I saw her only once again during my visit to Crudleigh: and for some years the full horror of that last meeting so compelled me that all the quiet sadness of my real feeling for her was swamped. But fortunately the horror could not last for ever. I can write of it now—as I must write of it—in perfect detachment. There is no question of understanding it—I can relate and no more. Who the Others were—what they were—I have no inkling. It was only that just for a moment I seemed to see the other side of the coin—the shadow of the shadow. There was a hole in the air . . .
It was a week after the conversation I had had with her at the edge of the Combe. All evening I had been standing at the window, looking out. Downstairs there had been one of Miss Delaware’s puppet shows, and, after it was over, young Dobson and his sister stayed on in the lounge, playing the lute and the recorder. The thin sounds came up the stairs to me as I stood shivering a little in the darkness; and I found my mind full of the image of the little white hands I had seen the very first night of my visit to Crudleigh. Eventually, towards midnight, the music stopped, and I heard the two players creeping stealthily to their beds.
The night was dark. After a few days of fair weather the rain had come back, and the air was full of the rhythmic whisper of it. Next door, from Hector Lowe’s room, I heard the continuous light creaking of the rowing machine. He was doing his last desperate exercises before going to bed.
I stood for perhaps an hour longer, and then, worn out, I went to bed. For a little time I tried to read, but my mind would not stay on the printed page before me, and towards two o’clock I fell into a heavy doze. My last sensation, I remember, was a recurrence of the unearthly sense of uneasiness and foreboding that had afflicted me since first I heard, from the girl in the garden, of the Black People. I started up once at a rustle and scurry from somewhere overhead, then sank back again to the pillow, telling myself it was only a rat in the raftering of the old house.
I do not know how long I slept—an hour, perhaps, or a little more. It was a heady, stupid sleep. I know I was dreaming, in a vast struggling way—but what the dream was I have no recollection. There were heavy, blanketing layers of consciousness—I was like a man smothered and held down.
And then, I remember, I slowly became aware of things—uneasily and unhappily. I fought back through the layers to the surface. And even before I was fully awake—while my eyes were still closed—I knew that she, the girl in the garden, was with me. There was no mistaking it—she was with me, and she was calling to me.
I opened my eyes. She was standing by the bedside—I could see her quite distinctly in the dim light from the corridor that came through the skylight above the door. Her small face was pale—even paler than I remembered it: her whole attitude was agitated—she trembled. She wrung her hands mournfully—she was weeping.
I sat up in bed, staring at her, not yet properly conscious. A slight moaning breeze had sprung up outside and was circling the house, whistling a little under the old eaves and rustling the ivy and Virginia creeper against the walls. The casement curtains billowed and flapped into the room—and again, overhead, the rat went scuttling along the rafters. And as I looked at the wan figure before me in the dusk I was filled suddenly with an immense, a mortal, horror. Not at her, but at the something else that now I felt to be all about us—pressing in on us in the darkness, foul and malevolent, making the very air all black and restless. And I longed, as I lay there, weak and sweating under that terrible sense of doom, to reach out my arms and put them round the trembling small figure. But it was not possible—no contact with her was possible. At the most, from her, there could be the soft diminutive caress she had given me in the garden—not a touch, but rather a breath: a little ghostly gesture across the abyss . . .
“It is time,” she said. “They are waiting. It is time.”
I did not answer. I wanted to scream out—to make some noise to break the terrible spell. Yet I was bound, in a curious and hideous way, to silence.
“The Black People?” I asked her at last, fighting to make the contact.
“Yes. It is time. They are coming.”
We remained for a long while looking at each other. Her eyes were wide and glistening, her little mouth was quivering. Then suddenly her trembling stopped. She stiffened—her whole attitude was one of immense, intolerable horror. She put out her hand and touched mine as it lay on the counterpane. I was filled with a terrible icy coldness. And as I gazed at her she screamed—not aloud, but through the sense, the way she spoke to me: a high, beastly, silent shriek that bored through my brain like a white cone.
And simultaneously, with my ears, I heard filling the air a hoarse, strangled, gasping sound—animal-like, horrible in the silence. And I knew at last that the Others were with us in that room—sweeping past us like a black wind. Invisible, horrible beyond all powers of description, dark, greedy, malevolent things, pressing in on us as they passed. Before me there opened an immense gulf—I reeled helplessly on the verge of something unutterably beastly. Then they were gone. The gasping ended in a long hoarse sigh. It was over—whatever the agony, it was over. I lay back weakly on the pillow. The little cold hand was withdrawn. I turned my eyes for a moment to look at her—and I knew it was the last glimpse I would ever have. The horror had gone out of her face. She still trembled, but her expression now, in the dim light, was infinitely sad and full of pity. Her small white hands were at rest.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them again she had gone. The room was empty. I fell asleep, exhausted. I knew nothing, understood nothing—except that it was all over, at last. Whatever terrible thing had happened in that old house was finished. There was nothing but peace in the air—and the old forlorn sadness. As it were, in the atmosphere, there was the thin lost chord of music she had sounded on the lute . . .
I was awakened at eight o’clock by old Mr. Belarius. He was agitated—clad in a camel-hair dressing gown, with his grey hair and beard all wispy and matted.
“Anderson, Anderson,” he cried, as he shook me,—“for the Lord’s sake come quickly! Young Hector Lowe has hanged himself!”
I was out of bed and into a dressing gown in a moment. Outside, in the corridor, Tess Beauchamp and Christine were huddled together with pale frightened looks on their faces. Tess wore a long clinging kimono, Christine clutched about her a shapeless blue overall. Her hair was stuck with curlers, her complexion, without a trace of make-up on it, was blotchy and pimpled.
All this detail I took in, irrelevantly, as I pushed past the women with old Belarius and made my way into Hector Lowe’s room. Young Dobson was there before us, staring stupidly upwards into the corner behind the door. I followed his gaze. A rope had been slung over a small old rafter that crossed the ceiling diagonally, and swinging slowly from the end of it, his feet about ten inches from the ground, was Hector Lowe. The long horse face was red and bloated, the eyes bulged out of their sockets, the whites of them quite purple. It was a beastly sight. I averted my gaze.
“I came up about a quarter of an hour ago,” said young Dobson, in a low helpless tone. “I wanted to borrow one of his diet books—he told me last night he’d lend it to me if I came up this morning. I couldn’t get any answer when I knocked at the door, so I opened it and walked in, and—and—”
His voice trailed away and there was a long silence. I saw the frightened faces of the two women framed in the doorway. It was old Belarius who spoke first. He cleared his throat and then said nervously:
“Anderson, he—he left a letter for you. It’s over there—on the table.”
I looked dazedly to where he was pointing. A small parchment-paper envelope rested against some books. It was addressed: “Henry Anderson, Esq., Personal,” in a thin angular scrawl.
I opened it absently and started to read. I was aware of a whispered conversation behind me, and furtive sniffling noises as the two men cut down the body. Outside, after the rain, the sun was shining. The air was fresh, a bird sang lustily in one of the bushes in t
he Combe. But these things impinged on me incidentally: my whole attention was focussed on the letter.
This is what I read:
“Mr. Anderson,—I am writing this to you because I believe from the few conversations we have had that you will be the most likely to be able to understand what I must say before I commit suicide. But I do not expect you will understand fully—I do not indeed believe that anyone will or can. It is only, in the end, because I must in some way justify this action I am being forced to take to put an end to all the torment I have suffered.
“I am not a healthy man. My earliest recollections are of the sick-room. A long succession of mysterious maladies—shaded lights, medicine bottles, people stooping over my bed and talking in low grave tones. My father died when I was very young and my mother was morbidly solicitous about my health. Of this part of my life I remember little. There were long journeys, there was a succession of different doctors. I had, in the early days, a private tutor, following on the acid governess who had supervised my first steps in education: but when I was twelve this young man left our household and I was sent to school.
“I will not dwell on the unhappiness of my schooldays. You will understand that as a weakling boy, things were not made too easy for me by my companions. The only reason I mention my going to school at all is to emphasise that from this time on I lived away from home. I saw my mother only during the vacations, and thus we grew very quickly to be comparative strangers to each other. She was a curiously reserved woman. She had very few friends and only one relative—an unmarried sister who shared the house with her.
“I was fourteen when my mother died. At this time my health had improved considerably, I was able much more to lead a normal and an energetic life—it was, I can most certainly state, the only happy period I have ever experienced. Yet this brief interlude was completely shattered by the death of my mother. I went home one Easter vacation to find that my aunt was alone in the house. She said my mother was ‘away’—she was nervously evasive of all my questions—perhaps my mother would be back, she said, before I left home for school again. But she did not come back. I moped disconsolately through the holiday, with my aunt making gallant attempts to amuse and entertain me. We avoided mentioning my mother after the first few days—I sensed that there was something terrible and mysterious in the air.
“I went back to school. Two days before the summer vacation was due to start, I got a telegram from my aunt to hurry home. My mother was dead.
“The effect on me was incalculable. We had been, as I have said, almost strangers—there was a reserve between us: yet her death left a great and an irreparable gap in my life. My health again grew bad—I toiled unwillingly through University (fortunately there was no shortage of money—my father had left a lot and it was carefully invested, and administered, on my mother’s death, by my aunt). It was at this time I began first to grow morbid about my health—hypochondriacal, I suppose: yet in the light of all that I have since learned, is it surprising that I was so?
“But here again I do not want to dwell on detail. I have set myself a limit of half-an-hour for the writing of this letter. I swore to confine myself detachedly to facts. And so, in order to fulfil my planned design, I must hasten to a conclusion.
“Let it suffice for me then to say that when I was eighteen I made the terrible discovery that has obsessed me ever since and poisoned my whole life. I had often wondered how my mother had died, but had never dared, remembering her previous evasiveness, to question my aunt about it. At this time, however, she—my aunt—fell seriously ill, and just before she herself died, she told me the truth. I write it here as the final—the only clue to any real understanding of why I am doing what I must do.
“My mother had committed suicide. For three months before her death she had been confined in a lunatic asylum. And in doing so she had fulfilled, in her generation, the inevitable destiny of her family—and my family. The history, as I then learned it from my aunt on her deathbed, was of a terrible thread running through the whole line—an ineluctable hereditary insanity.
“There is no more to say. My aunt died ten years ago. To describe in detail the agonies of introspection I have since undergone would be impossible. They have ended in the decision I have mentioned. Yet I would wish it to be understood that the decision has been taken for the sake—the sole sake—of putting an end to the torture. It is not the other thing—not that, but, oh, my God, the ghastly fear of that! The wakening every morning to the dread that perhaps that day—in some sneaking and to me unnoticeable manner—the time had come for me. I have been a man pursued and beastily haunted. And I can stand no more.
“It is five minutes past three. The rope is ready. I subscribe myself, as my last sane earthly act,
“Hector J. Lowe”
I folded the letter slowly and slipped it into my pocket. The men had cut down the body and had laid it on the bed, covering it with a sheet. Belarius was dazed, young Dobson’s face was pale—he seemed sick.
I looked round the room. Already the dull quietness of death had settled over it. The rowing machine lay pathetically motionless in a corner, the punch-ball stood beside it, a blank brown face, it seemed, on a thin and armless body. Thrown over a chair were the singlet and shorts I had seen Lowe wearing when first he passed Christine and me in the woods.
I glanced at his books on the table. They were mostly thin paper-covered pamphlets with titles like Health and Diet and The Importance of Protein. There was one heavy leather-bound volume, however, with its title in gilt Roman lettering on the spine: Some Aspects of Hereditary Insanity. And by the bedside, on a small shelf, was a vellum presentation copy of The Hound of Heaven.
I sighed and went through to my own room. I packed disconsolately; and, in the afternoon, Christine and I left Crudleigh.
I have tried, as far as I could, to set down this narrative detachedly and dispassionately. At this distance I think it has been possible—it is ten years since it all happened. There is no explanation—no implication, even. I know nothing. Only the letter remains, and it is a dismal and unsatisfactory index to the tragic agonies of that introspective and neurotic man. He himself is as unreal to me as they all are.
No—I no longer speculate, even. You, if you want to, may form conclusions—you may construct theories about the girl in the garden—you may decide who she was, and who, or what, the Black People were. I, after all this time, only accept it all—it is something that happened—something in which I was involved. There is no explanation—as I said before, I do not even, nowadays, want an explanation. It is all there, in my memory, ineffably—sometimes torturously—haunting. In my mind’s eye I see the small white figure beyond the croquet lawn: and somehow, in her whole spirit and attitude, there is the essence of the little French song Christine and I heard as we walked in the garden at Crudleigh: Ouvre moi ta porte . . . Pour l’amour de Dieu . . .
Christine is married now. She married a West Country farmer, of all people. She has two children—a boy and a girl. The last time I saw her she had views on child welfare and education. When the children are old enough they will go to Dartington Hall.
Tess Beauchamp is in America. She gave up Crudleigh after the suicide—the publicity embarrassed her. The old house was run for a time by a young doctor as a private nursing home, but somehow the venture never succeeded. Eventually, three years ago, it was pulled down—to accommodate a new road that was being built in that part of the country. I went down out of nostalgic curiosity, and stood disconsolately watching the big dredgers at work over the remains of the croquet lawn.
As for Belarius and the others—I never saw any of them again. Once, at a concert, I thought I saw Miss Delaware, the puppet woman. But it was only a fleeting glimpse and I might easily have been mistaken. There are so many people like Miss Delaware who go to concerts.
No, it is not these people I care about—not one of them. It is not they who haunt me from those days, it is not their faces I see as I sit quietly
looking back—at my piano, perhaps, playing Debussy—Clair de Lune—because, in association and atmosphere, it captures so exquisitely the ineffable mood of those days when I looked down and saw the girl in the garden . . . But she has gone, there is no use in searching any more.
Only sometimes, as I walk home on a moonlight night, or stand, looking out—sometimes, if the mood is deep enough, I seem to hear as from an infinite distance the small forlorn lute chord. And I have a clear fleeting image of those two little white hands. And I find myself wishing—
But no. It is all past. I know nothing.
Absence of Mind
All things are affairs of degree. Each man has his own tragedies and his own joys. And their depths can be measured only in relation to the man’s own experience. That is why people as trivial as Mrs. Carpenter are, in their own way, as tragic victims of the Other Passenger as Dr. Faustus or George Gordon, Lord Byron.
Yes, consider Maud Carpenter. Consider her well. She had her own type of the agenbite of inwit.
Mrs. Carpenter was absent minded. She could never resist telling people just how absent minded she was. “My dear,” she would say—“it’s really appalling. I can’t begin to tell you how bad it is. It sometimes positively frightens me.” And then she would recount some incident to illustrate her absence of mind—an interminable story involving shadowy uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, cousins and half-cousins.
Mrs. Carpenter had other interests besides her absence of mind. There were sewing parties, knitting parties, canteens, missions for home and abroad, socials, whist-drives—all of them connected with the Church, the vicar of which, Mr. MacNaughton, was a patient listener to Mrs. Carpenter’s stories. So her life was very full. She hardly noticed that her husband—in business in the north of England, though she lived in the south—never wrote to her: seemed, in fact, to have drifted out of her life altogether. Nor did she seem to notice that her daughters had left home, and that her aged mother, whom once she had pressed to come and be looked after, had gone off to live with another daughter in Wales. Mrs. Carpenter noticed nothing: she was too busy with her social duties—and in being absent minded.
The Other Passenger Page 7