“Harry! You are mad!”
I shrugged and put down the croquet mallet. We walked a little way into the Combe. The grass was wet and the woods were solemn and still. Occasionally there came the little patter of drops of moisture on leaves—once a shiny quiet grass snake glided away from beneath our feet. There were now only a few straggling fingers of cloud in the sky—the little breeze had died. A faint lingering pink showed over the low hills to the west, some stars were out, and the nearly full moon was poised almost straight above our heads. From the house, far-off, there came the thin sound of the recorder: Sylvia was playing, now, an arrangement of Au Clair de la Lune.
We walked in silence back to Crudleigh. As we rounded the corner into the yard I heard deep breathing again, and occasional heavy gruntings. It was Hector Lowe. He was dressed in his singlet and shorts again, and, with his horse’s face intently drawn, was engaged in a vigorous shadow-boxing.
“He does it every night and morning,” whispered Christine as we passed him and entered the house.
“He’ll wear himself out, that man!” I muttered.
I lay in my little room, unable to sleep. I had eaten my hunks of bread and dipped into every book in the hanging bookshelf above my bed. Now I lay on my back, smoking a cigarette and staring at the ceiling.
And once more there crept over me the indefinable sadness I have mentioned. Something elusive was in the air, something fragrant yet full of a dark foreboding. I tried to pin it down: I was, I knew, subject to moods—time and again in the past I had felt elated or depressed for no real seeming outward reason. But this was altogether different—was at once intenser and more nebulous than any mood I had ever experienced. It was a lyrical, elegiac sadness—a sense of things lost and gone away: a feeling of growing old, I might almost say—yet what reason had I, at thirty, to feel that I was old? And all the time, as I lay there, I saw in my mind’s eye the two little hands fluttering over the strings of the lute, and heard quite clearly the forlorn thin chord they had sounded.
I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out in a small ashtray of hand-beaten copper. Then I switched the light out, turned over on my side, and tried once more to sleep. But the effort was useless. I lay wide-eyed, staring at the moonlight as it fell across the bare boards of my room.
I thought of the strange people on all sides of me. I wondered what dreams they were having—Christine, for instance, her white sober face set determinedly (for I imagined she approached sleep in the same way she approached everything: very intensely, working it all out). Or the curious Hector Lowe—was he lying on his back or his side?—which was more correct according to the latest health journals? Was he making notes even in his sleep of the number of breaths he took per minute? Was young Dobson presenting his profile to the moon? Was Mrs. Fletcher wandering in the Elysian fields arm in arm with George Moore, listening to his latest confessional with a look of immense sympathy on her gaunt face? Or Sylvia—what dismal virginal visions did she have? A free-love affair (sooner or later she was doomed to such a thing) with a young poet? She meets him at a gathering of the Young Communists’ League—they go to Unity Theatre—they stand at a Promenade Concert staring a miniature score—they sit in the gallery at Sadler’s Wells during the Ballet season . . .
I sighed. The night was warm. The window—a swing lattice—was only slightly open. I pushed back the bedclothes and went across the room.
The night was still and lovely. Before me, spread out in a long gentle slope, was Crudleigh Combe, the leaves all silvery in the moonlight and seeming to stand out quite individually on the trees and bushes. The air was damp, although the sky was almost empty of clouds—it was plain that more rain was on the way. It manifested itself in a slight creeping ground mist that blurred the edges of the shadows.
I lowered my gaze—then suddenly gasped and gripped the window sill tightly. Again I could hardly believe my eyes—again I felt that what I saw was no more than a trick of the weird light. But there was, as I stared, no possibility of mistake. Below me, standing just beyond the croquet lawn, was a young girl. I thought for one brief moment that it was Sylvia Dobson: but that illusion went immediately. The girl on the lawn was smaller than Sylvia—infinitely more delicate and more slender. And her face was ineffably beautiful—pale and forlorn-looking in the moonlight.
For a full minute I looked at her—and it seemed to me that she, as she stood with her hands at her breast, was gazing equally seriously at me. And then I made a sudden resolution. I knew that just under my window was one of the many Crudleigh outbuildings. In a moment I was over the sill and had lowered myself on to its sloping roof. Then I had scrambled across the tiles and was running over the lawn.
But she was gone. In the brief interval while my back was towards her she had slipped away. I stood disconsolately facing the spot where she had stood—and again the sadness was all over me and around me. Far-off, deep in the woods, an owl cried desolately.
This time there was no question of illusion. I knew that she had been standing there, quietly, staring up at me. And I knew something else, too: that the small beautiful hands that had been held at her white bosom were the same hands that had hovered over the strings of Dobson’s lute . . .
I went back to bed and lay for a long time thinking in the silence. Towards dawn the threatening clouds at last assembled, and I eventually fell asleep to the low swishing of the rain in the trees.
What is a ghost? There isn’t any use any more in arguing whether there are such things or not. I know, quite simply, that there are ghosts—and more than ghosts. I have seen and felt far too much to be able to hold any other opinion.
Yet most accounts of ghosts are wrong—no matter how circumstantial they are, they are wrong: indeed the very fact of their being circumstantial makes them wrong. Ghosts are not things—I doubt if they are even people: they are feelings. They are all unaccountable essences—they are your own self sitting gravely and accusingly on your own doorstep. That is why this story is vague and nebulous—all the time it is groping to describe something that is literally indescribable. Nothing spectacular happens—there is no sudden horrifying dénouement in which the girl in the garden turns out to have died violently and unhappily at Crudleigh in the past—all my baiting of Christine on that point sprang only from ignorance. Yet the girl in the garden is the story—and though I have not seen her since that visit of mine to Crudleigh, she has haunted me quietly and terribly and with an aching persistence through all the years between.
Who was she?—what was she? Unanswerable questions. I know nothing about her—except that now, in my mind, she is more real than any of those ghosts of Tess Beauchamp’s: old Belarius, the two Dobsons, Mrs. Fletcher—even Christine.
I did not even know—definitely—that first night I saw her that she was a ghost. After all—was it impossible that a real girl should have been standing in the garden looking up at my window?—a girl from the village, perhaps, or a guest I had not met either in the lounge or the music room? I may have imagined the hands—perhaps my mind had invented them as a distraction from the boredom of listening to Mrs. Fletcher: and only my damned sentimentalism associated them with the girl in the garden . . . Yet there was more in it all than that. There was a feeling that there was more in it than that. Not fear—not once in the whole strange business was I afraid: except perhaps when—— But no. Even then it was horror and not fear.
And I knew definitely, next evening, that she was a ghost—and I knew something else too. And it is something I still know, and cannot escape from.
. . . She was standing in exactly the same position. Expecting her I had stationed myself at the window, with my raincoat over my pyjamas. The night was cloudy—only occasionally the moon broke through and lit up the whole quiet scene. It was in one of the dark intervals that I first became aware of her—as an uncertain shape just beyond the croquet lawn. Then the clouds parted and she was there, fully revealed, very small and frail, with her little hands at her bosom.
>
I opened my window wide and leaned out, staring at her. She did not move. And, cautiously this time, I lowered myself over the sill and on to the roof of the outhouse. Keeping my eyes fixed on her, I edged my way over the slates, till eventually I stood facing her, with only the lawn separating us.
For a long time I stood there; then, with my heart beating a shade more quickly, I walked slowly over the wet grass until I was no more than a foot or two away from her.
She was frightened. Her eyes were large, she was trembling. Her small white hands were all the time picking nervously at her dress—hovering at her bosom as I had seen them hovering over the strings of the lute. What could I possibly say to her? She was a ghost—I was as alien to her world as she was to mine. Quite quietly and suddenly, as I stood there, I saw how immense was the gulf between us. There was no real communication—she was a different thing—she existed on different terms. And all round me was the dead weight of utterly helpless sadness that had oppressed me since my walk through the woods to Crudleigh.
Her trembling stopped and she heaved a great sigh. Then she turned and made a little movement away from me.
“Wait,” I said—foolishly, for how could I know if she would understand me? But the exclamation came involuntarily.
She stopped: and then, very slowly, she moved back close to me. She looked at me with a curious, almost compassionate expression in her large eyes. She was beautiful in the dim light—her face small and wan, her frail figure so neat and trim in the elegant little gown she wore.
Her lips did not move, but she was speaking to me—I knew what she was saying. I set it down here—as I shall set down our other conversation too—as speech: but it was not speech—after that first “Wait” of mine I never again opened my lips to her, but communicated in the sense, as she did to me.
“It is not you,” she said. “Not you at all. Why did you come when it was not you?”
“Who are you?” I asked her. She remained unresponsive, staring, and plucking at her dress. Then she suddenly shuddered.
“It is not you,” she said again. “It is not you they are waiting for.”
“Who are They?” I asked.
For a moment she did not reply. Then she shivered again and said:
“The Black People—the Other Ones.”
A cloud covered the moon. There was a little rush and flicker as a small bat darted over my head. I started—and suddenly all about me there was a sense of icy coldness and menace—the whole air was full of menace. I looked round quickly. Nothing—only shadows, and her dim outline before me. But for a moment—only for a moment—perhaps communicated to me by my contact with her—there was the knowledge that we were not alone. Other things were round us in the quiet corner of the woods—they were pressed tight on all sides, invisible: and they were not as I was—or even as she was.
The cloud passed. I looked at her. Her eyes were wide and full of tears. Then, as it were impulsively, and without saying anything, she put out her small hand and seemed to touch me on the cheek. I had a sensation of a breath—something diminutive—soft, but infinitely cold: and then, quite simply, she was not there—she had gone, as if she had never been before me.
The grass was wet through my thin slippers. I was chilled, though in my bedroom earlier the night had seemed warm. The trees and bushes rustled as a sudden corner of the breeze swept through them.
I went back into the house—slowly, not quite in my proper senses.
From that time on I lived two separate lives at Crudleigh: a superficial one as one of Tess’s party, and a deep and secret one when I thought of the girl in the garden. When I first arrived with Christine it had been my intention to stay for only a few days—long enough to fulfil my duty to her. But now the time dragged on and I could not bring myself to leave—God knows what Tess Beauchamp and her guests thought of me, for they must have seen in a hundred ways that I had nothing really to do with them. I moped through their queer little rites and ceremonials—old Belarius’s harpsichord sessions, when he played arrangements of his own of old unknown folk songs and dance suites: Mrs. Fletcher’s anecdotes (she was writing a book on George Moore and used sometimes to read passages from it to us, in a high nasal chant): the Dobsons in full spate as duettists, he on his lute and she on her recorder. Mrs. Fletcher’s friend—the other gaunt mascara’d woman (a Miss Delaware) made and operated puppets; and sometimes there were performances in the long lounge, when Miss Delaware disappeared behind the screening of a small stage and jerked her dolls through long symbolic plays, with Tess Beauchamp reading all the male puppet parts in her deep husky voice. On occasions like this I went into a kind of dream. I had no interest in the small grotesque figures before me—or in the other puppet-figures, the audience: I was all the time letting my mind dwell on the image of the girl in the garden. I went over and over the conversation we had had, I pondered every expression I had seen on her face. In some strange way, now that I had seen her, had been so intimately close to her, I no longer speculated about who she was, or what she was. I knew, with absolute finality, that she was a ghost—not the ghost of anyone, but simply a ghost: something else. It was not a question of believing or disbelieving—not even a question of wondering why. She was a ghost, and there was an end to it.
And she haunted me. The days passed, and since that conversation in the garden on the second night of my visit to Crudleigh, I had not seen her. I waited at my window, shivering in my raincoat, till dawn sometimes. But she did not come. I looked for her, peering into the bushes beyond the lawn till my eyes were strained and aching—but there was no shape—no sign or shadow. I looked for her; and I looked too, sometimes, with a sort of horror, for the Others that she had talked about. But there was nothing in all that time—only on occasions, as I stood there, the sense of sadness—and another sense too, now, mingling with it: a sense of menace and foreboding.
Yes, I thought of her all the time. Her small sweet face was before me—I could not escape from it. The memory of the little caress she had given me compelled my imagination always. As time passed I realized that I did not want anyone else but her—not in the whole world: she was all my life. It was the others that were unreal.
—All, that is, except Hector Lowe. As the days went on I found myself developing an almost morbid interest in this strange man. Perhaps it was because, in another way, he was as much cut off from the Beauchamp crowd as I was—we had an affinity in our separation. The truth about him, it seemed to me, was that he was just not interested in people. He thought of nothing but himself and his health. His room was next to mine, and sometimes, in the early mornings, I would hear him battering at a punch-ball, or working desperately at a little stationary rowing machine that he had. I would see him from my window, darting through the trees of the Combe as he ran his five miles. I would come across him shadow-boxing in a corner, or sitting testing his reflexes, his long face drawn and worried as he made little entries in his notebook.
I tried, once or twice, to draw him into conversation; but all the time we talked his eyes were darting about distractedly and he was plainly thinking of something else—perhaps the number of calories he had in him, or the exact amount of roughage he would be having with his next meal.
“Where did he come from?” I asked Christine one afternoon when we were walking in the village. But she, usually so well-informed about people at Crudleigh, could on this occasion tell me nothing.
“He was here at the time of my last visit,” she said, “—about three months ago, that is. I don’t think Tess had any knowledge of him before he arrived—he answered one of her advertisements in a magazine—you know—Attractive Guest House, Approved Food Reform Society.”
Then she added, to my slight surprise:
“He frightens me a little, you know, Harry.”
“Frightens you, Christine? I shouldn’t have thought that anything could frighten you.”
“Oh yes. There’s something—well—unbalanced about him. He isn’t at pea
ce with himself.”
“Are any of us?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said solemnly. “Lots and lots of people are at peace with themselves, thank heaven. You are, for instance, Harry.”
I smiled ruefully.
“Am I, Christine? I’m glad to hear it.”
She drew her brows together in her intense way and added:
“Yes—you know what you want.”
“And what is it?”
“I can’t tell you that,” she said, in her most solemn voice. “Perhaps you don’t even know yourself, Harry—consciously. But it’s there all right. You know.”
Poor old Christine! Big, clumsy, hopelessly wrong on almost every point. But it was impossible not to adore her.
I remembered, as we walked on—she, as usual, swinging her skirt about her hips as she took her big gauche strides—I remembered with a kind of irony the phrase she had used to attract me to Crudleigh:
“Do come, Harry. You’ll love it. You meet such interesting people . . .”
Well, it’s an old tale now—all over and done with. Nothing remains. A few keepsakes and remembrancers and that is all. Some snapshots Christine took of Crudleigh before they pulled the old house down, a water colour I did from the window of my room of that little corner of the Combe beyond the croquet lawn. And the letter I had from Hector Lowe—that curious pedantic letter in the wavy handwriting: faded and worn now with the years, it has been folded and unfolded so often.
And the terrible sense of loss and sadness that I feel when I think of the girl in the garden. I sit now, for example, staring out of my window on this April evening, with the sky smoky and pink, the outlines on the roofs and chimney pots all hazy in the Spring mist over the city . . . and it is as if, all the time, I am groping unhappily to pin down, only for a moment, the whole nebulous sense of her. But she has gone. She haunts me, there is no escape from her—but now it is only as a memory that she haunts me: a memory of things that have slipped away and are lost—intangible things: sunlight on the wall of a nursery, the scent of a visitor who came to tea, the solemn sweetness of one’s very first love affair. The memory of a shadow in moonlight. And that is all.
The Other Passenger Page 6