The Other Passenger

by John Keir Cross

  No. Facts. A catalogue of facts.

  Fact 1: A cairngorm brooch.

  Fact 2: A picture of a woman with hair piled up on top and a locket round her throat.

  Fact 3: A photograph of a de Laszlo portrait.

  Fact 4: A letter, in the possession of Margaret du Parc, violinist, from John Aubrey Spenser, late pianist, breaking off his engagement to her.

  Fact 5: A footstep in a yellow fog.

  Fact 6: A heap of charred straw and old clothes, the remains of a Guy Fawkes bonfire organized by Eric Jameson, a friend of John Aubrey Spenser, as an entertainment for the children of the district in which he lived . . .

  Fact 7: A small razor.

  WINGED VICTORY

  . . . I can picture my friends rallying round. I can picture Jameson and Miller meeting in the Six Bells and in a welter of “old chaps” and bovine kind-heartedness saying:

  “Poor old Spenser! Gone to bits! What’s happened to his playing? Never gives a concert now, does he . . . Queer how chaps disintegrate. Probably needed a woman, poor fellow. I suppose we must do something about him—do something to shake him out of it.”

  “I’m having a sort of party next week-end at my place at Wraysbury,” says Jameson. “Fifth of November and all that. Got to do something. I’m having a Guy and fireworks—for my kids and their friends, you know. Could always invite him down to that. I don’t suppose he’ll come, but he might, you know. It’d do him good . . .”

  I did go down to Wraysbury. Since it is facts we are on now, let me say that I went because I had no heart to refuse. I was indifferent. What did it matter if I went or stayed? So it was easier to go—and I went.

  That was a week ago. Since my return on Tuesday I have not once moved out of my flat here. I have—knowing what had to be done—compiled this manuscript. It covers my desk in thirty closely-written sheets. Disconnected, pointless, an amorphous scribbled mass. It was to have been immense—I began, you remember, vastly. The antecedents of the author—the farmer, my grandfather, with his epigrammatic exit line: “Aye. Barnha’ will need a new maister in the morning.” Then my father and my aunt—a portrait of the author as a child. All in order and as it should be. But somehow in this—as in everything—something has gone wrong. I haven’t the heart. All that I had wanted to say (more about Ellen, for example, and more about Margaret)—all these things have gone by the board. I emerge as a sort of inverted Proust: A la Recherche du Temps Trouvé.

  A paragraph—a rest—perhaps a few moments’ dozing—an interlude on the piano—a scratch meal—another paragraph. So it has gone. Not what I meant—not it at all.

  And now there is only a little more to be said. It is late, and I cannot—I haven’t the heart—to spin it through another night.

  In the street it is quiet. On the mantelshelf the clock ticks slowly. On the wall, in steps, the Blake engravings. “The sparks fly upward.”

  I went to Wraysbury. And He—inevitably—went with me.

  Facts detached. The story of my life in simple facts.

  Jameson’s house. Large, modern. It must have cost him a fortune. Furnished expensively in appalling taste. A beautiful piano in the lounge on which they urged me (as a sop) to play. “Won’t you give us a piece on the piano, Mr. Spenser?” A blue China carpet on the floor, a ceiling tinted in pale green. A Chinese lacquer motif in the dining room—too much chinoiserie altogether.

  The Jameson children filled the house with an air of excited expectancy. They showed us the boxes of fireworks, they took us out to the yard to see the Guy, all ready propped on a heap of branches for his next day’s martyrdom. He sagged from a crosspiece of old creosoted wood, wretched, limp, with a grinning Scaramouche-like face. I shuddered a little as I looked at him with the yellow straw packed round his feet—to keep him from the cold through the long night vigil before him. In the twilight he was tragic.

  We went indoors and the children were sent to bed. We adults played cards for a time, and drank Jameson’s special rye juleps. Then, yawning, one by one we went upstairs.

  Facts, eh? I can give you the facts. It’s all I can give you now, as I sit here writing, so near the end. As in a curious far-off dream I see the facts—unreal—the unrealest things there are.

  Opposite the door in the little room that Jameson had given me there was a long wall mirror. I stood on the threshold for a long time regarding myself solemnly. Then I closed the door behind me. I turned to the right and the reflection turned in sympathy to his left. I walked over towards the bed, beyond the range of the mirror-frame. And, smiling, the other figure walked with me.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, infinitely weary. He, still smiling, sat opposite me in a little low armchair of brown uncut moquette.

  Indictment 5 above:—The panel, Spenser, is mad . . .

  Am I mad? Was I mad in that moment in my room at Jameson’s house when all the accumulated rage of the thirty-five years mounted up to a pitch of fury? How should I care any more whether it was hallucination or not? All I know is that he was flesh and blood. There was no mistaking that he was flesh and blood when I put my fingers round his throat. There was no mistaking that he was flesh and blood when he sagged limply in my arms and I lowered him gently to the floor.

  A thousand things were in my mind—a thousand small humiliations. How should I, among all things listed, list those? Can you understand humiliation? Can you understand the humiliation of simply being the shape you are?—of having the colour of hair that you have? . . .

  And, as always, coming into my mind irrelevantly, even at that high moment, there was one disconnected incident. It was before I left school—during my last term, when I was fifteen. In my form there was a boy named Gallacher, a barren, vindictive, twisted creature with a permanent grudge against one of the masters, Rivers, who taught Mathematics. One part of our school was in a very old house and the rooms were heated by huge coal fires in the winter time. It was typical of Gallacher that he should go to grotesque lengths and use this fact to gratify his revenge. He began in the school workshop and in the laboratories, heating pieces of metal and holding them in his bare hands until he could touch iron that was not positively red hot. Then, when he considered himself ready, he chose a day when the Algebra lesson was due to follow the mid-morning interval and put the poker in the schoolroom fire for the duration of the break. When the bell rang for class he lifted the poker out, carried it across the room and set it down on Rivers’s desk. Then he went to his seat and sat caressing his cheek with his palm to experience the heat that was in it from carrying the poker.

  When Rivers came in he saw the poker lying on his desk and, all unsuspecting, picked it up without hesitation. The pain must have been excruciating, but he gave no sign of feeling anything. Instead he carried the poker back to the fireplace and laid it in the fender. Then he turned and faced us. He was desperately white, and suddenly he threw out his hand towards us so that we could see the great red weal across it.

  “You’ve burned my hand!” he cried. “Look—you’ve burned my hand!”

  And he stamped out of the room. A few moments later he came back, with the Rector and Iles, the Janitor. Iles stationed himself at the door and spectacularly turned the key in the lock. Meantime the Rector had mounted the master’s dais and was surveying the class, while Rivers stood by with his hand wrapped in a duster.

  “No one will leave this room,” said the Rector impressively, “until I have found out who did this abominable thing to Mr. Rivers.”

  There was silence. One or two of the boys glanced toward Gallacher. He sat with a vacant, stupid smile on his face, rubbing his hand against the edge of his desk. The Rector sat down.

  “I’m quite prepared to wait,” he announced drily. “I can always get Iles to fetch me in something to eat. You’ll have the pleasure of watching me.”

  Up to this moment I had taken no great interest in what had been going on. But suddenly, I remember, a peculiar and intangible sensation began to grow inside me. I wat
ched the Rector, fascinated, studying his fresh healthy features and following his eyes as they roved slowly round the room. Then suddenly, without my own consent, as it were, I rose to my feet. The Rector’s brows went up.

  “You, Spenser? Well, well!”

  I was aware that the class was staring at me amazedly. I could see Gallacher, still with the fatuous smile on his face. I knew they all thought I was being quixotic, getting them out of a scrape, and that knowledge suddenly began to annoy me. It was not that that was in my mind at all. I did not know what it was, but I knew it was not that.

  I was escorted by Iles to the Rector’s room. The old man opened a drawer and took out a short, two-thonged strap of tough leather. He passed it through his fingers and looked at me quizzically.

  “Was it you, Spenser?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Why did you do it?”

  I made no reply. My heart was pounding, I remember, and I could feel my knees trembling slightly. The Rector went on:

  “It isn’t usual to punish in the fifth,” he said slowly. “When it is necessary it means that the punishment must be a heavy one.”

  He was looking out of the study window, and now suddenly he turned and said quickly:

  “Why did you say you did it, Spenser? You know you didn’t.”

  I still made no reply. I stared at him foolishly. And suddenly he made a gesture of annoyance and strode to the desk to pick up the strap.

  “Ach!” he cried. “Hold out your hand . . .”

  I stepped to the door and put out the light. Then I drew back the window curtains and stared out over the fields. The moon was full. The outbuildings cast long silent shadows on the silvered ground. I shuddered. The frost glistened and sparkled. I thought—I remembered . . .

  I lowered my eyes. In the yard below me, huddled and grotesque in the clear blue light, was that stuffed and tragic figure.

  For a moment I stopped breathing. Then, quickly, with sly and quiet movements, I went over to the door, opened it, and listened in the corridor. The house was dead. Leaving the door open I tiptoed back into my room and put my hands under the oxters of the thing on the floor . . .

  It is late—too late. I fill my pen with ink for the last few pages. I light a cigarette—my last cigarette.

  It all ties up. I stretch out my hand for a last cigarette: I stretch out my hand to open a door: I stretch out my hand sadly, as a last sentimental gesture, to Margaret. I was a man who lived in the dark. I stretched out my hand for a light to see by—and a light was quietly and simply given me.

  Why should I waste time now by building up the dramatic climax? I should describe, in detail, with a cumulative atmosphere, the nailing of that terrible thing to the crosspiece, the weeping struggle I had to drape the sagging ancient clothes round its limbs, the ecstasy that was inside me as I packed the yellow straw tightly, tightly round the foot of it . . . But there is no dramatic climax. There is only, all about me, a flow of images.

  The piano, open, a Winged Victory. That other small Winged Victory on the desk beside me, half-covered with the pages as I write. A little heap, too, of my father’s books on the desk: Jevons on Logic, two volumes of Carlyle, Renan’s Life of Jesus . . . the books I helped him to pack on that last day at the school-house when he stood, remote and statuesque, with the yellow hair before his eyes.

  No. There is no climax. If there had been—if it might have been over as I stood there with the children’s laughter in my ears, looking desperately for some sign, some diminutive sign—looking till the last smouldering fragment of cloth stopped glowing on the heap of charred and blowing ashes . . . if a climax might have been possible . . .

  Jevons on Logic. What else but devilish logic is there in it? What else but hell’s own logic explains and justifies me as I sit here writing in my room? Would this have been written at all if it hadn’t been for logic?

  I shiver. The fire has burnt out—there is no glow on the polish of the piano. I stretch my cramped limbs. I stare straight ahead. I know what has to be done. I stretch out my hand to clear the papers from the razor. I open it. The delicate blade shines in the dim light from my standard lamp.

  I test the edge on the little hairs on the back of my hand. I must remember what I once read in a book—to hold the head forward, not backward, as would seem natural. Otherwise the jugular is not severed, and that would be fatal—for both of us . . .

  I permit myself a final jest.

  “We, the undersigned, do hereby swear that all contained in this document is true. We affirm that we were born, thirty-five years ago, the illegitimate son of a Scottish schoolmaster and a servant girl. We affirm that we are a thin young man with narrow temples—what is popularly called ‘a sensitive face.’ We affirm that we are no longer engaged to Margaret du Parc, violinist. We state that we were seen throwing ourself under an electric train, we state that on Monday of this week we underwent ordeal by fire and are, in consequence, purged and purified. We state and confirm these things and sign this document under our hand and red seal this 9th day of November at five minutes to twelve o’clock.

  John Aubrey Spenser, Pianist,

  John Aubrey Spenser, Pianist.”

  For the last time I pause. I stare straight ahead. I stare to my left. But not to my right. Never, never, never to my right.

  Because he is there! He is there—to my right. There was no escaping him—no release in the ordeal by fire. He is there, smiling his damnable, everlasting smile. It is he who has written this story! . . .

  I knew he would be there. I knew it when, on Tuesday, I returned from Wraysbury. I knew it as I stood with my hand stretched out to open the door of my flat. Faintly, from inside, I heard the sound of a piano. I could have wept. It was the music that Margaret and I, sentimentally, as one does, had associated always with ourselves—because, as I put it, it was such a perfect description of her.

  Debussy—The Girl With the Flaxen Hair . . .

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Keir Cross was born in Scotland in 1914. A prolific writer of scripts for BBC radio and television programs, Keir Cross also published a number of science fiction and fantasy novels for young readers, either under his own name or the pseudonym Stephen MacFarlane. The Other Passenger (1944), a collection of macabre tales for adults, remains his best known work, though his contributions to the horror genre also include several influential anthologies, Best Horror Stories (1956), Best Black Magic Stories (1960), and Best Horror Stories 2 (1965). He died in 1967.