Gaslit Nightmares

by Lamb, Hugh;

  When a man devotes himself body and spirit to a single object, if he has training and aptitude, no matter how mediocre he may be in ordinary affairs, he will produce something so nearly akin to a work of genius as to deceive half the judges who think themselves competent to decide between genius and talent.

  Algar Gray had studied drawing at a good training-school, and was acknowledged by competent critics to be a true colourist, and for the last three months he had lived for the picture which he had just completed, therefore the result was satisfactory even to him. Beatrice, the ideal love of Dante, looked out from his canvas in the one attic of this Wapping slum, while Beatrice, the model, lay dead on her old mattress in the other.

  He had attempted to make her home more home-like and comfortable for her, but without success; what he ordered from the upholsterer she disposed of promptly to the brokers, laughing scornfully at his efforts to redeem her, and mocking coarsely at his remonstrances, as she always had done at his temperate habits. He was not of her kind, and she had no sympathy with him, or in any of his ways; she had tolerated him only for the money he was able to give her and so had burnt herself out of life without a kindly word or thought about him.

  She had died as she wished to do, that is, she had passed away silently and in the darkness leaving him to discover what was left of her, in the chill of a winter morning, a corpse not whiter or less luminous than she had been in life, with the transparent neck and delicate arms, blue-veined and beautiful, and the face composed with the immortal air of quiet which it had always possessed.

  She had lasted just long enough to enable him to put the finishing touches upon her replica, and now that the undertakers had taken away the matchless original, he thought that he might return to his own people, and take with him the object which he had coveted and won. The woman herself seemed nothing to him while she lay waiting upon her last removal in the room next to his, but now that it was empty, and only her image remained before him, he was strangely dissatisfied and restless.

  He had caught the false appearance of purity which was about her, but all unaware to himself, this constant communication of the more natural part had been absorbed into his being, until now the picture looked like a body waiting for the return of its own mocking spirit, and for the first time, regretful wishes began to tug at his heart-strings; it was no longer the Beatrice of Dante that he wanted, but the Beatrice who had mockingly enslaved him with her vileness, and whom he had permitted to escape from him for an ideal, she who had never tempted him in life, was now tormenting him past endurance with hopeless longings.

  He had gone out that afternoon with the intention of returning to his studio in the West End, and making arrangements for bringing his picture there, but after wandering aimlessly about the evil haunts where he had so often followed his late model, he found that he could not tear himself from that dismal round. A shadowy form seemed to glide before him from one gin-palace to another as she had done in life; the places where she had leaned against the bars seemed still to be occupied by her cold and mocking presence, no longer passive, but repulsing him as she had done in the early part of the first night, while he grew hungry and eager for her friendship.

  She was before him on the pavement as he turned towards his attic; her husky, oath-clogged voice sounded in his ears as he passed an alley, and when he rushed forward to seize her, two other women fled from him out of the gloom with shrieks of fear. All the voices of these unfortunates are alike, and he had made a mistake.

  The ice had given way on the morning of her death, and the streets were now slushy and wet, with a drizzling fog obscuring objects, so that only an instinct led him back to his temporary studio; he would draw down his blind and light his lamp, and spend the last evening of the slums in looking at his work.

  It appeared almost a perfect piece of painting, and likely to attract much notice when it was exhibited. The dress which Beatrice had worn still lay over the back of the chair near the door, where she had carelessly flung it when last she took it off. He turned his back to the dress-covered chair and looked at the picture. Yes, it was the Beatrice whom Dante yearned over all his life – as she appeared to him at the bridge, with the same pure face and pathetic eyes, but not the Beatrice whom he, Algar Gray, passed over while she lived, and now longed for with such unutterable longing when it was too late.

  He flung himself down before his magnum opus, and buried his face in his hands with passionate and hopeless regret.

  Was that a husky laugh down in the court below, on the stairs, or in the room beside him? – her devil’s laugh when she would go her own way in spite of his remonstrances.

  He raised his head and looked behind him to where the dress had been lying crumpled and away from his picture. God of Heaven! his dead model had returned and now stood at the open door beckoning upon him to come to her, with her lovely transparent arm bare to the elbow, and once more dressed in the costume which she had cast aside.

  He looked no more at his replica, but followed the mocking spirit down the stairs, into the fog-wrapped alley, and onwards where she led him.

  Down towards Wapping Old Stairs, where the shapeless hulks of the ships and barges loomed out from the swirling, rushing black river like ghosts, as she was, who floated towards them, luring him downwards, amongst the slime, to the abyss from which her lost soul had been recalled by his evil longings.

  The Accursed Cordonnier

  BERNARD CAPES

  Bernard Capes wrote five collections of strange stories in the late 1890s and early 1900s and was ignored by anthologists from then on. If you think it may have been because of the quality of his work, read these two and be amazed.

  Capes, who was born in London in 1854, died in 1918 of heart failure compounding influenza. His writing career, as far as books were concerned, spanned only twenty years, yet he was one of the era’s most prolific authors. He contributed stories to at least twenty-one of the magazines then prevalent, very often with a dozen appearances in the same journal over the years. His most popular work was probably the novel THE LAKE OF WINE (1898) and all told he produced over thirty-five books, the last being the posthumous THE SKELETON KEY (1919).

  Bernard Capes was undoubtedly one of the Victorian age’s great fantasists and I think it hard that he has not been given the recognition due him. I hope these two stories will help. Not the least strange thing about Capes’ work is the startling similarity it bears to later writers’ plots. His tale ‘The Moon Stricken’ is almost identical to a later work from M.P. Shiel, ‘The Place of Pain’. I think it likely Shiel was influenced by Capes, but what of the strange likeness between Capes’ ‘The Black Reaper’ (which appeared in his AT A WINTER’S FIRE in 1899) and Ray Bradbury’s classic story ‘The Scythe’? And while there have been many works on the legendary figure featured in his story ‘The Accursed Cordonnier’ (from the June 1900 issue of The Dome) hardly any have approached Capes’ imaginative treatment of the theme.

  I

  ‘Poor Chrymelus, I remember, arose from the diversion of a card-table, and dropped into the dwellings of darkness.’ – HERVEY

  It must be confessed that Amos Rose was considerably out of his element in the smoking-room off Portland Place. All the hour he remained there he was conscious of a vague rising nausea, due not in the least to the visible atmosphere – to which, indeed, he himself contributed languorously from a crackling spilliken of South American tobacco rolled in a maize leaf and strongly tinctured with opium – but to the almost brutal post-prandial facundity of its occupants.

  Rose was patently a degenerate. Nature, in scheduling his characteristics, had pruned all superlatives. The rude armour of the flesh, under which the spiritual, like a hide-bound chrysalis, should develop secret and self-contained, was perished in his case, as it were, to a semi-opaque suit, through which his soul gazed dimly and fearfully on its monstrous arbitrary surroundings. Not the mantle of the poet, philosopher, or artist fallen upon such, can still its shiverings, or gi
ve the comfort that Nature denies.

  Yet he was a little bit of each – poet, philosopher, and artist; a nerveless and self-deprecatory stalker of ideals, in the pursuit of which he would wear patent leather shoes and all the apologetic graces. The grandson of a ‘three-bottle’ J.P., who had upheld the dignity of the State constitution while abusing his own in the best spirit of squirearchy; the son of a petulant dyspeptic, who alternated seizures of long moroseness with fits of abject moral helplessness, Amos found his inheritance in the reversion of a dissipated constitution, and an imagination as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Before he was thirty he was a neurasthenic so practised, as to have learned a sense of luxury in the very consciousness of his own suffering. It was a negative evolution from the instinct of self-protection – self-protection, as designed in this case, against the attacks of the unspeakable. Another evolution, only less negative, was of a certain desperate pugnacity, that derived from a sense of the inhuman injustice conveyed in the fact that temperamental debility not only debarred him from that bold and healthy expression of self that it was his nature to wish, but made him actually appear to act in contradiction to his own really sweet and sound predilections.

  So he sat (in the present instance, listening and revolting) in a travesty of resignation between the stools of submission and defiance.

  The neurotic youth of to-day renews no ante-existent type. You will look in vain for a face like Amos’s amongst the busts of the recovered past. The same weakness of outline you may point to – the sheep-like features falling to a blunt prow; the lax jaw and pinched temples – but not to that which expresses a consciousness that combative effort in a world of fruitless results is a lost desire.

  Superficially, the figure in the smoking-room was that of a long, weedy young man – hairless as to his face; scalped with a fine lank fleece of neutral tint; pale-eyed, and slave to a bored and languid expression, over which he had little control, though it frequently misrepresented his mood. He was dressed scrupulously, though not obtrusively, in the mode, and was smoking a pungent cigarette with an air that seemed balanced between a genuine effort at self-abstraction and a fear of giving offence by a too pronounced show of it. In this state, flying bubbles of conversation broke upon him as he sat a little apart and alone.

  ‘Johnny, here’s Callander preaching a divine egotism.’

  ‘Is he? Tell him to beg a lock of the Henbery’s hair. Ain’t she the dog that bit him?’

  ‘Once bit, twice shy.’

  ‘Rot! – In the case of a woman? I’m covered with their scars.’

  ‘What,’ thought Rose, ‘induced me to accept an invitation to this person’s house?’

  ‘A divine egotism, eh? It jumps with the dear Sarah’s humour. The beggar is an imitative beggar.’

  ‘Let the beggar speak for himself. He’s in earnest. Haven’t we been bred on the principle of self-sacrifice, till we’ve come to think a man’s self is his uncleanest possession?’

  ‘There’s no thinking about it. We’ve long been alarmed on your account, I can assure you.’

  ‘Oh! I’m no saint.’

  ‘Not you. Your ecstasies are all of the flesh.’

  ‘Don’t be gross. I —’

  ‘Oh! take a whisky and seltzer.’

  ‘If I could escape without exciting observation,’ thought Rose.

  Lady Sarah Henbery was his hostess, and the inspired projector of a new scheme of existence (that was, in effect, the repudiation of any scheme) that had become quite the ‘thing.’ She had found life an arbitrary design – a coil of days (like fancy pebbles, dull or sparkling) set in the form of a mainspring, and each gem responsible to the design. Then she had said, ‘To-day shall not follow yesterday or precede to-morrow’; and she had taken her pebbles from their setting and mixed them higgledy-piggledy, and so was in the way to wear or spend one or the other as caprice moved her. And she became without design and responsibility, and was thus able to indulge a natural bent towards capriciousness to the extent that – having a face for each and every form of social hypocrisy and licence – she was presently hardly to be put out of countenance by the extremist expression of either.

  It followed that her reunions were popular with worldlings of a certain order.

  By-and-by Amos saw his opportunity, and slipped out into a cold and foggy night.

  II

  ‘De savoir votr’ grand âge,

  Nous serions curieux;

  A voir votre visage,

  Vous paraissez fort vieux;

  Vous avez bien cent ans,

  Vous montrez bien autant?’

  A stranger, tall, closely wrapped and buttoned to the chin, had issued from the house at the same moment, and now followed in Rose’s footsteps as he hurried away over the frozen pavement.

  Suddenly this individual overtook and accosted him.

  ‘Pardon,’ he said. ‘This fog baffles. We have been fellow-guests, it seems. You are walking? May I be your companion? You look a little lost yourself.’

  He spoke in a rather high, mellow voice – too frank for irony.

  At another time Rose might have met such a request with some slightly agitated temporising. Now, fevered with disgust of his late company, the astringency of nerve that came to him at odd moments, in the exaltation of which he felt himself ordinarily manly and human, braced him to an attitude at once modest and collected.

  ‘I shall be quite happy,’ he said. ‘Only, don’t blame me if you find you are entertaining a fool unawares.’

  ‘You were out of your element, and are piqued. I saw you there, but wasn’t introduced.’

  ‘The loss is mine. I didn’t observe you – yes, I did!’

  He shot the last words out hurriedly – as they came within the radiance of a street lamp – and his pace lessened a moment with a little bewildered jerk.

  He had noticed this person, indeed – his presence and his manner. They had arrested his languid review of the frivolous forces about him. He had seen a figure, strange and lofty, pass from group to group; exchange with one a word or two, with another a grave smile; move on and listen; move on and speak; always statelily restless; never anything but an incongruous apparition in a company of which every individual was eager to assert and expound the docrines of self.

  This man had been of curious expression, too – so curious that Amos remembered to have marvelled at the little comment his presence seemed to excite. His face was absolutely hairless – as, to all evidence, was his head, upon which he wore a brown silk handkerchief loosely rolled and knotted. The features were presumably of a Jewish type – though their entire lack of accent in the form of beard or eyebrow made identification difficult – and were minutely covered, like delicate cracklin, with a network of flattened wrinkles. Ludicrous though the description, the lofty individuality of the man so surmounted all disadvantages of appearance as to overawe frivolous criticism. Partly, also, the full transparent olive of his complexion, and the pools of purple shadow in which his eyes seemed to swim like blots of resin, neutralised the superficial barrenness of his face. Forcibly, he impelled the conviction that here was one who ruled his own being arbitrarily through entire fearlessness of death.

  ‘You saw me?’ he said, noticing with a smile his companion’s involuntary hesitation. ‘Then let us consider the introduction made, without further words. We will even expand to the familiarity of old acquaintanceship, if you like to fall in with the momentary humour.’

  ‘I can see,’ said Rose, ‘that years are nothing to you.’

  ‘No more than this gold piece, which I fling into the night. They are made and lost and made again.’

  ‘You have knowledge and the gift of tongues.’

  The young man spoke bewildered, but with a strange warm feeling of confidence flushing up through his habitual reserve. He had no thought why, nor did he choose his words or inquire of himself their source of inspiration.

  ‘I have these,’ said the stranger. ‘The first is my excuse for addr
essing you.’

  ‘You are going to ask me something.’

  ‘What attraction – ’

  ‘Drew me to Lady Sarah’s house? I am young, rich, presumably a desirable parti. Also, I am neurotic, and without the nerve to resist.’

  ‘Yet you knew your taste would take alarm – as it did.’

  ‘I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.’

  ‘Then – excuse me – why put yours to a demoralising test?’

  ‘I am not my own master. Any formless apprehension – any shadowy fear enslaves my will. I go to many places from the simple dread of being called upon to explain my reasons for refusing. For the same cause I may appear to acquiesce in indecencies my soul abhors; to give countenance to opinions innately distasteful to me. I am a quite colourless personality.’

  ‘Without force or object in life?’

  ‘Life, I think, I live for its isolated moments – the first half-dozen pulls at a cigarette, for instance, after a generous meal.’

  ‘You take the view, then – ’

  ‘Pardon me. I take no views. I am not strong enough to take anything – not even myself – seriously.’

  ‘Yet you know that the trail of such volitionary ineptitude reaches backwards under and beyond the closed door you once issued from?’

  ‘Do I? I know at least that the ineptitude intensifies with every step of constitutional decadence. It may be that I am wearing down to the nerve of life. How shall I find that? diseased? Then it is no happiness to me to think it imperishable.’

  ‘Young man, do you believe in a creative divinity?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And believe without resentment?’

  ‘I think God hands over to His apprentices the moulding of vessels that don’t interest Him.’

  The stranger twitched himself erect.