I stood a moment, wondering if it would appear again, before I followed the others indoors, and as I was in the act of closing the windows after me, I caught a glimpse of a figure on the lawn. It was some distance away, on the other side of the shrubberies, in fact where the bird had vanished. But in spite of the twilight that half magnified, half obscured it, the identity was unmistakable. I knew the housekeeper’s stiff walk too well to be deceived. ‘Mrs. Marsh taking the air,’ I said to myself. I felt the necessity of saying it, and I wondered why she was doing so at this particular hour. If I had other thoughts they were so vague, and so quickly and utterly suppressed, that I cannot recall them sufficiently to relate them here.
And, once indoors, it was to be expected that there would come explanation, discussion, conversation, at any rate, regarding the singular noise and its cause, some uttered evidence of the mood that had been strong enough to drive us all inside. Yet there was none. Each of us purposely, and with various skill, ignored it. We talked little, and when we did it was of anything in the world but that. Personally, I experienced a touch of that same bewilderment which had come over me during my first talk with Frances on the evening of my arrival, for I recall now the acute tension, and the hope, yet dread, that one or other of us must sooner or later introduce the subject. It did not happen, however; no reference was made to it even remotely. It was the presence of Mabel, I felt positive, that prohibited. As soon might we have discussed Death in the bedroom of a dying woman.
The only scrap of conversation I remember, where all was ordinary and commonplace, was when Mabel spoke casually to the grenadier asking why Mrs. Marsh had omitted to do something or other — what it was I forget — and that the maid replied respectfully that ‘Mrs. Marsh was very sorry, but her ‘and still pained her.’ I enquired, though so casually that I scarcely know what prompted the words, whether she had injured herself severely, and the reply, ‘She upset a lamp and burnt herself,’ was said in a tone that made me feel my curiosity was indiscreet, ‘but she always has an excuse for not doing things she ought to do.’ The little bit of conversation remained with me, and I remember particularly the quick way Frances interrupted and turned the talk upon the delinquencies of servants in general, telling incidents of her own at our flat with a volubility that perhaps seemed forced, and that certainly did not encourage general talk as it may have been intended to do. We lapsed into silence immediately she finished.
But for all our care and all our calculated silence, each knew that something had, in these last moments, come very close; it had brushed us in passing; it had retired; and I am inclined to think now that the large dark thing I saw, riding the dusk, probably bird of prey, was in some sense a symbol of it in my mind — that actually there had been no bird at all, I mean, but that my mood of apprehension and dismay had formed the vivid picture in my thoughts. It had swept past us, it had retreated, but it was now, at this moment, in hiding very close. And it was watching us.
* * *
Perhaps, too, it was mere coincidence that I encountered Mrs. Marsh, his housekeeper, several times that evening in the short interval between tea and dinner, and that on each occasion the sight of this gaunt, half-saturnine woman fed my prejudice against her. Once, on my way to the telephone, I ran into her just where the passage is somewhat jammed by a square table carrying the Chinese gong, a grandfather’s clock and a box of croquet mallets. We both gave way, then both advanced, then again gave way — simultaneously. It seemed impossible to pass. We stepped with decision to the same side, finally colliding in the middle, while saying those futile little things, half apology, half excuse, that are inevitable at such times. In the end she stood upright against the wall for me to pass, taking her place against the very door I wished to open. It was ludicrous.
‘Excuse me — I was just going in — to telephone,’ I explained. And she sidled off, murmuring apologies, but opening the door for me while she did so. Our hands met a moment on the handle. There was a second’s awkwardness — it was so stupid. I remembered her injury, and by way of something to say, I enquired after it. She thanked me; it was entirely healed now, but it might have been much worse; and there was something about the ‘mercy of the Lord’ that I didn’t quite catch. While telephoning, however — a London call, and my attention focused on it — I realised sharply that this was the first time I had spoken with her; also, that I had — touched her.
It happened to be a Sunday, and the lines were clear. I got my connection quickly, and the incident was forgotten while my thoughts went up to London. On my way upstairs, then, the woman came back into my mind, so that I recalled other things about her — how she seemed all over the house, in unlikely places often; how I had caught her sitting in the hall alone that night; how she was for ever coming and going with her lugubrious visage and that untidy hair at the back that had made me laugh three years ago with the idea that it looked singed or burnt; and how the impression on my first arrival at The Towers was that this woman somehow kept alive, though its evidence was outwardly suppressed, the influence of her late employer and of his sombre teachings. Somewhere with her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge. I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep her present mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house, and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intensely opposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a happier view of life.
All this in a passing second flashed in review before me, and I discovered, or at any rate reconstructed, the real Mrs. Marsh. She was decidedly in the Shadow. More, she stood in the forefront of it, stealthily leading an assault, as it were, against The Towers and its occupants, as though, consciously or unconsciously, she laboured incessantly to this hateful end.
I can only judge that some state of nervousness in me permitted the series of insignificant thoughts to assume this dramatic shape, and that what had gone before prepared the way and led her up at the head of so formidable a procession. I relate it exactly as it came to me. My nerves were doubtless somewhat on edge by now. Otherwise I should hardly have been a prey to the exaggeration at all. I seemed open to so many strange impressions.
Nothing else, perhaps, can explain my ridiculous conversation with her, when, for the third time that evening, I came suddenly upon the woman half-way down the stairs, standing by an open window as if in the act of listening. She was dressed in black, a black shawl over her square shoulders and black gloves on her big, broad hands. Two black objects, prayer-books apparently, she clasped, and on her head she wore a bonnet with shaking beads of jet. At first I did not know her, as I came running down upon her from the landing; it was only when she stood aside to let me pass that I saw her profile against the tapestry and recognised Mrs. Marsh. And to catch her on the front stairs, dressed like this, struck me as incongruous — impertinent. I paused in my dangerous descent. Through the opened window came the sound of bells — church bells — a sound more depressing to me than superstition, and as nauseating. Though the action was ill-judged, I obeyed the sudden prompting — was it a secret desire to attack, perhaps? — and spoke to her.
‘Been to church, I suppose, Mrs. Marsh?’ I said. ‘Or just going, perhaps?’
Her face, as she looked up a second to reply, was like an iron doll that moved its lips and turned its eyes, but made no other imitation of life at all.
‘Some of us still goes, sir,’ she said unctuously.
It was respectful enough, yet the implied judgment of the rest of the world made me almost angry. A deferential insolence lay behind the affected meekness.
‘For those who believe no doubt it is helpful,’ I smiled. ‘True religion brings peace and happiness, I’m sure — joy, Mrs. Marsh, JOY!’ I found keen satisfaction in the emphasis.
She looked at me like a knife. I cannot describe the implacable thing that shone in her fixed, stern eyes, nor the shadow of felt darkness that stole across her face. She glittered. I felt hate in her. I knew �
� she knew too — who was in the thoughts of us both at that moment.
She replied softly, never forgetting her place for an instant:
‘There is joy, sir — in ‘eaven — over one sinner that repenteth, and in church there goes up prayer to Gawd for those ‘oo — well, for the others, sir, ‘oo — —’
She cut short her sentence thus. The gloom about her as she said it was like the gloom about a hearse, a tomb, a darkness of great hopeless dungeons. My tongue ran on of itself with a kind of bitter satisfaction:
‘We must believe there are no others, Mrs. Marsh. Salvation, you know, would be such a failure if there were. No merciful, all-foreseeing God could ever have devised such a fearful plan — —’
Her voice, interrupting me, seemed to rise out of the bowels of the earth:
‘They rejected the salvation when it was hoffered to them, sir, on earth.’
‘But you wouldn’t have them tortured for ever because of one mistake in ignorance,’ I said, fixing her with my eye. ‘Come now, would you, Mrs. Marsh? No God worth worshipping could permit such cruelty. Think a moment what it means.’
She stared at me, a curious expression in her stupid eyes. It seemed to me as though the ‘woman’ in her revolted, while yet she dared not suffer her grim belief to trip. That is, she would willingly have had it otherwise but for a terror that prevented.
‘We may pray for them, sir, and we do — we may ‘ope.’ She dropped her eyes to the carpet.
‘Good, good!’ I put in cheerfully, sorry now that I had spoken at all. ‘That’s more hopeful, at any rate, isn’t it?’
She murmured something about Abraham’s bosom, and the ‘time of salvation not being for ever,’ as I tried to pass her. Then a half gesture that she made stopped me. There was something more she wished to say — to ask. She looked up furtively. In her eyes I saw the ‘woman’ peering out through fear.
‘Per’aps, sir,’ she faltered, as though lightning must strike her dead, ‘per’aps, would you think, a drop of cold water, given in His name, might moisten —— ?’
But I stopped her, for the foolish talk had lasted long enough.
‘Of course,’ I exclaimed, ‘of course. For God is love, remember, and love means charity, tolerance, sympathy, and sparing others pain,’ and I hurried past her, determined to end the outrageous conversation for which yet I knew myself entirely to blame. Behind me, she stood stock-still for several minutes, half bewildered, half alarmed, as I suspected. I caught the fragment of another sentence, one word of it, rather— ‘punishment’ — but the rest escaped me. Her arrogance and condescending tolerance exasperated me, while I was at the same time secretly pleased that I might have touched some string of remorse or sympathy in her after all. Her belief was iron; she dared not let it go; yet somewhere underneath there lurked the germ of a wholesome revulsion. She would help ‘them’ — if she dared. Her question proved it.
Half ashamed of myself, I turned and crossed the hall quickly lest I should be tempted to say more, and in me was a disagreeable sensation as though I had just left the Incurable Ward of some great hospital. A reaction caught me as of nausea. Ugh! I wanted such people cleansed by fire. They seemed to me as centres of contamination whose vicious thoughts flowed out to stain God’s glorious world. I saw myself, Frances, Mabel too especially, on the rack, while that odious figure of cruelty and darkness stood over us and ordered the awful handles turned in order that we might be ‘saved’ — forced, that is, to think and believe exactly as she thought and believed.
I found relief for my somewhat childish indignation by letting myself loose upon the organ then. The flood of Bach and Beethoven brought back the sense of proportion. It proved, however, at the same time that there had been this growth of distortion in me, and that it had been provided apparently by my closer contact — for the first time — with that funereal personality, the woman who, like her master, believed that all holding views of God that differed from her own, must be damned eternally. It gave me, moreover, some faint clue perhaps, though a clue I was unequal to following up, to the nature of the strife and terror and frustrate influence in the house. That housekeeper had to do with it. She kept it alive. Her thought was like a spell she waved above her mistress’s head.
VII
That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my door, and before I could answer, Frances stood beside my bed. She had switched on the light as she came in. Her hair fell straggling over her dressing-gown. Her face was deathly pale, its expression so distraught it was almost haggard. The eyes were very wide. She looked almost like another woman.
She was whispering at a great pace: ‘Bill, Bill, wake up, quick!’
‘I am awake. What is it?’ I whispered too. I was startled.
‘Listen!’ was all she said. Her eyes stared into vacancy.
There was not a sound in the great house. The wind had dropped, and all was still. Only the tapping seemed to continue endlessly in my brain. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past two.
‘I heard nothing, Frances. What is it?’ I rubbed my eyes; I had been very deeply asleep.
‘Listen!’ she repeated very softly, holding up one finger and turning her eyes towards the door she had left ajar. Her usual calmness had deserted her. She was in the grip of some distressing terror.
For a full minute we held our breath and listened. Then her eyes rolled round again and met my own, and her skin went even whiter than before.
‘It woke me,’ she said beneath her breath, and moving a step nearer to my bed. ‘It was the Noise.’ Even her whisper trembled.
‘The Noise!’ The word repeated itself dully of its own accord. I would rather it had been anything in the world but that — earthquake, foreign cannon, collapse of the house above our heads! ‘The noise, Frances! Are you sure?’ I was playing really for a little time.
‘It was like thunder. At first I thought it was thunder. But a minute later it came again — from underground. It’s appalling.’ She muttered the words, her voice not properly under control.
There was a pause of perhaps a minute, and then we both spoke at once. We said foolish, obvious things that neither of us believed in for a second. The roof had fallen in, there were burglars downstairs, the safes had been blown open. It was to comfort each other as children do that we said these things; also it was to gain further time.
‘There’s some one in the house, of course,’ I heard my voice say finally, as I sprang out of bed and hurried into dressing-gown and slippers. ‘Don’t be alarmed. I’ll go down and see,’ and from the drawer I took a pistol it was my habit to carry everywhere with me. I loaded it carefully while Frances stood stock-still beside the bed and watched. I moved towards the open door.
‘You stay here, Frances,’ I whispered, the beating of my heart making the words uneven, ‘while I go down and make a search. Lock yourself in, girl. Nothing can happen to you. It was downstairs, you said?’
‘Underneath,’ she answered faintly, pointing through the floor.
She moved suddenly between me and the door.
‘Listen! Hark!’ she said, the eyes in her face quite fixed; ‘it’s coming again,’ and she turned her head to catch the slightest sound. I stood there watching her, and while I watched her, shook. But nothing stirred. From the halls below rose only the whirr and quiet ticking of the numerous clocks. The blind by the open window behind us flapped out a little into the room as the draught caught it.
‘I’ll come with you, Bill — to the next floor,’ she broke the silence. ‘Then I’ll stay with Mabel — till you come up again.’ The blind sank down with a long sigh as she said it.
The question jumped to my lips before I could repress it:
‘Mabel is awake. She heard it too?’
I hardly know why horror caught me at her answer. All was so vague and terrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister house where nothing ever happened.
‘We met in the passage. She was on her way to me.’
What shook in me, shook inwardly. Frances, I mean, did not see it. I had the feeling just then that the Noise was upon us, that any second it would boom and roar about our ears. But the deep silence held. I only heard my sister’s little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question:
‘Then what is Mabel doing now?’
And her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadful tension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence. With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplessly at me like a child:
‘She is weeping and gna — —’
My expression must have stopped her. I believe I clapped both hands upon her mouth, though when I realised things clearly again, I found they were covering my own ears instead. It was a moment of unutterable horror. The revulsion I felt was actually physical. It would have given me pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the air above my head; the sound — a definite, wholesome sound that explained itself — would have been a positive relief. Other feelings, though, were in me too, all over me, rushing to and fro. It was vain to seek their disentanglement; it was impossible. I confess that I experienced, among them, a touch of paralysing fear — though for a moment only; it passed as sharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the face such as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspiration over the entire body. Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinary personal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury. It was, rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking — a sympathetic shrinking — from the agony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt for themselves. The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in that instant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery torture of the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered.... It was of incredible power. It was real. The vain, intolerable hope swept over me.
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 496