But then, of course, one’s condition of spirit and body must be taken into account. I was exhausted, and my mind like a vacant house with the door open – so vacant by now that I found I had read over and over the first two or three lines of Asrafel (or was it Israfel?) Holt’s blackened inscription without understanding a single word; and then, suddenly, two dark eyes in a long cadaverous face pierced out at me as if from the very fabric of his stone:
Here is buried a Miser:
Had he been wiser,
He would not have gone bare
Where Heaven’s garmented are.
He’d have spent him a penny
To buy a Wax Taper;
And of Water a sprinkle
To quiet a poor Sleeper.
He’d have cried on his soul,
‘O my Soul, moth & rust! —
What treasure shall profit thee
When thou art dust?’
‘Mene, Tekel, Upharsin!’
God grant, in those Scales,
His Mercy avail us
When all Earth’s else fails!
‘… Departed this life May the First 1700’. Two long centuries dead, seraphic Israfel! Was time nothing to him either?
‘Now withered is the Garland on the …’ the fragment of old rhyme chased its tail awhile in the back of my mind, and then was gone.
And I must be going. Winter twilight is brief. Frost was already glittering along the crisping surface of the snow. A crescent moon showed silvery in the sun’s last red. I made her a distant obeisance. But the rather dismal sound of the money I rattled in my pocket served only to scare the day’s last robin off. She – she paid me no heed.
Here was the same old unanswerable question confronting the traveller. ‘I have no Tongue,’ cried one from his corner, ‘and Ye no Ears.’ And this, even though nearby lay Isaac Meek, who in certain features seems easily to have made up for these deficiencies:
Hook-nosed was I; loose-lipped. Greed fixed its gaze
In my young eyes ere they knew brass from gold.
Doomed to the blazing market-place my days,
A sweating chafferer of the bought, and sold.
Frowned on and spat at, flattered and decried,
One only thing man asked of me – my price.
I lived, detested; and forsaken, died,
Scorned by the Virtuous and the jest of Vice.
And now behold, you Christians, my true worth!
Step close: I have inherited the Earth.
I turned to go – wearied a little even of the unwearying. Epitaphs in any case are only ‘marginal’ reading. There is rarely anything unusual or original in such sentiments as theirs. Up to that moment (apart from the increasing cold) this episode – this experience – had been merely that of a visitor ordinarily curious, vulgarly intrusive, perhaps, and one accustomed to potter about among the antiquated and forgotten.
No: what followed came without premonition or warning. I had been stooping, for the last time, my body now dwarfed by the proximity of the dark stone tower. I had been reading all that there was to be read about yet another forgotten stranger; and so rapidly had the now north-east wind curdled the air that I had been compelled to scrape off the rime from the lettering with numb fingertips. I had stooped (I say) to read:
O passer-by, beware!
Is the day fair? —
Yet unto evening shall the day spin on
And soon thy sun be gone;
Then darkness come,
And this, a narrow home.
Not that I bid thee fear:
Only, when thou at last lie here,
Bethink thee, there shall surely be
Thy Self for company.
And with its last word a peculiar heat coursed through my body. Consciousness seemed suddenly to concentrate itself (like the tentacles of an anemone closing over a morsel of strange food), and I realized that I was no longer alone. But – and of this I am certain – there was no symptom of positive fear in the experience. Intense awareness, a peculiar physical, ominous absorption, possibly foreboding; but not actual fear.
I say this because what impressed me most in the figure that I now saw standing amid that sheet of whiteness – three or four grave-mounds distant on these sparse northern skirts of the churchyard – what struck me instantly was the conviction that to him I myself was truly such an object. Not exactly of fear; but of unconcealed horror. It is not, perhaps, a pleasing thing to have to record. My appearance there – dark clothes, dark hair, wearied eyes, ageing face, a skin maybe somewhat cadaverous at that moment with fasting and the cold – all this (just what my body and self looked like, I mean) cannot have been much more repellent than that of scores and scores of men of my class and means and kind.
I was merely, that is, like one of the ‘Elder Ladies or Children’ who were bidden (by Mr Nash’s Rules of the Pump Room in Bath in 1709) be contented ‘with a second bench … as being past, or not come to, Perfection’.
None the less, there was no doubt of it. The fixed open gaze answering mine suggested that of a child confronted with a fascinating but repulsive reptile. Yet so strangely and arrestingly beautiful was that face, beautiful with the strangeness I mean of the dreamlike, with its almost colourless eyes and honey-coloured skin, that unless the experience of it had been thus sharply impressed, no human being could have noticed the emotion depicted upon its features.
There was not the faintest faltering in the steady eyes – fixed, too, as if this crystal graveyard air were a dense medium for a sight unused to it. And so intent on them was I myself that, though I noticed the slight trembling of the hand that held what (on reflection) appeared to resemble the forked twig which ‘diviners’ of water use in their mysteries, I can give no account of this stranger’s dress except that it was richly yet dimly coloured.
As I say, my own dark shape was now standing under the frowning stonework of the tower. With an effort one of its gargoyles could have spilt heaven’s dews upon my head, had not those dews been frozen. And the voice that fell on my ear – as if from within rather than from without – echoed cold and solemnly against its parti-coloured stone:
‘Which is the way?’
Realizing more sharply with every tardy moment that this being, in human likeness, was not of my kind, nor of my reality; standing there in the cold and snow, winter nightfall now beginning to lour above the sterile landscape; I could merely shake a shivering head.
‘Which is yours?’ sang the tranquil and high yet gentle voice.
‘There!’ I cried, pointing with my finger to the pent-roofed gate which led out on to the human road. The astonishment and dread in the strange face seemed to deepen as I looked.
‘But I would gladly …’ I began, turning an instant towards the gloomy snow clouds that were again gathering in the north – ‘I would gladly …’ But the sentence remained unfinished, for when I once more brought my eyes back to this confronter, he was gone.
I agree I was very tired; and never have I seen a more sepulchral twilight than that which now overspread this desolate descent of hill. Yet, strange though it may appear, I knew then and know now that this confrontation was no illusion of the senses. There are hours in life, I suppose, when we are weaker than we know; when a kind of stagnancy spreads over the mind and heart that is merely a masking of what is gathering beneath the surface. Whether or not, as I stood looking back for an instant before pushing on through the old weathered lych-gate, an emotion of intense remorse, misery, terror – I know not – swept over me. My eyes seemed to lose for that moment their power to see aright. The whole scene was distorted, awry.
THE GREEN ROOM
Only Mr Elliott’s choicer customers were in his own due season let into his little secret – namely, that at the far end of his shop – beyond, that is, the little table on which he kept his account books, his penny bottle of ink, and his rusty pen, there was an annexe. He first allowed his victims to ripen; and preferred even to see their names installed in the
pages of his fat, dumpy ledger before he decided that they were really worthy of this little privilege.
Alan, at any rate, though a young man of ample leisure and moderate means, had been browsing and pottering about on and off in the shop for weeks before he even so much as suspected there was a hidden door. He must, in his innocence, have spent pounds and pounds on volumes selected from the vulgar shelves before his own initiation.
This was on a morning in March. Mr Elliott was tying up a parcel for him. Having no scissors handy he was burning off the ends of the string with a lighted match. And as if its small flame had snapped at the same moment both the string and the last strands of formality between them, he glanced up almost roguishly at the young man through his large round spectacles with the remark: ‘P’r’aps, sir, you would like to take a look at the books in the parlour?’ And a birdlike jerk of his round bald head indicated where the parlour was to be found.
Alan had merely looked at him for a moment or two out of his blue eyes with his usual pensive vacancy. ‘I didn’t know there was another room,’ he said at last. ‘But then, I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me to think there might be. I fancied these books were all the books you had.’ He glanced over the dingy hugger-mugger of second-hand literature that filled the shelves and littered the floor – a mass that would have twenty-fold justified the satiety of a Solomon.
‘Oh, dear me, no, sir!’ said Mr Elliott, with the pleasantest confidentiality. ‘All this is chiefly riff-raff. But I don’t mention it except to those gentlemen who are old clients, in a manner of speaking. What’s in there is all in the printed catalogue and I can always get what’s asked for. Apart from that, there’s some who – well, at any rate, I don’t, sir. But if by any chance you should care to take a look round at any time, you would, I’m sure, be very welcome. This is an oldish house, as you may have noticed, sir, and out there is the oldest parts of it. We call it the parlour – Mrs Elliott and me; we got it from the parties that were here before we came. Take a look now, sir, if you please; it’s a nice little place.’
Mr Elliott drew aside. Books – and particularly old books – tend to be dusty company. This may account for the fact that few antiquarian booksellers are of Falstaffian proportions. They are more usually lean, ruminative, dryish spectators of life. The gnawing of the worm in the tome is among the more melancholy of nature’s lullabies; and the fluctuations in price of ‘firsts’ and of ‘mint states’ must incline any temperament, if not towards cynicism, at least towards the philosophical. Herodotus tells of a race of pygmies whose only diet was the odour of roses; and though morocco leather is sweeter than roses, it is even less fattening.
Mr Elliott, however, flourished on it. He was a rotund little man with a silver watch-chain from which a gold locket dangled, and he had uncommonly small feet. He might have been a ballet-master. ‘You make your way up those four stairs, sir,’ he went on, as he ushered his customer beneath the curtain, ‘turn left down the passage, and the door’s on the right. It’s quiet in there, but that’s no harm done. No hurry, sir.’
So Alan proceeded on his way. The drugget on the passage floor showed little trace of wear. The low panelled walls had been whitewashed. He came at last to the flowered china handle of the door beyond the turn of the passage, then stood for a moment lost in surprise. But it was the trim cobbled garden beyond the square window on his right that took his glance rather than the room itself. Yellow crocuses, laden with saffron pollen, stood wide agape in the black mould, and the greening buds of a bush of lilac were tapping softly against the glass. And above was a sky of the gentlest silken blue; wonderfully still.
He turned and looked about him. The paint on wainscot and cornice must once have been of a bright apple green. It had faded now. A gate-leg table was in the far corner beyond the small-paned window; and on his left, with three shallow steps up to it, was another door. And the shelves were lined from floor to ceiling with the literary treasures which Mr Elliott kept solely for his elect. So quiet was the room that even the flitting of a clothes-moth might be audible, though the brightness of noonday now filled it to the brim. For the three poplars beyond the lilac bush were still almost as bare as the frosts of winter had made them.
In spite of the flooding March light, in spite of this demure sprightliness after the gloom and disorder of the shop he had left behind him, Alan – as in his languid fashion he turned his head from side to side – became conscious first and foremost of the age of Mr Elliott’s pretty parlour. The paint was only a sort of ‘Let’s pretend’. The space between its walls seemed, indeed, to be as much a reservoir of time as of light. The panelled ceiling, for example, was cracked and slightly discoloured; so were the green shutter-cases to the windows; while the small and beautiful chimneypiece – its carved marble lintel depicting a Cupid with pan pipes dancing before a smiling goddess under a weeping willow – enshrined a grate that at this moment contained nothing, not even the ashes of a burnt-out fire. Its bars were rusty, and there were signs of damp in the moulded plaster above it.
A gentle breeze was now brisking the tops of the poplar trees, but no murmur of it reached Alan where he stood. With his parcel tucked under his arm, he edged round softly from shelf to shelf, and even after so cursory an examination as this – and it was one of Mr Elliott’s principles to mark all his books in plain figures – he realized that his means were much too moderate for his appetite. He came to a standstill, a little at a loss. What was he to do next? He stifled a yawn. Then, abstracting a charming copy of Hesperides, by that ‘Human and divine’ poet, Robert Herrick, he seated himself idly on the edge of the table and began to turn over its leaves. They soon became vocal:
Aske me, why I do not sing
To the tension of the string.
As I did, not long ago,
When my numbers full did flow?
Griefe (ay me!) hath struck my Lute,
And my tongue – at one time – mute.
His eye strayed on, and he read slowly – muttering the words to himself as he did so – ‘The departure of the good Daemon’:
What can I do in Poetry,
Now the good Spirit’s gone from me?
Why nothing now, but lonely sit,
And over-read what have I writ.
Alan’s indolence was even more extreme; he was at this moment merely over-reading what he had read – and what he had read again and again and again. For the eye may be obedient while the master of the mind sits distrait and aloof. His wits had gone wool-gathering. He paused, then made yet another attempt to fix his attention on the sense of this simple quatrain. But in vain. For in a moment or two his light, clear eyes had once more withdrawn themselves from the printed page and were once more, but now more intently, exploring the small green room in which he sat.
And as he did so – though nothing of the bright external scene around him showed any change – out of some day-dream, it seemed, of which until then he had been unaware, there had appeared to him from the world of fantasy the image of a face.
No known or remembered face – a phantom face, as alien and inscrutable as are the apparitions that occasionally visit the mind in sleep. This in itself was not a very unusual experience. Alan was a young man of an imaginative temperament, and possessed that inward eye which is often, though not unfailingly, the bliss of solitude. And yet there was a difference. This homeless image was at once so real in effect, so clear, and yet so unexpected. Even the faint shadowy colours of the features were discernible – the eyes dark and profound, the hair drawn back over the rather narrow temples of the oval head; a longish, quiet, intent face, veiled with reverie and a sort of vigilant sorrowfulness, and yet possessing little of what at first sight might be called beauty – or what at least is usually accepted as beauty.
So many and fleeting, of course, are the pictures that float into consciousness at the decoy of a certain kind of poetry that one hardly heeds them as they pass and fade. But this, surely, was no after-image of one of Herrick�
��s earthly yet ethereal Electras or Antheas or Dianemes, vanishing like the rainbows in a fountain’s falling waters. There are degrees of realization. And, whatever ‘good Spirit’ this shadowy visitant may have represented, and whatever its origin, it had struck some ‘observer’ in Alan’s mind mute indeed, and had left him curiously disquieted. It was as if in full sight of a small fishing smack peacefully becalmed beneath the noonday blue, the spars and hulk of some such phantom as the Flying Dutchman had suddenly appeared upon the smooth sea green; though this perhaps was hardly a flattering account of it. Anyhow, it had come, and now it was gone – except out of memory – as similar images do come and go.
Mere figment of a day-dream, then, though this vision must have been, Alan found himself vacantly searching the room as if for positive corroboration of it, or at least for some kind of evidence that would explain it away. Faces are but faces, of course, whether real or imaginary, and whether they appear in the daytime or the dark, but there is at times a dweller behind the eye that looks out, though only now and again, from that small window. And this looker-out – unlike most – seemed to be innocent of any attempt at concealment. ‘Here am I …And you?’ That had seemed to be the mute question it was asking; though with no appearance of needing an answer; and, well, Alan distrusted feminine influences. He had once or twice in his brief career loved not wisely but too idealistically, and for the time being he much preferred first editions. Besides, he disliked mixing things up – and how annoying to be first slightly elated and then chilled by a mere fancy!
The sun in his diurnal round was now casting a direct beam of light from between the poplars through one of the little panes of glass in Mr Elliott’s parlour. It limned a clear-cut shadow-pattern on the fading paint of the frame and on the floor beneath. Alan watched it and was at the same time listening – as if positively in hope of detecting that shadow’s indetectable motion!
Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales Page 12