‘You were no close friend of my nephew’s, Mr Smithers?’ she said presently.
‘No,’ I answered, welcoming the cue, ‘and yet, do you know, Miss Seaton, he is one of the very few of my old schoolfellows I have come across in the last few years, and I suppose as one gets older one begins to value old associations …’ My voice seemed to trail off into a vacuum. ‘I thought Miss Outram’, I hastily began again, ‘a particularly charming girl. I hope they are both quite well.’
Still the old face solemnly blinked at me in silence.
‘You must find it very lonely, Miss Seaton, with Arthur away?’
‘I was never lonely in my life,’ she said sourly. ‘I don’t look to flesh and blood for my company. When you’ve got to be my age, Mr Smithers (which God forbid), you’ll find life a very different affair from what you seem to think it is now. You won’t seek company then, I’ll be bound. It’s thrust on you.’ Her face edged round into the clear green light, and her eyes groped, as it were, over my vacant, disconcerted face. ‘I dare say, now,’ she said, composing her mouth, ‘I dare say my nephew told you a good many tarradiddles in his time. Oh, yes, a good many, eh? He was always a liar. What, now, did he say of me? Tell me, now.’ She leant forward as far as she could, trembling, with an ingratiating smile.
‘I think he is rather superstitious,’ I said coldly, ‘but, honestly, I have a very poor memory, Miss Seaton.’
‘Why?’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’
‘The engagement hasn’t been broken off, I hope.’
‘Well, between you and me,’ she said, shrinking up and with an immensely confidential grimace, ‘it has.’
‘I’m sure I’m very sorry to hear it. And where is Arthur?’
‘Eh?’
‘Where is Arthur?’
We faced each other mutely among the dead old bygone furniture. Past all my analysis was that large, flat, grey, cryptic countenance. And then, suddenly, our eyes for the first time really met. In some indescribable way out of that thick-lidded obscurity a far, small something stooped and looked out at me for a mere instant of time that seemed of almost intolerable protraction. Involuntarily I blinked and shook my head. She muttered something with great rapidity, but quite inarticulately; rose and hobbled to the door. I thought I heard, mingled in broken mutterings, something about tea.
‘Please, please, don’t trouble,’ I began, but could say no more, for the door was already shut between us. I stood and looked out on the long-neglected garden. I could just see the bright weedy greenness of Seaton’s tadpole pond. I wandered about the room. Dusk began to gather, the last birds in that dense shadowiness of trees had ceased to sing. And not a sound was to be heard in the house. I waited on and on, vainly speculating. I even attempted to ring the bell; but the wire was broken, and only jangled loosely at my efforts.
I hesitated, unwilling to call or to venture out, and yet more unwilling to linger on, waiting for a tea that promised to be an exceedingly comfortless supper. And as darkness drew down, a feeling of the utmost unease and disquietude came over me. All my talks with Seaton returned on me with a suddenly enriched meaning. I recalled again his face as we had stood hanging over the staircase, listening in the small hours to the inexplicable stirrings of the night. There were no candles in the room; every minute the autumnal darkness deepened. I cautiously opened the door and listened, and with some little dismay withdrew, for I was uncertain of my way out. I even tried the garden, but was confronted under a veritable thicket of foliage by a padlocked gate. It would be a little too ignominious to be caught scaling a friend’s garden fence!
Cautiously returning into the still and musty drawing-room, I took out my watch, and gave the incredible old woman ten minutes in which to reappear. And when that tedious ten minutes had ticked by I could scarcely distinguish its hands. I determined to wait no longer, drew open the door and, trusting to my sense of direction, groped my way through the corridor that I vaguely remembered led to the front of the house.
I mounted three or four stairs and, lifting a heavy curtain, found myself facing the starry fanlight of the porch. From here I glanced into the gloom of the dining-room. My fingers were on the latch of the outer door when I heard a faint stirring in the darkness above the hall. I looked up and became conscious of, rather than saw, the huddled old figure looking down on me.
There was an immense hushed pause. Then, ‘Arthur, Arthur,’ whispered an inexpressibly peevish rasping voice, ‘is that you? Is that you, Arthur?’
I can scarcely say why, but the question horribly startled me. No conceivable answer occurred to me. With head craned back, hand clenched on my umbrella, I continued to stare up into the gloom, in this fatuous confrontation.
‘Oh, oh,’ the voice croaked. ‘It is you, is it? That disgusting man! … Go away out. Go away out.’
At this dismissal, I wrenched open the door and, rudely slamming it behind me, ran out into the garden, under the gigantic old sycamore, and so out at the open gate.
I found myself half up the village street before I stopped running. The local butcher was sitting in his shop reading a piece of newspaper by the light of a small oil-lamp. I crossed the road and enquired the way to the station. And after he had with minute and needless care directed me, I asked casually if Mr Arthur Seaton still lived with his aunt at the big house just beyond the village. He poked his head in at the little parlour door.
‘Here’s a gentleman enquiring after young Mr Seaton, Millie,’ he said. ‘He’s dead, ain’t he?’
‘Why, yes, bless you,’ replied a cheerful voice from within. ‘Dead and buried these three months or more – young Mr Seaton. And just before he was to be married, don’t you remember, Bob?’
I saw a fair young woman’s face peer over the muslin of the little door at me.
‘Thank you,’ I replied, ‘then I go straight on?’
‘That’s it, sir; past the pond, bear up the hill a bit to the left, and then there’s the station lights before your eyes.’
We looked intelligently into each other’s faces in the beam of the smoky lamp. But not one of the many questions in my mind could I put into words.
And again I paused irresolutely a few paces further on. It was not, I fancy, merely a foolish apprehension of what the raw-boned butcher might ‘think’ that prevented my going back to see if I could find Seaton’s grave in the benighted churchyard. There was precious little use in pottering about in the muddy dark merely to discover where he was buried. And yet I felt a little uneasy. My rather horrible thought was that, so far as I was concerned – one of his extremely few friends – he had never been much better than ‘buried’ in my mind.
WINTER
All the other gifts appertinent to man, as the malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry …
Any event in this world – any human being for that matter – that seems to wear even the faintest cast or warp of strangeness, is apt to leave a disproportionately sharp impression on one’s senses. So at least it appears to me. The experience lives on secretly in the memory, and you can never tell what trivial reminder may not at some pregnant moment bring it back – bring it back as fresh and living and green as ever. That, at any rate, is my experience.
Life’s mere ordinary day-by-day – its thoughts, talk, doings – wither and die away out of the mind like leaves from a tree. Year after year a similar crop recurs: and that goes too. It is mere debris; it perishes. But these other anomalies survive, even through the cold of age – forsaken nests, everlasting clumps of mistletoe.
Not that they either are necessarily of any use. For all we know they may be no less alien and parasitic than those flat and spotted fungi that rise in a night on time-soiled birch trees. But such is their power to haunt us. Why else, indeed, should the recollection of that few moments’ confrontation with one who, I suppose, must have been some sort of a ‘fellow-creature’ remain so sharp and vivid?
There was nothing much unusual in the circumstances. I must have s
o met, faced, passed by thousands of human beings: many of them in almost as unfrequented places. Without effort I can recall not one. But this one! At the first unexpected premonitory gloom of winter; at sight of any desolate stretch of snow; at sound at dusk of the pebble-like tattling of a robin; at call, too, of a certain kind of dream I have – any such reminder instantly catches me up, transports me back. The old peculiar disquietude possesses me. I am once more an unhappy refugee. It is a distasteful experience.
But such things are difficult to describe – to share. Date, year are, at any rate, of no account; if only for the reason that what impresses us most in life is independent of time. One can in memory indeed live over again events in one’s life even twenty years or more gone by, with the same fever of shame, anxiety, unrest. Mere time is nothing.
Nor is now the actual motive of my journey of any consequence. At the moment I was in no particular trouble. No burden lay on my mind – nothing, I mean, heavier than that of being the kind of self one is – a fret common enough in these late days. And though my immediate surroundings were unfamiliar, they were not unusual or unwelcome, since, like others who would not profess to be morbid, I can never pass unvisited either a church of any age or its yard.
Even if I have but a few minutes to spare I cannot resist hastening in to ponder awhile on its old glass and brasses, its stones, shrines, and monuments. Sir Tompkins This, Lord Mount Everest That – one reads with a curious amusement the ingenuous bygones of their blood and state. I have sometimes laughed out. And queer the echo sounds in a barrel roof. And perhaps an old skimpy verger looks at you, round a pillar. Like a bat.
In sober fact this human pomposity of ours shows a little more amiably against any protracted background of time – even a mere two centuries of it. There is an almost saturnine vanity in the sepulchral – ‘scutcheons, pedigrees, polished alabaster cherubim and what not. You see it there – like a scarcely legible scribbling on the wall. – well, on this occasion it was not any such sacred interior I was exploring, but a mere half-acre of gravestones huddling under their tower, in the bare glare of a winter’s day.
It was an afternoon in January. For hours I had been trudging against a bitter winter wind awhirl with snow. Fatigue had set in – that leaden fatigue when the body seems to have shrunken; while yet the bones keep up a kind of galvanic action like the limbs of a machine. Thought itself – that capricious deposit – had ceased for the time being. I was like the half-dried mummy of a man, pressing on with bent head along an all but obliterated track.
Then, as if at a signal, I looked up; to find that the snow had ceased to fall: that only a few last, and as if forgotten, flakes were still floating earthwards to their rest in the pallid light of the declining sun.
With this breaking of the clouds a profounder silence had fallen upon the dome-shaped summit of the hill on which I stood. And at its point of vantage I came to a standstill awhile, surveying beneath me under the blueing vacancy of the sky, amidst the white-sheeted fields, a squat church tower, its gargoyles stooping open-mouthed – scarcely less open-mouthed than the frosted bells within. The low mounded wall that encircled the place was but just perceptible, humped with its snow. Its yews stood like gigantic umbrellas clotted with swansdown; its cypresses like torches, fringed, crested, and tufted with ash.
No sound broke the frozen hush as I entered the lych-gate; not a figure of man or beast moved across that far-stretching savanna of new-fallen snow. You could have detected the passage of a fly. Dazzling light and gemclear coloured shadow played in hollow and ripple. I was treading a virgin wilderness, but one long since settled and densely colonized.
In surroundings like these – in any vast vacant quiet – the senses play uncommonly queer tricks with their possessor. The very air, cold and ethereal and soon to be darkened, seemed to be astir with sounds and shapes on the edge of complete revelation. Such are our fancies. A curious insecure felicity took possession of me. Yet on the face of it the welcome of a winter churchyard is cold enough; and the fare scanty!
The graves were old: many of them recorded only with what nefarious pertinacity time labours and the rain gnaws. Others befrosted growths had now patterned over, and their tale was done. But for the rest – some had texts: ‘I am a Worm, and no Man’; ‘In Rama was there a Voice heard: Lamentation and Weeping’; ‘He knoweth the Way that I take’. And a few still bore their bits of doggerel:
Stranger, a light I pray!
Not that I pine for day:
Only one beam of light —
To show me Night!
That struck me as a naïve appeal to a visitor not as yet in search of a roof ‘for when the slow dark hours begin’, and almost blinded for the time being by the dazzle of the sunlight striking down on these abodes around him!
I smiled to myself and went on. Dusk, as a matter of fact, is my mind’s natural illumination. How many of us, I wonder, ‘think’ in anything worthy of being called a noonday of consciousness? Not many: it’s all in a mirk, without arrangement or prescience. And as for dreaming – well, here were sleepers enough. I loafed on – cold and vacant.
A few paces further I came to a stand again, before a large oval stone, encircled with a blunt loop of marble myrtle leaves embellishing the words:
He shall give His angels charge over thee,
To keep thee in all thy ways.
This stone was clasped by two grotesque marble hands, as if he who held it knelt even now behind it in hiding. Facing north, its lower surface was thickly swathed with snow. I scraped it off with my hands:
I was afraid,
Death stilled my fears:
In sorrow I went,
Death dried my tears:
Solitary too,
Death came. And I
Shall no more want
For company.
So, so: the cold alone was nipping raw, and I confess its neighbour’s philosophy pleased me better: i.e., it’s better to be anything animate than a dead lion; even though that lion be a Corporal Pym:
This quiet mound beneath
Lies Corporal Pym.
He had no fear of death;
Nor Death of him.
Or even if the anything animate be nothing better than a Logge:
Here lies Thomas Logge – a Rascally Dogge;
A poor useless creature – by choice as by nature;
Who never served God – for kindness or Rod;
Who, for pleasure or penny, – never did any
Work in his life – but to marry a Wife,
And live aye in strife:
And all this he says – at the end of his days
Lest some fine canting pen
Should be at him again.
Canting pens had had small opportunity in this hillside acre: and the gentry of the surrounding parts, like those of most parts, had preferred to lie inside under cover – where no doubt Mr Jacob Todd had prepared for many of them a far faster and less starry lodging:
Mr Todd’s successor, it seemed, had entrusted him with a little protégée, who for a few years – not quite nine – had been known as Alice Cass:
My mother bore me:
My father rejoiced in me:
The good priest blest me:
All people loved me:
But Death coveted me:
And free’d this body
Of its youthful soul.
For youthful company she had another Alice. A much smaller parcel of bones this – though in sheer date upwards of eighty years her senior:
Here lyeth our infant, Alice Rodd;
She were so small,
Scarce aught at all,
But a mere breath of Sweetness sent from God.
Sore we did weepe; our heartes on sorrow set.
Till on our knees
God sent us ease:
And now we weepe no more than we forget.
Tudor roses had been carved around the edge of her stone – vigorously and delicately too, for a rustic mason. Every petal hel
d its frozen store. I wandered on, restlessly enough, now that my journey was almost at an end, stooping to read at random; here an old broken wooden cross leaning crookedly over its one legible word ‘Beloved’; here the great, flat, seventeenth-century vault of Abraham Devoyage, ‘who was of France, and now, please God, is of Paradise’; and not far distant from him some Spanish exile, though what had brought such a wayfarer to these outlandish parts, heaven alone could tell:
Laid in this English ground
A Spaniard slumbers sound.
Well might the tender weep
To think how he doth sleep —
Strangers on either hand —
So far from his own land.
O! when the last Trump blow,
May Christ ordain that so
This friendless one arise
Under his native skies.
How bleak to wake, how dread a doom,
To cry his sins so far from home!
And then Ann Poverty’s stone a pace or two beyond him:
Stranger, here lies
Ann Poverty;
Such was her name
And such was she.
May Jesu pity
Poverty.
A meagre memorial, and a rather shrill appeal somehow in that vacancy. Indeed I must confess that this snowy waste, these magpie stones, the zebra-like effect of the thin snow-stripings on the dark tower beneath a leaden winter sky suggested an influence curiously pagan in effect. Church sentiments were far more alien in this scene of nature than beneath a roof. And after all, Nature herself instils into us mortals, I suppose, little but endurance, patience, resignation; despair – or fear. That she can be entrancing proves nothing.
On the contrary, the rarer kinds of natural loveliness – enormous forests of flowering chestnuts, their league-long broken chasms sonorous with cataracts and foaming with wild flowers; precipitous green steeps – quartz, samphire, cormorant – plunging a thousand fathoms into dark gulfs of emerald ocean – such memories hint far rather at the inhuman divinities. This place, too, was scarcely one that happy souls would choose to haunt. And yet, here was I … in a Christian burial ground.
Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales Page 11