by E. F. Benson
The mummy-case was reinterred next day, and two evenings after Morris left Luxor by the night train for Cairo, to join a homeward-bound P. & O. at Port Said. There were some hours to spare before his ship sailed, and having deposited his luggage, including a locked leather despatch-case, on board he lunched at the Café Tewfik near the quay. There was a garden in front of it with palm trees and trellises gaily clad in bougainvillias: a low wooden rail separated it from the street, and Morris had a table close to this. As he ate he watched the polychromatic pageant of Eastern life passing by: there were Egyptian officials in broad-cloth frock coats and red fezzes; barefooted splay-toed fellahin in blue gabardines; veiled women in white making stealthy eyes at passers-by; half-naked gutter-snipe, one with a sprig of scarlet hibiscus behind his ear; travellers from India with solar topees and an air of aloof British superiority; dishevelled sons of the Prophet in green turbans; a stately sheik in a white burnous; French painted ladies of a professional class with lace-rimmed parasols and provocative glances; a wild-eyed dervish in an accordion-pleated skirt, chewing betel-nut and slightly foaming at the mouth. A Greek boot-black with box adorned with brass plaques tapped his brushes on it to encourage customers, an Egyptian girl squatted in the gutter beside a gramophone, steamers passing into the Canal hooted on their syrens.
Then at the edge of the pavement there sauntered by a young Italian harnessed to a barrel-organ: with one hand he ground out a popular air by Verdi, in the other he held out a tin can for the tributes of music-lovers: a small monkey in a yellow jacket, tethered to his wrist, sat on the top of his instrument. The musician had come opposite the table where Morris sat: Morris liked the gay tinkling tune, and feeling in his pocket for a piastre, he beckoned to him. The boy grinned and stepped up to the rail.
Then suddenly the melancholy-eyed monkey leaped from its place on the organ and sprang on to the table by which Morris sat. It alighted there, chattering with rage in a crash of broken glass. A flower-vase was upset, a plate clattered on to the floor. Morris’s coffee-cup discharged its black contents on the tablecloth. Next moment the Italian had twitched the frenzied little beast back to him, and it fell head downwards on the pavement. A shrill hubbub arose, the waiter at Morris’s table hurried up with voluble execrations, a policeman kicked out at the monkey as it lay on the ground, the barrel-organ tottered and crashed on the roadway. Then all subsided again, and the Italian boy picked up the little body from the pavement. He held it out in his hands to Morris.
‘E morto,’ he said.
‘Serve it right, too,’ retorted Morris. ‘Why did it fly at me like that?’
He travelled back to London by long sea, and day after day that tragic little incident, in which he had had no responsible part, began to make a sort of colouring matter in his mind during those hours of lazy leisure on ship-board, when a man gives about an equal inattention to the book he reads and to what passes round him. Sometimes if the shadow of a sea-gull overhead slid across the deck towards him, there leaped into his brain, before his eyes could reassure him, the ludicrous fancy that this shadow was a monkey springing at him. One day they ran into a gale from the west: there was a crash of glass at his elbow as a sudden lurch of the ship upset a laden steward, and Morris jumped from his seat thinking that a monkey had leaped on to his table again. There was a cinematograph show in the saloon one evening, in which some naturalist exhibited the films he had taken of wild life in Indian jungles: when he put on the screen the picture of a company of monkeys swinging their way through the trees Morris involuntarily clutched the sides of his chair in hideous panic that lasted but a fraction of a second, until he recalled to himself that he was only looking at a film in the saloon of a steamer passing up the coast of Portugal. He came sleepy into his cabin one night and saw some animal crouching by the locked leather despatch-case. His breath caught in his throat before he perceived that this was a friendly cat which rose with gleaming eyes and arched its back . . .
These fantastic unreasonable alarms were disquieting. He had as yet no repetition of the hallucination that he saw a monkey, but some deep-buried ‘idea’, to cure which he had taken two months’ holiday, was still unpurged from his mind. He must consult Robert Angus again when he got home, and seek further advice. Probably that incident at Port Said had rekindled the obscure trouble, and there was this added to it, that he knew he was now frightened of real monkeys: there was terror sprouting in the dark of his soul. But as for it having any connection with his pilfered treasure, so rank and childish a superstition deserved only the ridicule he gave it. Often he unlocked his leather case and sat poring over that miracle of surgery which made practical again long-forgotten dexterities.
But it was good to be back in England. For the last three days of the voyage no menace had flashed out on him from the unknown dusks, and surely he had been disquieting himself in vain. There was a light mist lying over Regent’s Park on this warm March evening, and a drizzle of rain was falling. He made an appointment for the next morning with the specialist, he telephoned to the hospital that he had returned and hoped to resume work at once. He dined in very good spirits, talking to his manservant, and, as subsequently came out, he showed him his treasured bones, telling him that he had taken the relic from a mummy which he had seen unwrapped and that he meant to lecture on it. When he went up to bed he carried the leather case with him. Bed was comfortable after the ship’s berth, and through his open window came the soft hissing of the rain on to the shrubs outside.
His servant slept in the room immediately over his. A little before dawn he woke with a start, roused by horrible cries from somewhere close at hand. Then came words yelled out in a voice that he knew: ‘Help! Help!’ it cried. ‘O my God, my God! Ah-h – ’ and it rose to a scream again.
The man hurried down and clicked on the light in his master’s room as he entered. The cries had ceased: only a low moaning came from the bed. A huge ape with busy hands was bending over it; then taking up the body that lay there by the neck and the hips he bent it backwards and it cracked like a dry stick. Then it tore open the leather case that was on a table by the bedside, and with something that gleamed white in its dripping fingers it shambled to the window and disappeared.
A doctor arrived within half an hour, but too late. Handfuls of hair with flaps of skins attached had been torn from the head of the murdered man, both eyes were scooped out of their sockets, the right thumb had been plucked off the hand, and the back was broken across the lower vertebrae.
Nothing has since come to light which could rationally explain the tragedy. No large ape had escaped from the neighbouring Zoological Gardens, or, as far as could be ascertained, from elsewhere, nor was the monstrous visitor of that night ever seen again. Morris’s servant had only had the briefest sight of it, and his description of it at the inquest did not tally with that of any known simian type. And the sequel was even more mysterious, for Madden, returning to England at the close of the season in Egypt, had asked Morris’s servant exactly what it was that his master had shown him the evening before as having been taken by him from a mummy which he had seen unwrapped, and had got from him a sufficiently conclusive account of it. Next autumn he continued his excavations in the cemetery at Gurnah, and he disinterred once more the mummy-case of A-pen-ara and opened it. But the spinal vertebrae were all in place and complete: one had round it the silver clip which Morris had hailed as a unique achievement in surgery.
Christopher Comes Back
During five years of childless marriage Nellie Mostyn had lived in bondage to the fancied ailments and literary industry of her husband. For the last three of these Christopher had been engaged on a life and a definitive edition of the lyrics of the most obscure of Elizabethan poets – the little-known and less-read Francis Holder – and morning after morning it had been Nellie’s occupation to sit with her husband in his study, looking up references, copying out his notes, receiving his dictation, and rising at punctual
intervals to fetch him his tonic, or his aspirin, or his glass of hot water. In the afternoon she took a drive with him, and was almost equally busy with putting one window of the car an inch up, or the other two inches down, with telling the chauffeur not to drive so fast or a shade faster, with adjusting the collar of Christopher’s coat, or with shifting his hot-water bottle. Sometimes, if it was not too warm or too cold, he got out to walk for half a mile, and then she carried his woollen muffler, so that he could assume it again at a moment’s notice if the breeze grew chilly or the sun went behind clouds. When he got back into the car he would say: ‘Well, we’ve had a famous walk today, Petsy,’ and then perhaps he would doze a little, with his large head nodding and lolling on that wrinkled neck, which was so like that of a plucked chicken. Or he had little tendernesses for her, of much the same nature as those that an elderly woman has for her lap-dog – little strokings and squeezes and pattings, with pet names and baby language. Her youth and vigour were always tonic to him, and he was eager to get home and set to work again.
It was so this afternoon, on this day of peerless spring weather, as they passed through woods tapestried with primrose and anemone, and more than once she had to use the speaking-tube to tell the chauffeur to go a shade faster, for Christopher would like two clear hours for dictation between tea-time and seven o’clock, when he always rested for half an hour. If he fell asleep it was Nellie’s duty to give him five minutes’ law and then wake him.
‘And this evening, Petsy,’ he said, ‘it may be – though I promise nothing – that I shall have a little surprise for you. Ah! I think we will have the window quite up; the spring weather is often treacherous. Be quick, Nellikins, there is a considerable draught . . . A surprise, I was saying. How excited you will be when I tell you. Now you shan’t get a word more out of me; don’t tease me into telling you, my little rascal girl!’
They had left the woods seething with spring below them, and were mounting the flank of the hill where the village of Pole-Street stood on a shelf of the high downs. A couple of dozen shops lined the entrance to it, and after that came a circle of brick-built houses round the Green, antique and mellow, a survival of more spacious days, when land and leisure were not so dearly bought as now. It was at the farthest of these that their motor drew up; beyond it stood the church, the graveyard of which came up to the low garden wall, and below the ground fell rapidly away towards the woods through which they had passed. Tea was ready, and before five o’clock, Christopher, with his rug spread over his knees and his notes in front of him, had begun to dictate. They worked at the big table in his study, lined with books, and by the fireside was the rocking-chair in which he sat when Nellie read over to him some finished section. A pause occasionally broke the even flow of his voice when he sipped his hot water.
Nellie took down his words automatically; her hand had formed a habit of accurate transcription, and she could unleash her thoughts to wander where they willed. Today they were alive with the sense of spring; they went dancing with the daffodils, coming back only now and then to supervise her manual employment. Her blood was alert with April, and here she sat day after day, so many of them, over her sapless employment, without lot or portion in the rights of her own spring-season, and in the briskness of her youth. Never did any of their neighbours, with one exception, cross the threshold of the joyless house, for after the morning’s work Christopher could not contemplate the strain of a guest at lunch, who might linger unduly and curtail the hours of his motor drive. Tea was followed by work again, and after that he did not feel up to more than a quiet frugal dinner with a little reading aloud till bedtime. Nor could he accept hospitalities from others, if it was thus impossible to return them; besides, hostesses, ignorant of the sad plight of his digestion, might provide a dinner which would be just so many plates of poison to him, and Nellie, of course, could not go out and leave him alone. All this had long been fermenting within her, a perilous brew, and the sense of spring today had caused it to bubble afresh.
It may easily be conjectured who was the one person from outside who entered this hermitage. Dr Bernard Eves paid a visit here regularly once a week to see that no disquieting symptoms were sprouting, to approve the continuance of the current dietary, or suggest some modification, and, in addition to this, he was usually summoned once or twice between his fixed visits to dispel chance alarms. He was a young man, lately come here, and Christopher had the highest opinion of his abilities. He was cheerful, he had a laughing eye, which became suitably grave when he tapped and pressed, and brightened up again as he congratulated his patient on his general soundness. When the examination was over he interviewed Nellie, and gave her the prescribed commissariat for the next week. Hardly a word, at present, of personal import had passed between them, but both knew that there was fire kindling.
She recalled herself to her work; opposite her sat her husband with his velvet skull-cap on his head, fingering the scanty greyish-brown beard that dripped from his chin. Though he was not yet fifty he appeared an old man; his mouth had a senile droop, his eyes an unfocused watery vagueness, his hands were creased with wrinkled skin. Fresh from her April thoughts, Nellie suddenly shuddered with a qualm of horror and repulsion at the sight of him . . .
His custom was to spread slips of paper with his notes written on them over the table in front of his oak armchair. His dictation was founded on these, and as each was finished with he tore it up. Now there was but one left, and he was beginning to tear it.
‘For me,’ he said, ‘it will be sufficient reward to have rescued from oblivion one who, whatever his failings, we must consider to be one of the sweetest minor singers in the choir of English melody.’
Nellie took down his words, and paused for the next. Then she understood.
‘Oh, Christopher!’ she said, ‘I see what your surprise is. The book’s finished.’
He rose with a chuckle of delight and a fondling hand.
‘Clever Nellie!’ he said. ‘But is it not wonderful? Little did I think, when three years ago I set myself this great task, that I should have strength to finish it. Tomorrow, Nellikins, we will have a holiday, and then we must buckle to again. You shall do the talking then, lazy girl, reading it all over to me from the beginning, just for verbal corrections, and then off it goes to be typed. Shall Christopher give Nellie ’ickle kiss for her cleverness in guessing? Such a bright little Petsy!’
The reading of the finished manuscript duly began after a day’s holiday. Christopher found it less fatiguing to listen than to dictate, and an after-dinner session was added to the usual hours for work. Never was such progress made, until one evening when progress ceased altogether. Christopher was seized with an attack of severe pain which hot water failed to soothe. Dr Eves was sent for. He recommended an examination by X-ray. That left little doubt that his patient was suffering from malignant disease, and no doubt at all that an operation was impossible.
One morning some six months later Bernard Eves had paid his daily visit to the sick-room, and was now giving his report to Nellie.
‘He has very little pain,’ he was saying; ‘because he’s really only half-conscious. It’s like an uneasy dream, probably, to him, not more than that. What’s so astonishing is his vitality. A few months ago I should have said it was quite impossible that he should live through the summer.’
Nellie’s face was like a mask. For weeks now that hardness had been habitual to it.
‘Tell me what you expect,’ she said.
‘I don’t know what to expect,’ he said. ‘All I can do is to keep him free from pain. Any recovery is absolutely out of the question, but his resistance amazes me.’
Suddenly the mask dropped from her face; she got up quivering and shaking.
‘Bernard, I can’t bear it much longer,’ she said. ‘It’s a daily horror, and something is giving way inside me under it. His eyes are like the eyes of a dead man, who is yet ter
ribly alive. It’s a miracle, you say, that he’s alive at all; what if another miracle happens and he gets well? I simply couldn’t go through more years of it.’
‘Nellie, darling, he can’t get well,’ said Bernard. ‘You may take my word for that. Of course, for everybody’s sake – his, yours, mine – one hopes it will be over soon.’
She shook her head; she found no comfort there.
‘And sometimes I think he knows how I shudder at him,’ she said, ‘and why I long for it to be over. He looks from me to you, and then back again. When people go on living on the brink of death like that, who knows but that the veil of material things wears thin, and they see the things of the spirit? I believe he knows.’
He looked up at her sharply.
‘Come, Nellie, you’re talking nonsense,’ he said. ‘It’s an awful strain on you, I know, but you can keep a hold on yourself, and you must. I wish you could go away till it’s all over, but that’s impossible. Remember that he’s hardly conscious, and when he gives those long looks at you and then at me he is like someone half asleep, who sees figures by his bed. They are no more than dreams are to us. Besides, how could he know? Utterly impossible.’
The nurse who attended Christopher went out for a couple of hours in the afternoon, leaving Nellie to sit in his room or in the dressing-room adjoining. Usually he lay in a drugged torpor, but she had instructions to give him a dose from an opiate mixture if he got restless or showed any signs of being in pain. This afternoon when she was with him he began muttering and turning in bed, and she went to the table where the bottle stood. There were three doses left in it, and she poured the whole into his glass and gave it to him. In a few minutes he was quiet again, and after some half-hour she told a servant to ring up Dr Eves and bid him come at once. In ten minutes more he was with her, and she pointed to the empty bottle.