And this, it soon seemed, was to be his sole reward! His excitement fizzled out. With every passing moment his heart fell lower. He had gone away filled with a stark irrational hatred of the poor, restless, phantasmal creature who had intruded on his solitude. He had come back only to realize not only that she herself had been his lodestone, but that, even though any particular spot may undoubtedly be ‘haunted’, it by no means follows that its ghost is always at home. Everything about him seemed to have changed a little. Or was the change only in himself? In this damp air the room smelt of dry-rot and mouldering leather. Even the pretty grate looked thicklier scurfed with rust. And the books on the shelves had now taken to themselves the leaden livery of the weather. ‘Look not too closely on us,’ they seemed to cry. ‘What are we all but memorials of the dead? And we too are swiftly journeying towards the dust.’
The prospect from the window was even more desolating. Nonetheless Alan continued to stare stupidly out of it. By the time he had turned away again he had become certain – though how he couldn’t tell – that he need have no apprehension whatever of intangible company today. Mr Elliott’s ‘parlour’ was emptier than he supposed a room could be. It seemed as if by sheer aversion for its late inmate he had exorcised it, and, irrational creature that he was, a stab of regret followed.
He turned to go. He gave a last look round – and paused. Was it that the skies had lightened a little or had he really failed to notice at his entry that the door at which his visitor had appeared was a few inches open? He stepped across softly and glanced up the staircase. Only vacancy there too. But that door was also ajar. The two faint daylights from above and below mingled midway. For a moment or two he hesitated. The next he had stolen swiftly and furtively up the staircase and had looked in.
This room was not only empty but abandoned. It was naked of any stick of furniture and almost of any trace of human occupation. Yet with its shallow bow window, low ceiling, and morning sun it must once in its heyday have blossomed like the rose. The flowered paper on its walls was dingy now; a few darker squares and oblongs alone showed where pictures had once hung. The brass gas bracket was green with verdigris, and a jutting rod was the only evidence of the canopy where once a bed had been.
But even vacancy may convey a sense of age and tell its tale. Alan was looking into the past. Indeed, the stale remnant of some once pervasive perfume still hung in the musty atmosphere of the room, though its sole refuse consisted of a few dust-grimed books in a corner and – on a curved white narrow shelf that winged the minute fireplace – a rusty hairpin.
Alan stooped, and very gingerly, with gloved finger and thumb, turned the books over – a blistered green-bound Enoch Arden, a small thick copy of The Mysteries of Paris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life, a Nightingale Valley, a few damp, fly-blown shockers, some of them in French and paper-bound; and last, a square black American cloth-bound exercise book with E.F. cut out with a clumsy penknife at one of the top corners. The cockled cloth was slightly greened.
He raised the cover with the extreme tips of his fingers, stooped forward a little, and found himself in the window-light scanning with peculiar intensity the vanishing lineaments of a faded photograph – the photograph of a young woman in clothes somehow made the more old-fashioned in appearance by the ravages of time and light on the discoloured cardboard. He knew this face; and yet not this face. For days past it had not been out of his mind for more than a few hours together. But while his first impression had been that of the vivid likeness of the one to the other, what next showed clearest were the differences between them. Differences that stirred his heart into a sudden tumult.
The hair in the photograph was dressed in pretty much the same fashion – drawn up and back from the narrow temples across the widening head. The lips were, possibly, not so full; certainly not so dark. And though the cheek even of this much younger face was a little sunken, these faded eyes – a fading only of the paper depicting them and not of age – looked out at him without the faintest trace of boldness or effrontery. They were, it is true, fixed profoundly on his own. But they showed no interest in him, little awareness, no speculation – only a remote settled melancholy. What strange surmises, the young man reflected, must the professional photographer at times indulge in when from beneath his ink-black inquisitorial velvet cowl he peers into his camera at a face as careless of human curiosity as this had been. The young woman in the photograph had made, if any, a more feeble attempt to conceal her secret sorrows than a pall to conceal its bier or a broken sepulchre its bones.
At a breath the young man’s aversion had died away. A shame-stricken compassion of which he had never dreamed himself capable had swept over him in its stead. He gazed on for a minute or two at the photograph – this withering memento which not even the removing men seemed to have considered worth flinging into a dustbin; then he opened the book at random – towards the middle of it – and leaning into the light at the window read these lines:
My midnight lamp burns dim with shame,
In Heaven the moon is low;
Sweet sharer of its secret flame,
Arise, and go!
Haste, for dawn’s envious gaping grave
Bids thee not linger here;
Though gone is all I am, and have –
Thy ghost once absent, dear.
He read them over again, then glanced stealthily up and out. They were a voice from the dead. It was as if he had trespassed into the echoing cold of a vault. And as he looked about him he suddenly realized that at any moment he might be interrupted, caught – prying. With a swift glance over his shoulder he pushed the photograph back into the old exercise book, and tucking this under his arm beneath his coat, tiptoed down the unlighted stairs into the parlour.
It had been a bold venture – at least for Alan. For, of all things in this world he disliked, he disliked by far the most being caught out in any little breach of the conventions. Suppose that old, cod-like Mrs Elliott had caught him exploring this abandoned bedroom? After listening yet again for any rumour either of herself or of her husband, he drew out from the lowest shelf near by two old sheepskin folios, seated himself in full view of the door that led into the shop, and having hidden the exercise book well within cover of these antiquated tomes he began to turn over its pages. The trick took him back to his early schooldays – the sun, the heat, the drone of bees at the window, a settling wayward fly, the tick of the clock on the wall, and the penny ‘blood’ half concealed in his arithmetic book. He smiled to himself. Wasn’t he being kept in now? And how very odd he should be minding so little what, only an hour before, he had foreseen he would be minding so much. How do ghosts show that you needn’t expect them? Not even in their chosen haunts?
The book he was now examining was not exactly a penny ‘blood’. In spite of appearances it must have cost at least sixpence. The once black ink on its pages had faded, and mildew dappled the leaves. The handwriting was irregular, with protracted loops. And what was written in the book consisted of verses, interlarded with occasional passages in prose, and a day or a date here and there, and all set down apparently just as it had taken the writer’s fancy. And since many of the verses were heavily corrected and some of them interlined, Alan concluded – without any very unusual acumen! – that they were home made. Moreover, on evidence as flimsy as this, he had instantly surmised who this E.F. was, and that here was not only her book but a book of her own authorship. So completely, too, had his antipathy to the writer of it now vanished out of memory, so swiftly had the youthful, tragic face in the photograph secreted itself in his sentiments, that he found himself reading these scribbled ‘effusions’ with a mind all but bereft of its critical faculties. And of these the young man had hitherto rather boasted himself.
Still, poetry, good or bad, depends for its very life on the hospitable reader, as tinder awaits the spark. After that, what else matters? The flame leaps, the bosom glows! And as Alan read on he never for an instant doubted that he
re, however faultily expressed, was what the specialist is apt to call ‘a transcript of life’. He knew of old – how remotely of old it now seemed – what feminine wiles are capable of; but here, surely, was the truth of self to self. He had greedily and yet with real horror looked forward to his reappearance here, as if Mr Elliott’s little parlour was the positive abode of the Evil One. And yet now that he was actually pecking about beneath the very meshes of his nets, he was drinking in these call-notes as if they were cascading down upon him out of the heavens from the throat of Shelley’s skylark itself. For what is Time to the artifices of Eros? Had he not (with Chaucer’s help) once fallen head over ears in love with the faithless Criseyde? He drank in what he had begun to read as if his mind were a wilderness thirsty for rain, though the pall of cloud that darkened the window behind him was supplying it in full volume. He was elated and at the same time dejected at the thought that he was perhaps the very first human creature, apart from the fountain head, to sip of these secret waters.
And he had not read very far before he realized that its contents referred to an actual experience as well as to one of the imagination. He realized too that the earlier poems had been written at rather long intervals; and, though he doubted very much if they were first attempts, that their technique tended to improve as they went on – at least, that of the first twenty poems or so. With a small ivory pocket paper-knife which he always carried about with him he was now delicately separating page 12 from page 13, and he continued to read at random:
There was sweet water once,
Where in my childhood I
Watched for the happy innocent nonce
Day’s solemn clouds float by.
O age blur not that glass;
Kind Heaven still shed thy rain;
Even now sighs shake me as I pass
Those gentle haunts again.
He turned over the page:
Lullay, my heart, and find thy peace
Where thine old solitary pastures lie;
Their light, their dews need never cease,
Nor sunbeams from on high.
Lullay, and happy dream, nor roam,
Wild though the hills may shine,
Once there, thou soon would’st long for home,
As I for mine!
and then:
Do you see; O, do you see? –
Speak – and some inward self that accent knows,
Bidding the orient East its rose disclose –
And daybreak wake in me.
Do you hear? O, do you hear? –
This heart whose pulse like menacing night-bird cries?
Dark, utter dark, my loved, is in these eyes
When gaunt good-bye draws near.
and then, after a few more pages:
‘There is a garden in her face’:
My face! Woe’s me were that my all! –
Nay, but my self, though thine its grace,
Thy fountain is, thy peach-bloomed wall.
Come soon that twilight dusky hour,
When thou thyself shalt enter in
And take thy fill of every flower,
Since thine they have always been.
No rue? No myrrh? No nightshade? Oh,
Tremble not, spirit! All is well.
For Love’s is that lovely garden; and so,
There only pleasures dwell.
Turning over the limp fusty leaves, one by one, he browsed on:
When you are gone, and I’m alone,
From every object that I see
Its secret source of life is flown:
All things look cold and strange to me.
Even what I use – my rings, my gloves,
My parasol, the clothes I wear –
‘Once she was happy; now she loves!
Once young,’ they cry, ‘now carked with care!’
I wake and watch when the moon is here –
A shadow tracks me on. And I –
Darker than any shadow – fear
Her fabulous inconstancy.
That sphinx, the Future, marks its prey;
I who was ardent, sanguine, free,
Starve now in fleshly cell all day –
And yours the rusting key.
and then:
Your maddening face befools my eyes,
Your hand – I wake to feel –
Lost in deep midnight’s black surmise –
Its touch my veins congeal.
What peace for me in star or moon?
What solace in nightingale!
They tell me of the lost and gone –
And dawn completes the tale.
A note in pencil – the point of which must have broken in use – followed at the foot of the page:
All this means all but nothing of what was in my mind when I began to write it. Dawn!! I look at it, read it – it is like a saucer of milk in a cage full of asps. I didn’t know one’s mind could dwell only on one thought, one face, one longing, on and on without any respite, and yet remain sane. I didn’t even know – until when? – it was possible to be happy, unendurably happy, and yet as miserable and as hopeless as a devil in hell. It is as if I were sharing my own body with a self I hate and fear and shake in terror at, and yet am powerless to be rid of. Well, never mind. If I can go on, that’s my business. They mouth and talk and stare and sneer at me. What do I care! The very leaves of the trees whisper against me, and last night came thunder. I see my haunted face in every stone. And what cares he! Why should he? Would I, if I were a man? I sit here alone in the evening – waiting. My heart is a quicksand biding its time to swallow me up. Yet it isn’t even that I question now whether he ever loved me or not – I only thirst and thirst for him to come. One look, a word, and I am at peace again. At peace! And yet I wonder sometimes, if I – if it is even conceivable that I still love him. Does steel love the magnet? Surely that moon which shone last night with her haggard glare in both our faces abhors the earth from which, poor wretch, she parted to perish and yet from which she can never, never, never utterly break away? Never, never, never. O God, how tired I am! – knowing as I do – as if my life were all being lived over again – that only worse lies in wait for me, that the more I feel the less I am able to please him. I see myself dragging on and on – and that other sinister mocking one within rises up and looks at me – ‘What? And shall I never come into my own!’
Alan had found some little difficulty in deciphering the faint, blurred, pencilled handwriting – he decided to come back to this page again, then turned it over and read on:
Your hate I see, and can endure, nay, must –
Endure the stark denial of your love;
It is your silence, like a cankering rust,
That I am perishing of.
What reck you of the blinded hours I spend
Crouched on my knees beside a shrouded bed?
Grief even for the loveliest has an end;
No end in one whose soul it is lies dead.
I watch the aged who’ve dared the cold slow ice
That creeps from limb to limb, from sense to sense,
Yet never dreamed this also is the price
Which youth must pay for a perjured innocence.
Yours that fond lingering lesson. Be content!
Not one sole moment of its course I rue.
The all I had was little. Now it’s spent.
Spit on the empty purse: ’tis naught to you.
And then these Lines on Ophelia:
She found an exit from her life;
She to an earthly green-room sped
Where parched-up souls distraught with strife
Sleep and are comforted.
Hamlet! I know that dream-drugged eye,
That self-coiled melancholic mien!
Hers was a happy fate – to die:
Mine – her foul Might-have-been.
and then:
Tomorrow waits me at my gate,
While all my yesterdays swarm near;
And one mouth whines, Too late, too late:
And one is dumb with fear.
Was this the all that life could give
Me – who from cradle hungered on.
Body and soul aflame, to live –
Giving my all – and then be gone?
O sun in heaven, to don that shroud,
When April’s cuckoo thrilled the air!
Light thou no more the fields I loved.
Be only winter there!
and then:
Have done with moaning, idiot heart;
If it so be that Love has wings
I with my shears will find an art
To still his flutterings.
Wrench off that bandage too will I,
And show the imp he is blind indeed;
Hot irons will prove my mastery;
He shall not weep, but bleed.
And when he is dead, and cold as stone,
Then in his Mother’s book I’ll con
The lesson none need learn alone,
And, callous as she, play on.
He raised his eyes. The heavy rain had ebbed into a drifting drizzle; the day had darkened. He stared vacantly for a moment or two out of the rain-drenched window, and then, turning back a few of the damp cockled leaves, once more resumed his reading:
And when at last I journey where
All thought of you I must resign,
Will the least memory of me be fair,
Or will you even my ghost malign?
I plead for nothing. Nay, Time’s tooth –
That frets the very soul away –
May prove at last your slanders truth,
And me the Slut you say.
There followed a series of unintelligible scrawls. It was as if the writer had been practising a signature in various kinds of more or less affected handwritings: ‘Esther de Bourgh, Esther de Bourgh, Esther De Bourgh, E. de Bourgh, E de B, E de B, E. de Ice Bourgh, Esther de la Ice Bourgh, Esther de Borgia, Esther Césarina de Borgia, Esther de Bauch, Esther de Bausch, E. de BOSH.’ And then, this unfinished scrap:
Why cheat the heart with old deceits? –
Love – was it love in thine
Could leave me thus grown sick of sweets
And …
The words sounded on – forlornly and even a little self-pityingly – in Alan’s mind. Sick of sweets, sick of sweets. He had had enough for today. He shut the book, lifted his head, and with a shuddering yawn and a heavy frown on his young face, once more stared out of the window.
Out of the Deep: And Other Supernatural Tales Page 14