‘Fear, of course, won in the end. It sent me racing back into the depths of the house, where I caught my head a whack against the ceiling of the living-room, for the lamp was out. She had put it out. The clock was thumping loudly; and I was scared to death that she might find me there before I got away.
‘I hardly know how I got away in time. Hunting for the door, plunging through the puff-balls, sprinting over the poppy field—have you ever seen poppies by moonlight? Sanity! That’s what I was after! Sanity, and the breath of the sea! Well, there was no breath, the wind was dead, there were no waves; but I scooped up the water in my two hands, and cooled the bump on my head. . . . And after that I went back to the foreshore and watched the house until I saw her light gleaming again. . . .’
Harlock stared at the dying fire.
‘I suppose I ought to have known it at once,’ he said, as if to himself. ‘Especially from a distance. Known that the spot was haunted, I mean. It was there, staring me in the face—the queer shape, the mist of puff-balls, the heavy thatch, the very set of the trees.’
Then one of us, softly, as if to take the edge off the silence that followed, ventured a remark.
‘I suppose the real ghost was the children.’
‘She was not!’ Harlock burst out. ‘She was something far worse than that!’
Nothing further was said while we watched our host returning his picture to the remote corner.
Aimless Afternoon
EVERINGHAM, with his knees up to his chin, was sitting on the beach at Shorehampton, staring over the sea; and the sunlight, from behind the lower edge of a cloud, was coming down in a big, faint fan, smearing a white streak along the very thread of the horizon.
After staring for a long time at a point midway between the cloud and the water, Everingham turned his head. The beach was almost deserted at this hushed and played-out end of the summer season. A hundred yards to his right, four or five people were sitting, grouped and motionless, and a white-hatted man with his back to the indolent waves was on the point of taking their photograph. Everingham waited for the click of the shutter; then, seeing the man approaching the group of people, he persuaded himself that he had heard it.
The fan of sunlight was dissolving now into the dull sky; the white streak was fading as though the sea were lapping it off the horizon; and Everingham lingered on until his eyes and ears were certain that not a glimmer remained. He thought that he had heard the faintest sound as the last spark died. Hearing was very acute on such a day as this, and he fancied that with the smallest effort he might project himself long distances, and there exist in mind, if not in body.
The wind began to blow, yet he still lingered; then he sprang up in a flurry, as though there were duties of great importance that he must do. There was none. He intended—what was it that he intended to do? To turn away from the sea. Yes, certainly that. To wander back to the Marine Hotel? He stooped, and picked a piece of seaweed from his trousers, and saw the group of people from the corner of his eye.
Everingham climbed the noisy slope of shingle, and, coming to a flight of steps in the wall at the back of it, reached a broad and ornamented terrace, where a pavilion of glass faced him. On the outside of one of the panes, the bill of a departed pierrot troupe was still showing. In summer the building was full of sun and sound and flies; but now the air was cold and dead, and only a single, human voice could be heard buzzing, intensely pronounced. Inside the door, to the left, there was a small bar where soft drinks, cigarettes, and chocolates were for sale, and Everingham said to the young woman who presided at it:
‘Ten Players, please!’
She looked up, smiling, from her knitting of sky-blue wool, and reached for a packet, bright in its wrapping of cellophane paper. He did not need these cigarettes. There were a hundred in his hotel bedroom. He had spoken for the sake of speaking; particularly, perhaps, for the sake of crushing that monotonous voice. It had certainly paused—but Everingham, staring round the pavilion, soon saw that the late speaker had no other thought beyond his companion in the faded yellow beret. The youth had paused because he was casting about for something clever to say, and because the girl, perilously tilting her glass on the marble-topped table between them, was expecting his next remark to outshine all those that had gone before; and the effort had fixed the young man’s mouth and eyes into three circles, from which nothing emerged but the darkness of despair.
Impulsively, Everingham went towards their table. To his delight they smiled at him as he was passing; and he, surprised and flattered, smiled at them. He caught their serious eyes. For a moment the glass walls expanded, to enclose the whole of the throbbing world.
Fearful of breaking, by speech, the spell of this encounter, he hurried away through the door at the far end of the pavilion, thence climbing further steps to the parade above. He entered one of the deserted shelters that were set at intervals along the Shorehampton parade, and shivered as he gazed at the sea. ‘Yes. Even the Marine Hotel is better than this,’ he murmured, starting up; and five minutes later he stood in the hall that was forever impregnated with the smells of sea-mist and cooking.
‘What do I want with my key?’ he muttered, dropping his hand from the rack that held the keys, and mooning back to the hotel entrance. A waiter was standing there, deeply occupied, wetting the stub of a pencil; his fingers were almost hidden by his dirty cuffs; behind him stretched a plot of grass, the railings of the promenade, the thread of the horizon.
Everingham sighed, and, putting his hand into his pocket, ran his fingers over the cellophane wrapping of the cigarettes; but already the thrill of the contact was passing away. Turning abruptly, he reached for his key from the rack, and hurried into the coffee-room that crushed him at once with its grimy walls, its ceiling almost out of sight, its napkins folded and waiting. He stood at a table, and drummed, with his key, a song of love that the pierrots had sung in the summer; and through another door he passed into the depths of the house. Climbing the staircase, softly creaking every stair as he walked, Everingham rose towards the roof of the Marine Hotel, Shorehampton. He saw the dull white figures of chambermaids flitting along the corridors that stretched away from the successive landings. ‘Hi, there! Are you all daft?’ he shouted, and wondered why he had chosen that particular adjective. No one answered him; and presently he turned the key in his lock, and pushed open his door.
The young man asleep on the bed stirred at the jarring sound of the key in the lock. Everingham sighed and walked steadily onwards, the light of the room fading from his eyes. He bent down, smiling, towards the sleeper, whom at that instant he did not see. ‘Hey! Wake up! Wake up!’ he whispered resonantly into the young man’s ear: and Everingham, waking up, and becoming momentarily blinded by the glare from the window, turned in a panic on his bed.
The voice that he had heard in his ear, the touch that he had felt on his shoulder, soon resolved themselves into gestures that had come from within himself and not from without. Lying for another full minute on his back, he watched, beneath the mottled ceiling, the oscillating of a fly that had overlived in this mournful room. ‘Oh, fly to hell!’ moaned Everingham at last, and sat upright upon the bed. His eyes no longer saw the light of day intensified, as they had done on his awakening. He stared at the drab routine of the sky. The sight of it took him to the window, to view the scene that he knew too well, to gaze at the horizon of the sea. The waves of the sea were all crushed out by the heaviness of the afternoon. Standing there at the window, he remembered his dream. He had found himself in the pavilion. He had asked the woman at the bar for cigarettes, and with a frown she had reached out a hand from her knitting of sea-green wool. He could hear, even now, the thud of the packet on the counter, a packet of Players in shop-soiled cellophane wrapping. And he hadn’t needed cigarettes. He’d got a hundred in his hotel bedroom. He had spoken for the sake of speaking, he remembered now; for the sake of shattering that deep silence. He had gone away, pursued by the clicking of the knitting-needl
es that seemed to accentuate the emptiness of the tables and to contract upon him the four walls of the pavilion.
That was all. A barren scrap of dream. He turned his back to the window, and stared into the room. The farthest corners were towering store-cupboards of shade. He had chosen this large, unfathomable room because he wished for the physical freedom that only space can give—but how could he be free, when for ever clamped by his thoughts? Across the floor, and scarcely throwing a flush on the surrounding air, a fire was faintly glowing, and by it sat a woman. A woman? . . . But who was she? . . . And how did she come here? . . . He dared to approach her; stood, and watched her face. A woman sitting by his hearth, asleep, her lashes almost touching her cheek; smiling, waiting.
Though the fire did not cast its glow upon him, at least her mouth had kindled a smile upon his. She would be embarrassed if he awoke her now. He must leave her here, to sleep on, undisturbed, and later he would call a chambermaid.
Walking on tiptoe, searching the room for his hat, he stopped at intervals to listen to her breathing; then, leaving the door unlocked and putting the key into his pocket, he paused at the brink of the staircase. Where should he go? It pleased him to know that she was there, asleep, behind his door. A small and misty skylight hung above his head, sprinkling upon his hair the temper of the afternoon. Where should he go? To the sea? Oh yes, why not? He would go and lie on the beach, and wait until the sea washed him away. His arms were hanging limply at his side. He dropped his hat, and stooped to pick it up, and saw the gleaming of his door-handle from the corner of his eye.
Accompanied by the creaking of stairs, Everingham descended to the ground floor of the Marine Hotel, Shorehampton. Passing through the coffee-room, his thin and languid figure looked as unsubstantial as a ghost. The hall was empty; no one loitered at the entrance; the smell of the Marine Hotel dwindled behind him. At the foot of the steps there were two stone urns, enlivened with dead geraniums; a faint wind rustled through the stems, but its note was soon supplanted by the crunching of shingle, and as Everingham stood on the quiet sand there was not a whisper along the whole shore. In the clear, grey light of the afternoon he could see great distances. ‘This is better!’ he muttered, starting to walk westwards at a quick pace, ready to feel the springing of the sand beneath his feet. On his right hand, far ahead, there lay the glass pavilion, looking as heavy as lead beneath the sunless sky; and when he had come abreast of it, his pace was slacker, and he felt as though he wanted to sink down on to the sand, and die. His heaviness of mind and body brought him to a standstill at last; he could go no farther; and sighing, he drooped down to the moaning man who slept on the sand at his feet.
‘Wake up! Wake up!’ cried Everingham.
Then Everingham woke up. His cheeks were pressed between his drawn-up knees, and his eyes, narrow with dreams, were directed towards the sand and wormcasts and fan-shaped cockle-shells at his feet. The cool air soon brought him to full consciousness of his surroundings; looking round to his right, he saw the family group, moving now, and the photographer on the point of attaining it; and as soon as the man in the white hat had reached the people, they stood up, as though something were ended, and began to walk away. Everingham turned his head, and looked at the sea, hoping that it might furrow into waves. As he stared at the sea, he remembered his dream. He had awakened panic-stricken in his hotel bedroom, thinking that he had heard a voice in his ear. The voice was in fact no more than his own, speaking—who knows?—from some inner dream that had just ended; and for some minutes he had continued to lie on his bed, watching a fly beneath the ceiling. He had found himself later at the window, staring dejectedly at the scene beyond; and finally he had stared into the room itself, running his eye over all the familiar things, the monstrously patterned wallpaper, the crumpled counterpane on the bed, the corners towering with shade, the pleated and glimmering sheet of paper hiding the mouth of the fireplace and shaped like a fan.
A scrap of dream, over when scarcely begun! But all his life was dreams, calling and shaping and coming to nothing. The sea and the sky were uniform in colour now, and almost in texture —grey and without lustre. Everingham lifted his head, and gazed at the horizon. Only that was real and always there. It ran like a thread between heaven and earth; and as he gazed, the thread rolled up from either end, and formed a knot, pressing against his eyes.
The Announcement
TOWARDS three o’clock on a hot August afternoon, a tall and rather studious-looking man emerged from a side street and began to walk unhurriedly along the main thoroughfare amidst the noise of the traffic. People frequently knocked against him, and he lifted apologetic eyes from the pavement.
When he discovered that he was about to enter the Public Library, a bitter smile leapt into his face, and he stood still for a moment, staring at the two sunny spots on his shoes. Force of habit had guided him here, half way up the Library steps; the destination that he had contemplated was a hundred yards farther along the high-road.
He found himself standing at the barrier where books are returned and fines are paid. The thick-lipped, familiar face of the young woman smiled at him, and he felt comforted; smiling back quickly, he said to her: ‘I haven’t come to return a book, but to borrow one,’ and for more than an hour afterwards he was browsing amongst books.
At first he strolled beside the shelves of fiction. Austen, Balzac, Chekhov, Conrad, Flaubert . . . the names recalled to him very vividly, on this hot afternoon when every minute seemed an hour and all his mind was waiting in suspense, characters and scenes that had filled him with pleasure and a promise that he would enjoy them again; sometimes he touched a book impulsively with his thin fingers; but not until he reached Gautier did he take a volume down, and then, standing back from the shelves, he read, for the sixth or seventh time in his life, the description of the old house in Captain Fracasse. The wildness of the picture fitted his mood. He heard once more the croaking of frogs in the drive. He saw again the red-tiled roof with its leprous patches, the rifts through which the bats were flying, the broken shutters, the statued grotto in the garden of weeds. Yet after a while he drifted back along the library shelves; refreshed his heart with the names of Singapore, Makassar, and Carimata; listened to Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) playing fierce love music in one of the Seven Isles.
His mood for whatever book he was reading never lasted for long. Soon he wanted another atmosphere, another author—and he chose them deliberately. Deserting Conrad, he searched for the mountainous landscape in Chekhov’s Duel. The characters were at a picnic in the shadows of evening. Scattered stones lay in the meadow, convenient for sitting on; a rug was spread on the ground, and a fire was burning. On all sides, the mountains rose up into the sky. They were a solid frame that seemed to hold the jerky, tenuous nerves of the picnic-party together.
The Lending Department was large and cool; beyond its western windows a garden glittered in the sun. The quiet man wandered from book to book. There had been times when his thoughts ran on murders and thefts and strange, death-dealing inventions; there were nights when the grim art of the detective story had soothed him and sent him to sleep soundly. Such tales he now began to sample, turning the thick leaves to and fro, reading the propitious names of the chapters. Yet all the while, there stood on his face a look of distress, even a fleck of horror.
From fiction he turned to the ‘non-fiction’ shelves, and his pale hand, shining in sunlight, took down a copy of H.B. Irving’s Book of Remarkable Criminals. Once it had been in his mind to produce such a book—to write of a man like the Reverend Selby Watson, who murdered his wife on a Sunday evening from an access of melancholia. Here, too, was Dr Castaing, looking more like a priest than a doctor, with his long face and regular features, hair brushed back from the forehead, and downcast eyes. The reader lifted his eyes, and saw on the shelf above, The Story of the English Cardinals; and he studied the clerical faces carefully, hiding the mouth or the eyes with his thin hand.
Biography held him for a
long time. He read of musicians, of artists, of inventors, of explorers; until there came to him at last an overwhelming desire for maps and geography, for books of travel, especially for the innermost meadows of England and for descriptions of those counties that he had never seen. He reached up for Rutland, and read through a page of its typical scenery; he found and examined a book on the Thames Valley villages, staring for long at its illustrations . . . at the oldest bridge, lying in low meadows. . . .
Turning again to the shelves of fiction, he looked for those novels that he had intended to read, and would never read now: The Chartreuse of Parma, by Stendhal—surely the greatest of novelists, he thought with enthusiasm; Turgenev’s Fathers and Children; the Erewhon satires of Samuel Butler; the stories of Count de Gobineau; and many more. He did not want to take them down and dip into them. He merely wished to stare at the titles. Here was the second volume of Scarlet and Black; he was reading the first volume—he had it at home; in certain passages, through the subtle turning of a phrase, he had guessed already the terrible end. And walking wistfully beside the shelves, he came to Merrick. He liked Merrick. Conrad in Quest of his Youth was a favourite of his. But the book was out, and, feeling at once—as he stared at the place on the shelf where the quest for youth should have been—a dryness of mouth, and a bitter taste on his palate that made him shiver, he hastened towards the barrier. The young woman smiled with her thick lips; her very round glasses caught the sunlight, and her eyes were hidden.
Written With My Left Hand Page 20