In the Dark

by E. Nesbit

His dark figure was outlined against the sky behind the hill. She wrapped the soft shawl more closely around her, and we went out in the moonlight to meet her husband.

  The next morning when I entered the room I found that it lacked its chief ornament. The sparkling white and silver breakfast accessories were there, but for the deft white hands and kindly welcoming blue eyes of my hostess I looked in vain. At ten minutes past nine Hurst came in looking horribly worried, and more like his old self than I had ever expected to see him.

  ‘I say, old man,’ he said hurriedly, ‘are you really set on going back to town today – because Kate’s awfully queer? I can’t think what’s wrong. I want you to see her after breakfast.’

  I reflected a minute. ‘I can stay if I send a wire,’ I said.

  ‘I wish you would, then,’ Hurst said, wringing my hand and turning away; ‘she’s been off her head most of the night, talking the most astounding nonsense. You must see her after breakfast. Will you pour out the coffee?’

  ‘I’ll see her now, if you like,’ I said, and he led me up the winding stair to the room at the top of the tower.

  I found her quite sensible, but very feverish. I wrote a prescription, and rode Hurst’s mare over to Eastbourne to get it made up. When I got back she was worse. It seemed to be a sort of aggravated marsh fever. I reproached myself with having let her sit by the open window the night before. But I remembered with some satisfaction that I had told Hurst that the place was not quite healthy. I only wished I had insisted on it more strongly.

  For the first day or two I thought it was merely a touch of marsh fever, that would pass off with no more worse consequence than a little weakness; but on the third day I perceived that she would die.

  Hurst met me as I came from her bedside, stood aside on the narrow landing for me to pass, and followed me down into the little sitting-room, which, deprived for three days of her presence, already bore the air of a room long deserted. He came in after me and shut the door.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said abruptly, reading my thoughts as usual; ‘she won’t die – she can’t die.’

  ‘She will,’ I bluntly answered, for I am no believer in that worst refinement of torture known as ‘breaking bad news gently’. ‘Send for any other man you choose. I’ll consult with the whole College of Physicians if you like. But nothing short of a miracle can save her.’

  ‘And you don’t believe in miracles,’ he answered quietly. ‘I do, you see.’

  ‘My dear old fellow, don’t buoy yourself up with false hopes. I know my trade; I wish I could believe I didn’t! Go back to her now; you have not very long to be together.’

  I wrung his hand; he returned the pressure, but said almost cheerfully:

  ‘You know your trade, old man, but there are some things you don’t know. Mine, for instance – I mean my wife’s constitution. Now I know that thoroughly. And you mark my words – she won’t die. You might as well say I was not long for this world.’

  ‘You,’ I said with a touch of annoyance; ‘you’re good for another thirty or forty years.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ he rejoined quickly, ‘and so is she. Her life’s as good as mine; you’ll see – she won’t die.’

  At dusk on the next day she died. He was with her; he had not left her since he had told me that she would not die. He was sitting by her holding her hand. She had been unconscious for some time, when suddenly she dragged her hand from his, raised herself in bed, and cried out in a tone of acutest anguish:

  ‘John! John! Let me go! For Heaven’s sake let me go!’

  Then she fell back dead.

  He would not understand – would not believe; he still sat by her, holding her hand, and calling on her by every name that love could teach him. I began to fear for his brain. He would not leave her, so by-and-by I brought him a cup of coffee in which I had mixed a strong opiate. In about an hour I went back and found him fast asleep with his face on the pillow close by the face of his dead wife. The gardener and I carried him down to my bedroom, and I sent for a woman from the village. He slept for twelve hours. When he awoke his first words were:

  ‘She is not dead! I must go to her!’

  I hoped that the sight of her – pale, and beautiful, and still – with the white asters about her, and her cold hands crossed on her breast, would convince him; but no. He looked at her and said:

  ‘Bernard, you’re no fool; you know as well as I do that this is not death. Why treat it so? It is some form of catalepsy. If she should awake and find herself like this the shock might destroy her reason.’

  And, to the horror of the woman from the village, he flung the asters on to the floor, covered her body with blankets, and sent for hot-water bottles.

  I was now quite convinced that his brain was affected, and I saw plainly enough that he would never consent to take the necessary steps for the funeral.

  I began to wonder whether I had not better send for another doctor, for I felt that I did not care to try the opiate again on my own responsibility, and something must be done about the funeral.

  I spent a day in considering the matter – a day passed by John Hurst beside his wife’s body. Then I made up my mind to try all my powers to bring him to reason, and to this end I went once more into the chamber of death. I found Hurst talking wildly, in low whispers. He seemed to be talking to someone who was not there. He did not know me, and suffered himself to be led away. He was, in fact, in the first stage of brain fever. I actually blessed his illness, because it opened a way out of the dilemma in which I found myself. I wired for a trained nurse from town, and for the local undertaker. In a week she was buried, and John Hurst still lay unconscious and unheeding; but I did not look forward to his first renewal of consciousness.

  Yet his first conscious words were not the inquiry I dreaded. He only asked whether he had been ill long, and what had been the matter. When I had told him, he just nodded and went off to sleep again.

  A few evenings later I found him excited and feverish, but quite himself, mentally. I said as much to him in answer to a question which he put to me:

  ‘There’s no brain disturbance now? I’m not mad or anything?’

  ‘No, no, my dear fellow. Everything is as it should be.’

  ‘Then,’ he answered slowly, ‘I must get up and go to her.’

  My worst fears were realised.

  In moments of intense mental strain the truth sometimes overpowers all one’s better resolves. It sounds brutal, horrible. I don’t know what I meant to say; what I said was:

  ‘You can’t; she’s buried.’

  He sprang up in bed, and I caught him by the shoulders.

  ‘Then it’s true!’ he cried, ‘and I’m not mad. Oh, great God in heaven, let me go to her; let me go! It’s true! It’s true!’

  I held him fast, and spoke.

  ‘I am strong – you know that. You are weak and ill; you are quite in my power – we’re old friends, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to serve you. Tell me what you mean; I will do anything you wish.’ This I said to soothe him.

  ‘Let me go to her,’ he said again.

  ‘Tell me all about it,’ I repeated. ‘You are too ill to go to her. I will go, if you can collect yourself and tell me why. You could not walk five yards.’

  He looked at me doubtfully.

  ‘You’ll help me? You won’t say I’m mad, and have me shut up? You’ll help me?’

  ‘Yes, yes – I swear it!’ All the time I was wondering what I should do to keep him from his mad purpose.

  He lay back on his pillows, white and ghastly; his thin features and sunken eyes showed hawklike above the rough growth of his four weeks’ beard. I took his hand. His pulse was rapid, and his lean fingers clenched themselves round mine.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I don’t know— There aren’t any words to tell you how true it is. I am not mad, I am not wandering. I am as sane as you are. Now listen, and if you’ve a human heart in you, you’ll help me. When I married her I gave up hypno
tism and all the old studies; she hated the whole business. But before I gave it up I hypnotised her, and when she was completely under my control I forbade her soul to leave its body till my time came to die.’

  I breathed more freely. Now I understood why he had said, ‘She cannot die.’

  ‘My dear old man,’ I said gently, ‘dismiss these fancies, and face your grief boldly. You can’t control the great facts of life and death by hypnotism. She is dead; she is dead, and her body lies in its place. But her soul is with God who gave it.’

  ‘No!’ he cried, with such strength as the fever had left him. ‘No! no! Ever since I have been ill I have seen her, every day, every night, and always wringing her hands and moaning, “Let me go, John – let me go”’.

  ‘Those were her last words, indeed,’ I said; ‘it is natural that they should haunt you. See, you bade her soul not leave her body. It has left it, for she is dead.’

  His answer came almost in a whisper, borne on the wings of a long breathless pause.

  ‘She is dead, but her soul has not left her body.’

  I held his hand more closely, still debating what I should do.

  ‘She comes to me,’ he went on; ‘she comes to me continually. She does not reproach, but she implores, “Let me go, John – let me go!” And I have no more power now; I cannot let her go, I cannot reach her. I can do nothing, nothing. Ah!’ he cried, with a sudden sharp change of voice that thrilled through me to the ends of my fingers and feet: ‘Ah, Kate, my life, I will come to you! No, no, you shan’t be left alone among the dead. I am coming, my sweet.’

  He reached his arms out towards the door with a look of longing and love, so really, so patently addressed to a sentient presence, that I turned sharply to see if, in truth, perhaps— Nothing – of course – nothing.

  ‘She is dead,’ I repeated stupidly. ‘I was obliged to bury her.’

  A shudder ran through him.

  ‘I must go and see for myself,’ he said.

  Then I knew – all in a minute – what to do.

  ‘I will go,’ I said. ‘I will open her coffin, and if she is not – is not as other dead folk, I will bring her body back to this house.’

  ‘Will you go now?’ he asked, with set lips.

  It was nigh on midnight. I looked into his eyes.

  ‘Yes, now,’ I said; ‘but you must swear to lie still till I return.’

  ‘I swear it.’ I saw I could trust him, and I went to wake the nurse. He called weakly after me, ‘There’s a lantern in the tool-shed – and, Bernard—’

  ‘Yes, my poor old chap.’

  ‘There’s a screwdriver in the sideboard drawer.’

  I think until he said that I really meant to go. I am not accustomed to lie, even to mad people, and I think I meant it till then.

  He leaned on his elbow, and looked at me with wide open eyes.

  ‘Think,’ he said, ‘what she must feel. Out of the body, and yet tied to it, all alone among the dead. Oh, make haste, make haste; for if I am not mad, and I have really fettered her soul, there is but one way!’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I must die too. Her soul can leave her body when I die.’

  I called the nurse, and left him. I went out, and across the wold to the church, but I did not go in. I carried the screwdriver and the lantern, lest he should send the nurse to see if I had taken them. I leaned on the churchyard wall, and thought of her. I had loved the woman, and I remembered it in that hour.

  As soon as I dared I went back to him – remember I believed him mad – and told the lie that I thought would give him most ease.

  ‘Well?’ he said eagerly, as I entered.

  I signed to the nurse to leave us.

  ‘There is no hope,’ I said. ‘You will not see your wife again till you meet her in heaven.’

  I laid down the screwdriver and the lantern, and sat down by him.

  ‘You have seen her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And there’s no doubt?’

  ‘There is no doubt.’

  ‘Then I am mad; but you’re a good fellow, Bernard, and I’ll never forget it in this world or the next.’

  He seemed calmer, and fell asleep with my hand on his. His last word was a ‘Thank you’, that cut me like a knife.

  When I went into his room next morning he was gone. But on his pillow a letter lay, painfully scrawled in pencil, and addressed to me.

  You lied. Perhaps you meant kindly. You didn’t understand. She is not dead. She has been with me again. Though her soul may not leave her body, thank God it can still speak to mine. That vault – it is worse than a mere churchyard grave. Goodbye.

  I ran all the way to the church, and entered by the open door. The air was chill and dank after the crisp October sunlight. The stone that closed the vault of the Hursts of Hurstcote had been raised, and was lying beside the dark gaping hole in the chancel floor. The nurse, who had followed me, came in before I could shake off the horror that held me moveless. We both went down into the vault. Weak, exhausted by illness and sorrow, John Hurst had yet found strength to follow his love to the grave. I tell you he had crossed that wold alone, in the grey of the chill dawn; alone he had raised the stone and had gone down to her. He had opened her coffin, and he lay on the floor of the vault with his wife’s body in his arms.

  He had been dead some hours.

  The brown eyes filled with tears when I told my wife this story.

  ‘You were quite right, he was mad,’ she said. ‘Poor things! poor lovers!’

  But sometimes when I wake in the grey morning, and, between waking and sleeping and my waking thoughts, I wonder was I right or was he? Was he mad, or was I idiotically incredulous? For – and it is this thing that haunts me – when I found them dead together in the vault, she had been buried five weeks. But the body that lay in John Hurst’s arms, among the mouldering coffins of the Hursts of Hurstcote, was perfect and beautiful as when first he clasped her in his arms, a bride.

  THE FIVE SENSES

  Professor Boyd Thompson’s services to the cause of science are usually spoken of as inestimable, and so indeed they probably are, since in science, as in the rest of life, one thing leads to another, and you never know where anything is going to stop. At any rate, inestimable or not, they are world-renowned, and he with them. The discoveries which he gave to his time are a matter of common knowledge among biological experts, and the sudden ending of his experimental activities caused a few days wonder in even lay circles. Quite unintelligent people told each other that it seemed a pity, and persons on omnibuses exchanged commonplaces starred with his name.

  But the real meaning and cause of that ending have been studiously hidden, as well as the events which immediately preceded it. A veil has been drawn over all the things that people would have liked to know, and it is only now that circumstances so arrange themselves as to make it possible to tell the whole story. I propose to avail myself of this possibility.

  It will serve no purpose for me to explain how the necessary knowledge came into my possession; but I will say that the story was only in part pieced together by me. Another hand is responsible for much of the detail, and for a certain occasional emotionalism which is, I believe, wholly foreign to my own style. In my original statement of the following facts I dealt fully, as I am, I may say without immodesty, qualified to do, with all the scientific points of the narrative. But these details were judged, unwisely as I think, to be needless to the expert, and unintelligible to the ordinary reader, and have therefore been struck out; the merest hints been left as necessary links in the story. This appears to me to destroy most of its interest, but I admit that the elisions are perhaps justified. I have no desire to assist or encourage callow students in such experiments as those by which Professor Boyd Thompson brought his scientific career to an end.

  Incredible as it may appear, Professor Boyd Thompson was once a little boy who wore white embroidered frocks and blue sashes; in that state he caught flies and pul
led off their wings to find out how they flew. He did not find out, and Lucilla, his little girl-cousin, also in white frocks, cried over the dead, dismembered flies, and buried them in little paper coffins. Later, he wore a holland blouse with a belt of leather, and watched the development of tadpoles in a tin bath in the stable yard. A microscope was, on his eighth birthday, presented to him by an affluent uncle. The uncle showed him how to surprise the secrets of a drop of pond water, which, limpid to the eye, confessed under the microscope to a whole cosmogony of strenuous and undesirable careers. At the age of ten, Arthur Boyd Thompson was sent to a private school, its headmaster an acolyte of Science, who esteemed himself to be a high priest of Huxley and Tyndal, a devotee of Darwin. Thence to the choice of medicine as a profession was, when the choice was insisted on by the elder Boyd Thompson, a short, plain step. Inorganic chemistry failed to charm, and under the cloak of Medicine and Surgery the growing fever of scientific curiosity could be sated on bodies other than the cloak-wearer’s. He became a medical student and an enthusiast for vivisection.

  The bow of Apollo was not always bent. In a rest-interval, the summer vacation, to be exact, he met again the cousin – second, once removed – Lucilla, and loved her. They were betrothed. It was a long, bright summer full of sunshine, garden-parties, picnics, archery – a decaying amusement – and croquet, then coming to its own. He exulted in the distinction already crescent in his career, but some half-formed wholly-unconscious desire to shine with increased lustre in the eyes of the beloved, caused him to invite, for the holidays ultimate week, a fellow student, one who knew and could testify to the quality of the laurels already encircling the head of a young scientist. The friend came, testified, and in a vibrating interview under the lime-trees of Lucilla’s people’s garden, Mr Boyd Thompson learned that Lucilla never could, never would love or marry a vivisectionist.

  The moon hung low and yellow in the spacious calm of the sky; the hour was propitious, the lovers fond. Mr Boyd Thompson vowed that his scientific research should henceforth deal wholly with departments into which the emotions of the non-scientific cannot enter. He went back to London, and within the week bought four dozen frogs, twelve guinea-pigs, five cats, and a spaniel. His scientific aspirations met his love-longings, and did not fight them. You cannot fight beings of another world. He took part in a debate on ‘Blood Pressure’, which created some little stir in medical circles, spoke eloquently, and distinction surrounded him with a halo.