On reflection Jimmie decided that he had cut almost a gallant figure as he had retorted gaily – yet with extraordinary sobriety: ‘You shall have a whole dishful before I’m done, Mrs Thripps – with a big scoop in it for the gravy. But on my oath, I assure you there’s absolutely nothing or nobody in this old barn of a museum except you and me. Nobody, unless, of course, you will understand, one happens to pull the bell. And that we’re not likely to do in broad daylight. Are we, Mrs Thripps?’ Upon which he had hastily caught up his aunt’s handbag and had emerged into a daylight a good deal bleaker if not broader than he could gratefully stomach.
For a while Jimmie had let well alone. Indeed, if it had been a mere matter of choice, he would far rather have engaged in a friendly and jocular conversation of this description with his old charwoman than in the endless monologues in which he found himself submerged on other occasions. One later afternoon, for instance, at half-past three by his watch, sitting there by a small fire in the large muffled drawing room, he at length came definitely to the conclusion that some kind of finality should be reached in his relations with the Night Staff in his Uncle Timothy’s.
It was pretty certain that his visit would soon be drawing to a close. Staying out at night until he was almost too exhausted to climb down to the pavement from his hansom – the first April silver of dawn wanning the stark and empty chimney-pots – had proved a dull and tedious alternative. The mere spectator of gaiety, he concluded, as he stared at the immense picture of the Colosseum on his Uncle Timothy’s wall, may have as boring a time as must the slaves who cleaned out the cages of the lions that ate the Christians. And snapping out insults at former old cronies who couldn’t help their faces being as tiresome as a whitewashed pigsty had soon grown wearisome.
Jimmie, of course, was accustomed to taking no interest in things which did not interest him; but quite respectable people could manage that equally well. What fretted him almost beyond endurance was an increasing inablity to keep his attention fixed on what was really there, what at least all such respectable people, one might suppose, would unanimously agree was there.
A moment’s fixture of the eyes – and he would find himself steadily, steadily listening, now in a creeping dread that somewhere, down below, there was a good deal that needed an almost constant attention, and now in sudden alarm that, after all, there was absolutely nothing. Again and again in recollection he had hung over the unlighted staircase listening in an extremity of foreboding for the outbreak of a rabbit-like childish squeal of terror which would have proved – well, what would it have proved? My God, what a world! you can prove nothing.
The fact that he was all but certain that any such intolerably helpless squeal never had wailed up to him out of its pit of blackness could be only a partial consolation. He hadn’t meant to be a beast. It was only his facetious little way. And you would have to be something pretty piggish in pigs to betray a child – however insubstantial – into the nausea and vertigo he had experienced in the presence of that unspeakable abortion. The whole thing had become a fatuous obsession. If, it appeared, you only remained solitary and secluded enough, and let your mind wander on in its own sweet way, the problem was almost bound to become, if not your one and only, at least your chief concern. Unless you were preternaturally busy and preoccupied, you simply couldn’t live on and on in a haunted house without being occasionally reminded of its ghosts.
To dismiss the matter as pure illusion – the spectral picturing of life’s fitful fever – might be all very well; that is if you had the blood of a fish. But who on earth had ever found the world the pleasanter and sweeter a place to bid good-bye to simply because it was obviously ‘substantial’, whatever that might mean? Simply because it did nothing you wanted it to do unless you paid for it pretty handsomely; or unless you accepted what it proffered with as open a hospitality as Jimmie had bestowed on his pilgrims of the night. Not that he much wanted – however pressing the invitation – to wander off out of his body into a better world, or, for that matter, into a worse.
Upstairs under the roof years ago Jimmie as a small boy would rather have died of terror than meddle with the cord above his bed-rail – simply because he knew that Soames Senior was at the other end of it. He had hated Soames; he had merely feared the nothings of his night hours. But, suppose Soames had been a different kind of butler. There must be almost as many kinds as there are human beings. Suppose his Uncle Timothy and Aunt Charlotte had chosen theirs a little less idiosyncratically; what then?
Well, anyhow, in a sense, he was not sorry life had been a little exciting these last few weeks. How odd that what all but jellied your soul in your body at night or in a dream, might merely amuse you like a shilling shocker in the safety of day. The safety of day – at the very cadence of the words in his mind, as he sat there in his aunt’s ‘salon’, his limbs huddled over Mrs Thripps’s fire, Jimmie’s eyes had fixed themselves again. Again he was listening. Was it that, if you saw ‘in your mind’ any distant room or place, that place must actually at the moment contain you – some self, some ‘astral body’? If so, wouldn’t, of course, you bear yourself moving about in it?
There was a slight whining wind in the street outside the rainy window that afternoon, and once more the bright idea crossed Jimmie’s mind that he should steal upstairs before it was dark, mount up onto the Arabian bed and just cut the bell-pull – once for all. But would that necessarily dismiss the Staff? Necessarily? His eye wandered to the discreet S of yet another bell-pull – that which graced the wall beneath the expansive white marble chimney-piece.
He hesitated. There was no doubt his mind was now hopelessly jaundiced against all bell-ropes – whether they failed to summon one to church or persisted in summoning one to a six-foot hole in a cemetery. His Uncle Timothy lay in a mausoleum. On the other hand he was properly convinced that a gentleman is as a gentleman does, and that it was really ‘up to you’ to treat all bell-answerers with decent courtesy. No matter who, when, where. A universal rule like that is a sheer godsend. If they didn’t answer, well, you couldn’t help yourself. Or rather, you would have to.
This shivering was merely physical. When a fellow is so thin that he can almost hear his ribs grind one against the other when he stoops to pick up a poker, such symptoms must be expected. There was still an hour or two of daylight – even though clouds admitted only a greyish light upon the world, and his Uncle Timothy’s house was by nature friendly to gloom. That house at this moment seemed to hang domed upon his shoulders like an immense imponderable shell. The flames in the chimney whispered, fluttered, hovered, like fitfully-playing, once-happy birds.
Supposing if, even against his better judgment, he leaned forward now in his chair and – what was infinitely more conventional and in a sense more proper than summoning unforeseen entities to one’s bedside – supposing he gave just one discreet little tug at that small porcelain knob; what would he ask for? He need ask nothing. He could act. Yes, if he could be perfectly sure that some monstrous porcine caco-demon akin to the shapes of childish nightmare would come hoofing up out of the deeps at his behest – well, he would chance it. He would have it out with the brute. It was still day.
It was still day. But, maybe, the ear of pleasanter visitors might catch the muffled tinkle? In the young man’s mind there was now no vestige of jocularity. In an instant’s lightness of heart he had once thought of purchasing from the stiff-aproned old assistant at his Aunt Charlotte’s family grocer’s, a thumping big box of chocolates. Why, just that one small bowl in famille rose up there could be bartered for the prettiest little necklet of seed pearls. She had done her best – with her skimpy shoulders, skimpier pigtail and soda-reddened hands. Pigtail! But no; you might pull real bells: to pull dubiously genuine pigtails seemed now a feeble jest. The old Jimmie of that kind of facetiousness was a thing of the past.
Apart from pigs and tweeny-maids, what other peculiar emanations might in the future respond to his summonings, Jimmie’s exhausted ima
gination could only faintly prefigure. For a few minutes a modern St Anthony sat there in solitude in the vast half-blinded London drawing-room; while shapes and images and apparitions of memory and fantasy sprang into thin being and passed away in his mind. No, no.
‘Do to the Book; quench the candles;
Ring the bell. Amen, Amen.’
– he was done with all that. Maledictions and anathemas; they only tangled the hank.
So when at last – his meagre stooping body mutely played on by the flamelight – he jerked round his dark narrow head to glance at the distant mirror, it must have been on the mere after-image, so to speak, of the once quite substantial-looking tweeny-maid that his exhausted eyes thirstily fixed themselves.
She was there – over there, where Soames Junior had more than once taken up his obsequious station. She was smiling – if the dusk of the room could be trusted that far; and not through, but really at Jimmie. She was fairer than ever, fairer than the flaxenest of nymphs on his uncle’s ceiling, fairer than the saffronest of young ladies in the respectablest of family grocers, fairer even than —
Jimmie hung on this simple vision as did Dives on the spectacle of Lazarus in bliss. At once, of course, after his very first sigh of relief and welcome, he had turned back on his lips a glib little speech suggesting forgiveness – Let auld acquaintance be forgot; that kind of thing. He was too tired even to be clever now. And the oddest of convictions had at once come into his mind – seemed almost to fill his body even – that she was waiting for something else. Yes, she was smiling as if in hope. She was waiting to be told to go. Jimmie was no father. He didn’t want to be considerate to the raw little creature, to cling to her company for but a few minutes longer, with a view to returns in kind. No, nothing of all that. ‘Oh, my God; my God!’ a voice groaned within him, but not at any unprecedented jag or stab of pain.
The child was still waiting. Quite quietly there – as if a shadow, as if a secret and obscure ray of light. And it seemed to Jimmie that in its patient face hung veil upon veil of uncountable faces of the past – in paint, stone, actuality, dream – that he had glanced at or brooded on in the enormous history of his life. That he may have coveted, too. And as well as his rebellious features could and would, he smiled back at her.
‘I understand, my dear,’ he drew back his dry lips to explain. ‘Perfectly. And it was courtesy itself of you to look in when I didn’t ring. I didn’t. I absolutely put my tongue out at the grinning old knob … But no more of that. One mustn’t talk for talking’s sake. Else, why all those old Trappists … though none of ’em such a bag-of-bones as me, I bet. But without jesting, you know …’
Once more a distant voice within spoke in Jimmie’s ear. ‘It’s important’; it said. ‘You really must hold your tongue – until, well, it holds itself.’ But Jimmie’s face continued to smile.
And then suddenly, every vestige of amusement abandoned it. He stared baldly, almost emptily at the faint inmate of his solitude. ‘All that I have to say,’ he muttered, ‘is just this: – I have Mrs Thripps. I haven’t absolutely cut the wire. I wish to be alone. But if I ring, I’m not asking, do you see? In time I may be able to know what I want. But what is important now is that no more than that accursed Pig were your primroses ‘real’, my dear. You see things must be real. And now, I suppose,’ he had begun shivering again, ‘you must go to – you must go. But listen! listen! We part friends!’
The coals in the grate, with a scarcely audible shuffling, recomposed themselves to their consuming.
When there hasn’t been anything there, nothing can be said to have vanished from the place where it has not been. Still, Jimmie had felt infinitely colder and immeasurably lonelier when his mouth had thus fallen to silence; and he was so empty and completely exhausted that his one apprehension had been lest he should be unable to ascend the staircase to get to bed. There was no doubt of it: his ultimatum had been instantly effective. The whole house was now preternaturally empty. It was needless even to listen to prove that. So absolute was its pervasive quietude that when at last he gathered his bones together in the effort to rise, to judge from the withering colour of the cinders and ashes in the fireplace, he must have been for some hours asleep; and daybreak must be near.
He managed the feat at last, gathered up the tartan travelling shawl that had tented in his scarecrow knees, and lit the only candle in its crystal stick in his Aunt Charlotte’s drawing-room. And it was an almost quixotically peaceful though forebodeful Jimmie who, step by step, the fountain of his thoughts completely stilled, his night-mind as clear and sparkling as a cavern bedangled with stalagmites and stalactites, climbed laboriously on and up, from wide shallow marble stair to stair.
He paused in the corridor above. But the nymphs within – Muses, Graces, Fates, what not – piped in vain their mute decoy. His Uncle Timothy’s Arabian bed in vain summoned him to its downy embraces. At the wide-open door he brandished his guttering candle in a last smiling gesture of farewell: and held on.
That is why when, next morning, out of a sounding slanting shower of rain Mrs Thripps admitted herself into the house at the area door, she found the young man, still in his clothes, lying very fast asleep indeed on the trucklebed in the attic. His hands were not only crossed but convulsively clenched in that position on his breast. And it appeared from certain distressing indications that he must have experienced a severe struggle to refrain from a wild blind tug at the looped-up length of knotted whip-cord over his head.
As a matter of fact it did not occur to the littered old charwoman’s mind to speculate whether or not Jimmie had actually made such a last attempt. Or whether he had been content merely to wait on a Soames who might, perhaps, like all good servants, come when he was wanted rather than when he was called. All her own small knowledge of Soameses, though not without comfort, had been acquired at second-hand.
Nor did Mrs Thripps waste time in surmising how Jimmie could ever have persuaded himself to loop up the cord like that out of his reach, unless he had first become abysmally ill-content with his small, primitive, and belated knowledge of campanology.
She merely looked at what was left of him; her old face almost comically transfixed in its appearance of pity, horror, astonishment, and curiosity.
SEATON'S AUNT
I had heard rumours of Seaton’s aunt long before I actually encountered her. Seaton, in the hush of confidence, or at any little show of toleration on our part, would remark, ‘My aunt’, or ‘My old aunt, you know’, as if his relative might be a kind of cement to an entente cordiale.
He had an unusual quantity of pocket-money; or, at any rate, it was bestowed on him in unusually large amounts; and he spent it freely, though none of us would have described him as an ‘awfully generous chap’. ‘Hullo, Seaton,’ we would say, ‘the old Begum?’ At the beginning of term, too, he used to bring back surprising and exotic dainties in a box with a trick padlock that accompanied him from his first appearance at Gummidge’s in a billycock hat to the rather abrupt conclusion of his schooldays.
From a boy’s point of view he looked distastefully foreign with his yellowish skin, slow chocolate-coloured eyes, and lean weak figure. Merely for his looks he was treated by most of us true-blue Englishmen with condescension, hostility, or contempt. We used to call him ‘Pongo’, but without any much better excuse for the nickname than his skin. He was, that is, in one sense of the term what he assuredly was not in the other sense, a sport.
Seaton and I, as I may say, were never in any sense intimate at school; our orbits only intersected in class. I kept deliberately aloof from him. I felt vaguely he was a sneak, and remained quite unmollified by advances on his side, which, in a boy’s barbarous fashion, unless it suited me to be magnanimous, I haughtily ignored.
We were both of us quick-footed, and at Prisoner’s Base used occasionally to hide together. And so I best remember Seaton – his narrow watchful face in the dusk of a summer evening; his peculiar crouch, and his inarticulate whisperings a
nd mumblings. Otherwise he played all games slackly and limply; used to stand and feed at his locker with a crony or two until his ‘tuck’ gave out; or waste his money on some outlandish fancy or other. He bought, for instance, a silver bangle, which he wore above his left elbow, until some of the fellows showed their masterly contempt of the practice by dropping it nearly red-hot down his neck.
It needed, therefore, a rather peculiar taste, and a rather rare kind of schoolboy courage and indifference to criticism, to be much associated with him. And I had neither the taste nor, probably, the courage. None the less, he did make advances, and on one memorable occasion went to the length of bestowing on me a whole pot of some outlandish mulberry-coloured jelly that had been duplicated in his term’s supplies. In the exuberance of my gratitude I promised to spend the next half-term holiday with him at his aunt’s house.
I had clean forgotten my promise when, two or three days before the holiday, he came up and triumphantly reminded me of it.
‘Well, to tell you the honest truth, Seaton, old chap —’ I began graciously: but he cut me short.
‘My aunt expects you,’ he said; ‘she is very glad you are coming. She’s sure to be quite decent to you, Withers.’
I looked at him in sheer astonishment; the emphasis was so uncalled for. It seemed to suggest an aunt not hitherto hinted at, and a friendly feeling on Seaton’s side that was far more disconcerting than welcome.
Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales Page 7