“That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,” he whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes.
* * *
It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin’s story. Since hearing it, the doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his secretaries had discovered that Vezin’s ancestors had actually lived for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by scores.
“It seems strange,” continued the doctor, “that Vezin should have remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to think he still knows nothing about it.
“The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by a most singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken part with him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period dominated the imaginations of the whole country.
“One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal credence. The witchcraft trials abound in evidences of such universal beliefs.”
Dr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject, and showed how every detail of Vezin’s adventure had a basis in the practices of those dark days.
“But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man’s own consciousness, I have no doubt,” he went on, in reply to my questions; “for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered his signature in the visitors’ book, and proved by it that he had arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone.
“I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more than once that he saw her through smoke and flame.”
“And that mark on his skin, for instance?” I inquired.
“Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding,” he replied, “like the stigmata of the religieuses, and the bruises which appear on the bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. This is very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these marks should have remained so long in Vezin’s case. Usually they disappear quickly.”
“Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it all over again,” I ventured.
“Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to alleviate.”
Dr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.
“And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?” I asked further— “the man who warned him against the place, à cause du sommeil et à cause des chats? Surely a very singular incident?”
“A very singular incident indeed,” he made answer slowly, “and one I can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence—”
“Namely?”
“That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him. But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen to him, and thus to warn him as he did.
“Yes,” he presently continued, half talking to himself, “I suspect in this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves, they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in memory, to a former and lower state of development.
“Ah yes!” he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, “subliminal up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt it, I doubt it.”
His voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power.
* * *
CASE III: THE NEMESIS OF FIRE
I
By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the preliminary facts of the case. He had telephoned to me that very morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice.
“As if it were an ordinary country visit,” he called, in reply to my question; “and don’t forgot to bring your gun.”
“With blank cartridges, I suppose?” for I knew his rigid principles with regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for some obvious purpose of disguise.
Then he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to do my packing. For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on one of his big cases was what many would have considered an empty honour — and risky. Certainly the adventure held all manner of possibilities, and I arrived at Waterloo with the feelings of a man who is about to embark on some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the dangers he expects to run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and limb, but of some secret character difficult to name and still more difficult to cope with.
“The Manor House has a high sound,” he told me, as we sat with our feet up and talked, “but I believe it is little more than an overgrown farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D —— , and its owner,
Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some excitement of its own.”
“Which is likely?”
By way of reply he handed me a letter marked “Private.” It was dated a week ago, and signed “Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge.”
“He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson,” the doctor explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; “you remember that Indian obsession case—”
I read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult to understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred by way of introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite simply that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal interview — a morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be absent from the house at night. The letter was dignified even to the point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed to convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed. Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had something to do with it; and the reference to the Anderson case, the horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the sense of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the cause, there was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out of that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any visible form of expression.
“And when you saw him — ?” I asked, returning the letter as the train rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.
“I have not seen him,” was the reply. “The man’s mind was charged to the brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. Notice the restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry could be depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is sufficient to give to another mind — a sensitive and sympathetic mind — clear mental pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very sound general idea of his problem.”
“So there may be excitement, after all?”
John Silence waited a moment before he replied.
“Something very serious is amiss there,” he said gravely, at length. “Some one — not himself, I gather, — has been meddling with a rather dangerous kind of gunpowder. So — yes, there may be excitement, as you put it.”
“And my duties?” I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. “Remember, I am your ‘assistant.’”
“Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything, without seeming to. Say nothing — nothing that means anything. Be present at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions are correct this is—”
He broke off suddenly.
“But I won’t tell you my impressions yet,” he resumed after a moment’s thought. “Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary visitors, of course,” he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye; “hence, the guns.”
Though disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than double the quantity of mere “brains,” as such.
Before putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.
“Don’t deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen.”
I followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible. But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.
“You see — what?” he asked presently.
“Nothing,” I was obliged to admit disappointedly; “nothing but the usual flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more vivid than usual.”
He said nothing by way of comment or reply.
“And they group themselves now and then,” I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, “group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses — almost like geometrical figures. Nothing more.”
I opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.
“It makes my head hot,” I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at once.
“That sensation of heat is important,” he said significantly.
“It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,” I replied, hoping he would expand and explain. “There was a distinct feeling of warmth — internal warmth somewhere — oppressive in a sense.”
“That is interesting,” he remarked, putting the letter back in his pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day’s events — faces, scenes, memories, — and in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.
When we left the train, after six hours’ travelling, at a little wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather, the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to the moment of actual arrival.
Colonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years. The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity and importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm, I felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.
His speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet. Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come alone.
“My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard,” the doctor said, introducing me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then received were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the impression that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And, quite obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was unmistakably genuine.
He led us at once in
to a room, half library, half smoking-room, that opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient, comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the letter in the train.
I heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no preamble, and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description. Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved action rather than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his incompetence.
“So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company, and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going on,” he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of including me in his confidence.
“I think, Colonel Wragge,” replied John Silence impressively, “that we shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall have our hands full.”
The two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 374