The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  He did not reply.

  “Oh come, father! You’re bound to remember her name. It was——?”

  “Desdemona,” he said, in an almost inaudible whisper.

  “Father! You always got those two mixed up! No—Desdemona was the other time. Don’t you remember?—the other time you sat beside the little girl. It was when they took you all to the theatre that afternoon—and you were so tremendously excited. You had never been to a theatre at all before—though you had heard about them. You thought you were going to see dancing girls, didn’t you, father—but it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was educational—it would be, since the school arranged it!—and it was a play—by Shakespeare. It was Desdemona who was the girl in that, father. Her husband smothered her. You always got her mixed up with the other girl—the girl in the book—their names were so alike. Don’t you remember? She was called——?”

  “Esmeralda!” gasped Broome.

  “Yes—Esmeralda! Clever father! And the little girl sat beside you, father—and she was dressed in white that day—and she had a little bag of sticky sweets, and she gave you some. And do you remember she wriggled in her seat, and her dress slipped up over her knees, and you sat there beside her, father, and you looked at her, and you thought——”

  She broke off. In the silence Broome heard, above him, in Miss Ickman’s flat, the sound of the piano stool being screwed up. The girl spoke again, and this time all the terrible archness was back in her voice.

  “Father—look at me. Look at me, father.”

  He slowly raised his head. His eyes were staring. She was regarding him with the hideous fixed smile still on her face. And as she knelt on the floor she was pulling her skirt lasciviously over her knees.

  “Oh Christ!” cried Broome. “No—no! It’s abominable—it’s hellish!”

  He covered his eyes with his hands. There came an echo of the terrible impersonal laughter. And simultaneously, from above, there floated to his ears the strains of the Strauss waltz he had heard the night before.

  An immense shudder shook him. He opened his eyes and rose wildly to his feet. The room was empty. But all about him—suffocating him—was the smell of Nancy.

  * * * *

  The policeman, entering the little side-street near the Portobello Road, found Broome gibbering at the door of his shop. He went inside with him—Broome seized him and made him go inside. He looked on with stolid interest while the small sobbing figure tore at the loose earth on the floor of the cellar.

  And he whistled through his teeth when he saw what the little man, with an expression of mixed terror and relief on his face, disclosed.

  Later, when Broome had been taken away, the policeman and his sergeant made a search of the house.

  “Blimey,” said the sergeant, as they opened the door of the bedroom—“what a stink!”

  “Someone’s been mucking about with scent,” said the policeman.

  They found that every bottle on the dressing-table had been smashed. The contents had been splashed over the room—the carpet, the walls, the bed—and then the bottles had been smashed.

  “The little chap’s hands were bleeding,” said the policeman. “I thought it was the digging in the cellar—he went at it like a maniac. But it must have been this. Poor little devil—I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him somehow . . .”

  Music, When Soft Voices Die . . .

  I heard of the death of Sir Simon Erskine some five years ago, when I was taking a long holiday in my beloved Scotland. I had known him quite well—a terrible man, moody, powerful, irascible. They said he was only forty-eight when he died. Yet, when I had last seen him, about two years before, at the time of the tragic death of his young wife, he had seemed at least eighty. I remember him then, standing in the porch of that huge, bleak house of his, a brooding and lonely figure, holding tight about him the black cloak he favoured, his already white hair blowing round his temples in the eternal winds of that wild corner of Perthshire. He was the last survivor of the Pitvrackie Erskines—the Black Erskines, as they had been called in the old Covenanting days: stern, merciless, religious men, who believed (if truth be faced) in hellfire and damnation and not much else. It was one of the Black Erskines who, with one mad stroke, had swept the head from the shoulders of a young officer who, in his cups, had questioned some religious truths. And another of the clan, on discovering his wife in adultery, had hanged the woman with his own hands, after immolating her lover most dreadfully before her eyes. A terrible, half-beastly family they were, with a long history of bloodshed and cruelty behind them.

  About a month after the death of Sir Simon, the factors announced an auction of his properties and effects at Vrackie Hall. I was sufficiently interested to travel in the creaking old bus from Perth to Pitvrackie that day: not only was I keen to see the curious old house again on its storm-swept promontory among the hills, but there was the chance of picking up a treasure or two. Sir Simon had been a man of many accomplishments. He had been interested in a thousand things—in 17th Century Dutch painting, in Romantic English literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and, above all, in unusual musical instruments. He had, too, done much big game hunting in Africa. It was in Africa, in fact, that he met Bridgid Cannell, whom he later married, and whose strange death affected him so terribly. Indeed, let me be honest and say that it affected him almost to the point of madness. There were wild tales of his behaviour during the last two lonely years of his life—tales of how he shut himself up for days on end in the big library of Vrackie Hall, of how the scared servants heard him sometimes weeping aloud, sometimes laughing, and sometimes, as it were in a disconsolate frenzy, beating on a collection of native drums he had brought back from one of his African expeditions. The wild, primitive rhythms, going on through the hours and throbbing into the farthest corners of the dark house, hypnotized him, perhaps, into forgetting his bitterness and the terrible sense of his loss. He was a man whose mind was delicately enough poised as it was, God knows—a man who feared loneliness for what it might do to him, yet who nursed his passions jealously and secretly. Neither Bridgid nor his first wife had near-succeeded in fathoming him—it was as if he needed them, he needed their company and the comfort of their bodies, yet was unwilling to let them have access to the innermost parts of him—a Bluebeard who kept one chamber eternally secret. His first wife, a young Scotswoman of good family, had, after five years of him, run off incontinently with a middle-aged American doctor. The fact that she had no child by him but had been delivered of a son within a year of meeting the American, weighed bitterly with Sir Simon. And when Bridgid died childless, so that he saw the line of the Black Erskines ending with him, he raged vilely against the destinies: and so shut himself up in the decaying house, seeing no one, brooding jealously among those priceless possessions of his, weeping like a spoilt child over his failures, beating insanely on those damnable drums and sending the throbbing, restless voices of them across the valley and against the forbidding harsh face of old Ben Vrackie itself . . .

  I reached the house that day of the sale in a battered, irritable condition. Gusts of wet, mist-laden wind had worried at me as I mounted the mud-raddled roads to the Hall from Pitvrackie. Dull clouds sagged over the peaks of the hills that surrounded the house, the pine forests that flanked my path were silent and evil seeming, heavily adrip with moisture. I saw no one, save, at one point, an old cross-eyed tinker who carried, over his shoulder, a long pole slung with dead rabbits, all matted and patchy from the damp. A fawn-coloured, evil-eyed ferret stared at me out of his pocket. I had a fleeting remembrance of an old childhood fear—that ferrets were capable of springing at human throats and sucking the blood therefrom: but the beast, I saw, was chained to the tinker’s wrist. I gave the man a greeting but he did not reply—passed on his silent way, his squinting eyes fixed on the roadway before him as he walked.

  Vrackie Hall stood back from the road in a large park full of trees and gardens that at one time had been caref
ully laid out. There was a drive of red gravel. The entrance gates were made of elaborate wrought-iron and there were, above the pillars of them, two eagles, staring at each other with their heads turned sideways. They were made of soft stone that had been eaten away by the weathers, so that they seemed to have a frightful and painful disease. The big house itself, built three-quarters of a century ago on the site of the old Erskine Castle, was a mixture of many styles and periods. There was, first, a large porch way flanked with smooth Grecian pillars, the arch of it embellished by a florid frieze consisting of festoons of fruits and flowers with, occasionally in the midst of them, pot-bellied nymphs in modest attitudes. There were festoons above some of the windows too, and many tiles, glazed in yellow and green, with small fat cupids on them and long formal garlands of flowers. The windows themselves were large, and some of them had inset panes of stained glass at each corner. Those on the front of the house had narrow barred shutters in the French style folded back from them, some a dingy cream colour, others painted in flaky green with white underneath. On the south wall there was an exuberant creeper of a rich glossy brown that merged into fresh green at the top and sides: on the back wall there were espalier fruit trees, pegged symmetrically to the lime-eaten bricks. The roof was tiled with slates of varying shapes, some square, others pointed like diamonds and others curved and scalloped—the layers of these last ones looking like enormous fish scales. And on top of all, overtowering the chimneys, was a domed belfry decorated with still more stone festoons and with, inside it, a small rusted bell that had come from an old monastery of St. Fechan, the ruins of which could be seen among the trees in a corner of the park. That old bell had been rung for three days after the death of Bridgid Erskine—not as a sign of mourning: as a last forlorn hope that its clamour, borne out over the hills, would guide her back through the thick mountain mist that was her death-pall to the house where her distracted husband awaited her.

  It was a hideous house, this home of the Erskines. I had often speculated, in the old days, on how it was possible for a man of Sir Simon’s fastidiousness to live among its rococo carvings. But he seemed singularly attached to it—it was, he once sardonically said, an embodiment, a projection of his own over-elaborate and tortured mind.

  When I arrived that day at Vrackie Hall for the auction sale it was to find a small silent company already gathered in the big lobby. The auctioneer had not yet appeared—he was, I understood, a Glasgow man, one Gregory, famed for his dry wit. But it appeared to me, as I looked round the group in the dark hall, that he would have little opportunity that day for the exercise of it. There were about a dozen serious-faced men and two women, and they talked quietly together in twos and threes. I recognized some acquaintances—one of the women was a dealer in Perth, a Miss Logan: I had been introduced to her the year before in my mother’s house. Standing alone in a corner was an old man I had seen at several sales in Scotland before (I was, you must understand, profoundly interested in such things, with an eye for old tapestries). This man, I had the fancy, came from Dundee, where he had a business of some strange sort—we none of us had ever discovered quite what it was, though we knew it to be lucrative and had the impression that it had something to do with drawing or designing. His name was Menasseh, and he was a small, wizened fellow with a large head covered with an obvious toupee.

  I roamed about the tables for some ten minutes. There were, I could perceive, even at a cursory glance, some exquisite things. Among the paintings were two miniatures by Koninck that I coveted instantly, and a small landscape by Samuel van Hoogstraaten that I would fain have seen in my rooms in London as a companion to the de Hooch Study of a Hillside Town I had acquired at Christie’s a year before. There were some beautiful vases from the Delft potteries and a Mortlake tapestry—a copy, unless I was heavily mistaken, of one of Le Brun’s Gobelin cartoons. In a corner I saw a most masterly carved lime-wood cravat, attributed, according to the notice on it, to Grinling Gibbons. Among the books was a first edition of Lewis’s The Monk and a copy, signed by Maturin himself, of that strangest of works, Melmoth the Wanderer. There were some Blake drawings too, and some of the Master’s hand-coloured prints for the Songs of Innocence. And among all these beautiful things, curiously out of place even in that strange house, was Erskine’s collection of African drums. I shuddered as I looked at them, recalling the man’s mad, grief-wracked thumping of them during the last two years of his life. They were, in their way, I suppose, beautiful enough. The largest ones were made of parchment stretched on hollow hardwood trunks, with primitive designs carved round them. There were two enchanting but repulsive small drums, however, that had for sounding boards polished human skulls. I could see, from a close examination of the larger one, the low brow and long cranium of the primitive. The parchments of these (as were also the parchments of some of the large drums) were held tight by means of small carved ivory pegs, driven in at an angle. The stretched surfaces of them bore a design in coloured dyes—a serpent coiled in a curious way: three coils at the tail end, an erratic figure eight in the centre of the body, and two coils again at the head, with the long fangs pointing downwards. It was the mounting of these skull-drums that particularly attracted me. A small hole had been bored in the forehead of each and the end of a long bent bar of chased silver inserted therein, so that the drums inclined at a convenient angle for the player. The drumsticks—long, polished bones—rested in hollows in the bases of the silver bars. Yes, beautiful things in their way, they were, as they stood there on the table beneath Erskine’s trophy heads of buffalo and lions and his crossed game rifles. It was impossible not to be fascinated by them, though they contrasted so strangely with the more delicate products of the less barbaric civilization.

  I wandered upstairs, since there still seemed little chance of the arrival of Gregory, the auctioneer. One or two of the buyers were looking at their watches and I heard one of them say something about the “Glasga’ ” express being late as usual, he supposed. I looked into some of the rooms on the first floor, but most of the portable things had been carried downstairs and the bigger pieces were covered with dust-sheets—they were being sold with the house.

  I was standing at the long stained glass window at the end of the corridor looking at the mist-cloaked hills, first through the clear panes and then, to give more interest, through the red and the blue ones, when I heard a step behind me and a cheerful deep voice.

  “Hullo, Mr. Ferguson. I didn’t know you were coming to the auction or I’d have suggested we travelled up from Perth together.”

  I looked round and found myself confronting Miss Logan, the dealer I had met the year before at my mother’s house. I greeted her civilly and we stood together chatting—talking of my mother first and of what we had both done since our last meeting, and then going on naturally to the things downstairs and Sir Simon.

  “You knew him, didn’t you?” the big woman asked, and I nodded.

  “Oh yes—quite well. A curious man. Impossible to understand.”

  “I met him once,” said Miss Logan thoughtfully. “He made me very uncomfortable—so bleak and cruel, somehow. I was at school with his first wife, you know.”

  I expressed myself as interested—as indeed I was.

  “Was she—well, as volatile in those days? I mean—you know how she went off with the American doctor——”

  “Oh yes, I know about that,” said Miss Logan quickly. “No—it was really a most curious thing. She wasn’t at all like that at school—rather serious and unenterprising, in fact. I could never quite understand it all . . .”

  She fell silent, staring out at the hills. Then she added ruminatively:

  “A tragic man—tragic. And the last one of that terrible family. What exactly was the story about his second wife?—do you know it? I’ve heard odd rumours, of course, but I was in France at the time. I never heard the real truth of what happened to her.”

  “Nor did anyone,” I said shortly. “You’re looking now at the only one
who does know the truth of it all.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Miss Logan, turning for a moment from the window, at which she had been standing firmly implanted in her expensive brogues.

  “Ben Vrackie. That old mountain is her graveyard—and her only father confessor. There were two of them, you know,” I went on, “Bridgid and an old friend of Sir Simon’s—a well-educated South African negro called David Strange, a lawyer, I think. Simon met him in Cape Town about the same time that he met Bridgid. He was holidaying here with the Erskines and one Sunday afternoon he went out for a walk in the hills with Bridgid. Simon would have gone too, but he had a headache and went to lie down instead . . .”

  I paused for a moment, looking through the red pane at the clammy mist creeping and twisting round the summit of the old mountain. Then I continued:

  “They never returned. They stayed out longer than they had intended, and in the evening one of those sudden and terrible mountain mists came down. Simon sent out search parties—he rang the old bell in the belfry for as long as the mist lasted—three whole days—as some sort of signal to them. But they never came. They must have wandered for miles—you know how it is when you are lost in a fog—and then slipped and fallen into a gully, perhaps. Their bodies were never found . . .”

  “Horrible,” said Miss Logan with a shudder. “And that was it, then . . . It must have been appalling for Sir Simon—appalling!”

  I nodded.

  “It was. He had set such store on this second marriage—the last of the line, you know. Particularly after the tragic disappointment his first wife had been to him . . .”

  We were silent. There came a slight commotion from downstairs and, looking over the bannister into the hall, I saw that Gregory had arrived. He was divesting himself of his coat—a large, red-faced man, benevolent in appearance: singularly out of place in that over-crowded room with his big, bucolic personality. He was joking with some of the buyers.