Ape's Face

by Marion L. Fox

  Thoughts in his mind clashed and jangled together disconnectedly, as snapped wires of a stringed instrument; yet some strange current of meaning made half tunes and harmonies amongst them. Again they seemed joined and knotted together. Some strong hand gripped them and struck one crashing chord across the strings: one terrific thought that caught the meaning of two thousand years or more, wrought up the present with the past, and hurled it into the finite world like a menace or a challenge.

  That ancient, prehistoric race had caught this winged thing and used it as a curse upon the downs. Sacrificing to it themselves, they had willed that the people coming after should sacrifice also, although they were long exiled and turned to dust. The curse of a conquered race was intended to haunt the ways of the conquerors. The people, who owned these lands that had been theirs, should pay the toll in blood and tears which they had rendered piously though in fear: brother slaying brother, or brother slaying sister—a prehistoric right of heriot upon each succeeding generation. There was the strangely jumbled history of the two brothers as told by Aunt Ellen, both showing now as true, one in the last century, the other in the century before. And then the century before that again. This strange story of Isabella of the downs. The weird chain of evidence linked itself across the ages. The circling horror had swooped off across the downs for the moment, waiting its hour. It was drawing near—the winter solstice—Christmas. Up here, alone in this place of fear, he could credit the thing truly enough—the blood toll for every century to be paid punctually by the timing of the sun, at some spot upon the downs, the demesne lands of those long-forgotten seigneurs. Something of the terror vanished now that it had descended to the concrete; it could be touched, dealt with, perhaps prevented even.

  At this moment he realised that he was not alone: a woman in black had come over the trenches and stood near him, watching. She startled him before he realised that she was only Josephine Delane-Morton—Ape’s-face.

  Out here, in this place of strange shapes and subdued lights, under the bleak control of winter clouds and shadows, her ugliness became comprehensible.

  Her features were not the features of the present race of men, they were not intended to compare with the hybrid breed of modern folk; they belonged to the older, stranger peoples who once inherited that land. The low forehead, with its dark projecting brows, the forceful jaw, the bright black eyes—all these should have proclaimed her to any discerning glance as a throw-back to an extinct species.

  She looked at him with a slow smile, as if she had long ago seen what he had just perceived, and had come to hear his version of her tale. Her arms were folded one across the other, in a patient, waiting attitude, her elbows resting in the palms of her hands. Her eyes had seen evil and good, they had looked on beauty and horror alike; they had summed up either side and judged, or held judgment balanced, suspended.

  ‘When did you know?’ said Armstrong.

  ‘Two months ago—that is why I came home. But I did not realise until this morning in church,’ she said. Of course her voice could sound no otherwise than huskily, speaking a foreign speech.

  ‘You came home to stop it!’ he cried.

  ‘If I can,’ she said; ‘but who else will believe?’

  ‘You must tell them.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘do you think they have called me Ape’s-face so long for nothing? Who could believe me?’

  ‘And why should they believe me either?’ Armstrong reflected. ‘Probably when we get again into the valley I shall forget too.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she agreed, ‘and yet it will happen—if we do not prevent it.

  It has always happened in a way any of them could explain; why should it not be stopped in the same fashion?’

  ‘And you?’ he asked.

  ‘I?’ she repeated, and then stopped short.

  ‘Yes, you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘when you say that it does seem incredible, indeed: but probably it seemed just as incredible to all the rest until they had done the thing. But still,’ she added, ‘I should recognise what the feeling meant when it came: the others were blinded. I have been honest with myself always.

  Sometimes I think that is why people hate me. I never once pretended for myself—and I never once pretended for them either; they see themselves as I see them, and it doesn’t please.’

  ‘No,’ said Armstrong, ‘you showed me an unpleasant portrait of myself yesterday evening, when we drove up from the station.’

  ‘I liked you best when you were silent,’ she replied. ‘Shall we go down?’

  ‘I wonder what we shall talk about when we get there?’ he said.

  ‘But remember,’ she urged, ‘that even then this is real—the most real thing you will ever meet.’

  ‘I shall think of this sunken stone,’ he answered, ‘and the story.’

  ‘The truth of it,’ she interrupted.

  ‘Are you coming ?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘not yet, not yet!’

  She wrung her hands in an odd kind of way. ‘Please go on. I cannot face them so soon.’

  ‘I thought you weren’t afraid,’ he returned, eyeing her closely.

  ‘Of this—no! But of them,’ she replied, ‘I am afraid. This is real, I can see and feel it: but the others . . . what is there to understand ?’

  ‘Come and find out.’

  ‘Presently,’ she said and turned eastwards.

  He left her there, and as he went the terms of that age-long compact with a power but half comprehended rang in his ears—that brother should kill brother, or sister, as a perpetual sacrifice to this ancient spirit.

  VIII

  The Red Summer

  IT WAS RATHER AFTER FIVE O’CLOCK when Armstrong made his appearance in the drawing-room for tea. The darkness and cold had grown so intense out of doors that he was almost thankful for the garish light and warmth of the room. As he had foreseen, that recent scene on the downs became inconceivable at once. He began to wonder if Ape’s-face might not be ever so little, if not exactly unsound of mind, perhaps a trifle eccentric. He allowed that he himself had been somewhat unbalanced; at least one might call it so.

  Aunt Ellen beckoned him into the chair beside her and made a special feature of handing his tea-cup with almost affectionate affability. Her hands, and her manner of managing them, were skilful and charming. It was evident that she admired and appreciated him in her own way, and this, too, warmed him. The older you get the more warmth you require; and though of course he was barely middle-aged (save the ungracious epithet!) still perhaps he felt sometimes an extra involuntary chill that needed mitigation.

  ‘Do you think we shall have an abnormally cold Christmas?’ she chirruped.

  ‘We old people feel the frost and snow much more than ever you young people can imagine. So you can guess what a boon that extraordinary heat-wave must have been to me. I felt as if new life and strength had sprung up in me. Dear Godfrey used to carry me out into the garden, and I used to sit on the grass and literally feel the heat from the earth steal up me through the scorched blades. And they were scorched indeed! The entire country looked as if a fire had passed over it, did it not? You know—but do not laugh at me too much!—I feel as if it must have some special meaning. Now if you laugh at me I shall not be able to speak again for quite a long time.’ She put her head on one side and blushed quite prettily. Armstrong denied the least inclination to deride her fancy.

  ‘That might easily be,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ she returned softly. ‘Dear Godfrey said the shadowed parts of the downs were the only cool spots on the earth’s surface; didn’t you, 5 6

  Godfrey ? He used to spend all his time there when he was not attending to his old aunt, didn’t you, dear ?’

  Godfrey, looking a little sheepish, acknowledged the fact. The two brothers were sitting opposite to one another, facing Armstrong, and in the common occupation of eating looked more alike than usual. Somehow at menti
on of the downs they both showed signs of mental abstraction.

  A pause here ensuing, Armstrong struggled to break it by remarking on the lonely farm.

  ‘Now there,’ he said, ‘is a place where I should like to spend my last days.

  What is the place called ? I really must not forget it.’

  ‘How very amusing you are, dear Mr Armstrong,’ the old lady chuckled; ‘it is called—’ She suddenly hesitated, and he saw her eyelids flicker in a curious manner. He noticed that she had glanced covertly at the two young men. He too turned to look at them. They were both sitting bolt upright glaring at him. ‘It is called the Drylches,’ the old lady concluded; ‘rather a curious name, is it not?’

  ‘Very curious,’ Armstrong agreed, turning his eyes carelessly away again.

  ‘Does it mean anything?’

  ‘We sometimes wonder,’ the old lady replied suavely, and Armstrong noticed the same covert glance in her nephews’ direction. ‘The boys can tell you more about it than I, no doubt; you see I so seldom get upon the downs.’

  She turned to them gently with a questioning look which suggested their joining in the conversation. Armstrong followed her example. It was at this moment that Ape’s-face came quietly into the room and sat down very unobtrusively in the background, but facing the entire group. She had a curious way of surveying people as though they were actors on a stage, that always struck Armstrong every time she entered.

  Godfrey, with curiously elaborate nonchalance, was replying to his aunt that the place was so dreary he seldom went that way. Arthur, on the contrary, with flaming face and eyes, scowled on Armstrong as he muttered:

  ‘Can’t see why anyone should want to go near such a rotten old place.’

  Godfrey suddenly looked at his brother with his slow good-tempered smile, as suddenly at least as his supple undulating movements would allow.

  ‘Oh, is it very rotten?’ he asked in his maidenly way.

  Arthur immediately transferred the scowl from Armstrong to his brother.

  Armstrong noticed how strongly the difference in the two was heightened by their very identity.

  ‘Perhaps you know more about it than I do,’ he said, fiercely suspicious.

  Godfrey smiled at him. ‘The truth is,’ he continued to Armstrong, ‘that we neither of us know much about the place. The farmer there is rather a rough, unpleasant fellow, and looks on everyone who goes near the place as a trespasser. But if you are interested in old farmhouses, sir, there is a very quaint one in the hollow . . .’ He went on for some minutes in this communicative style, enlarging with a certain amount of superfluous knowledge upon ancient buildings in general, until he saw that boredom was pervading the atmosphere, when he gently desisted, and left the conversation at a far distant point from whence it started. Mr Delane-Morton had been too deeply immersed in some lugubrious meditation of his own to notice this small but curious disturbance. But Ape’s-face seemed determined that the subject should not pass away so easily.

  ‘Artists very often stay up there in the summer,’ she said in the same determination with which an anarchist might throw a bomb. Aunt Ellen turned a disapproving glance upon her which would have frozen anyone less firm.

  ‘It always seems queer that artists should like anything so grey and colourless.’

  ‘It is not grey or colourless,’ rejoined Arthur, flaming, ‘I can tell you there are any amount of fine tones in the folds of the downs: only it takes a better eye than mine or yours to see them. But if any genius got up there she—he’d soon show you what I mean,’ the slight slip might have passed almost as a hesitation, it was so slight, but Aunt Ellen held it up to view.

  ‘Dear Arthur,’ said she, ‘how glad I am to see that you can imagine one of our sex could really possess genius.’

  He looked at her angrily, perplexed, crimson from brow to chin. Then he dashed his cup down upon the table so that it rattled together with the spoon in his saucer.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said shortly, rose, and walked sulkily out of the room.

  ‘And he was such a pretty child,’ Aunt Ellen sighed after him.

  ‘You must agree with me, or contradict yourself, Mr Armstrong, that the past is far more pleasing than the present.’

  ‘But the future far more pleasing than either,’ interposed Godfrey.

  Mr Delane-Morton had recovered consciousness with the noise of Arthur’s exit. He here raised his voice.

  ‘Not at all, not at all,’ he said solemnly, ‘I dislike the future intensely. No man of my age who thinks could possibly do otherwise. A man who did not think . . .’ and he left the lamentable state of such a man to be rather vaguely imagined than described.

  ‘On the contrary, John,’ Aunt Ellen retorted, ‘I rather agree with dear Godfrey; the future is most pleasing because . . .’

  ‘It depends,’ said Mr Delane-Morton, rising also, ‘whether you are in the position of debtor or creditor to old Time.’

  With which cryptic utterance he departed. They were now left a snug little ‘partie carrée,’ as Aunt Ellen smoothly put it, which she wished to break up with Mr Armstrong’s consent; for although it was quite dark she intended to show him the house, to make up for the time he had spent away from them in the afternoon, and so that he might not be bored with having waste time on his hands. Armstrong sighed inwardly when he thought of the letters still unread which he purposely had come to see: they lay awaiting him in his own room, so Mr Delane-Morton had informed him.

  ‘You have seen all the rooms on the ground-floor,’ she said, ‘but to my mind the first floor is the most interesting.’ (Armstrong forbore retorting that attics and kitchens had often proved more to the point than any other parts of old houses.) ‘So if you will await me at the stair-head, Godfrey and Pym shall carry me up, and then I can guide you myself in my little wheeled carriage. I often think that feeble people like myself help to shew the wonders of our age—exemplars, you know, of the advance of science.’ She smiled him to the door.

  Obedience is a polite and facile habit. Armstrong went and awaited her at the stair-head.

  The place was entirely dark, save for the slight glow mounting up the stairs from the hall; the wonderful carving on the newels and rails was lost in the gloom except where a flash of light endowed them with a flickering motion of fictitious life. The patience of waiting lays all susceptibilities open to the understanding. He was thinking unconsciously of Aunt Ellen as he stood leaning against the walls of the cavern-like landing, opening himself as it were to any impression she might choose to impress upon him. He felt like the men in Plato’s pictured cavern, from which only shadows of the real could be seen cast upon the wall: a figure of the limits of human perception.

  At that moment he was aware of something, greater than he could comprehend, approaching within the casting of a shade, but looming always nearer and nearer. He heard Aunt Ellen’s soft voice calling him from the gallery. He went and found her sitting alone in the wheeled chair, the centre of a splash of light which radiated from a small lamp which she carried in one hand.

  ‘Come along, dear Mr Armstrong,’ she murmured, and turned the chair dexterously. It was so well contrived that no sound came as it moved on its rubber edges. There was something curious in accompanying this swift footless movement through the house, encircled by that small radius of light in the midst of the cold gloom. She drew her delicate shoulders together in a shiver.

  ‘How cold!’ she exclaimed, ‘and yet the strength of that summer weather has not left me yet. It leaves me with the impression of something red, as if one had been bathed in red for months and one’s memory could conjure up no other colour. I always call it the Red Summer. How you do make one chatter!

  Here am I talking about myself when I really want to tell you all about the house.’ She paused a moment, and then burst with real relish into a long discourse on the Morton pedigree: however dry it might be to Armstrong, to her it was evidently full of matter.

  ‘That was an inter
esting story that your niece told me about Isabella Morton and her two brothers,’ Armstrong inserted in the first pause.

  ‘Which Isabella?’ said the old lady sharply.

  ‘The author’s sister,’ Armstrong replied, surprised at her tone.

  ‘A story?’ persisted the old lady. ‘What did Josephine tell you?’

  It was evidently unknown to her. Armstrong evaded a direct reply out of some but half-understood loyalty to Ape’s-face. He said:

  ‘I couldn’t tell a story half so well myself. Story-telling must be an inherited gift,’ and he looked down at her smiling. The smile froze itself inwardly at the roots. He had seldom seen a face change so unpleasantly: she looked like some keen-eyed bird of prey ready to swoop. The lamp trembled slightly in her hand.

  ‘I wonder what she knows about it,’ Aunt Ellen muttered.

  They came to the end of the gallery opposite two folding doors. She turned herself sideways to the keyhole, so as better to insert the key, and flung the door open. A solitary, disused atmosphere gushed out across the threshold. She glided forward into the darkness with her little lamp.

  ‘If you follow me closely you can see the pictures quite well, and the ceiling is low enough for the pattern to shew clearly. It is considered handsome.’

  She stretched out her thin hand to beckon him nearer. ‘This was once the ladies’ withdrawing-room, which is the reason for this fine plaster work. But my poor sister-in-law used it as her room. The shutters are not often opened now. How well I remember looking at it across the fields. I used to live on the other side of the meadows until my brother kindly asked me to live here with him and his wife. Dear creature! Here she is. A picture painted at the time of their marriage. A trifle older than my brother, but younger by nature. The only child, and her people had petted her a good deal. These petted children seldom attain maturity of mind.’ She held the light towards the wall.

  ‘Why, it might almost be your niece!’ Armstrong exclaimed. There were the same strange, dark, ape-like features, the melancholy eyes, but within them more melancholy still. Besides there was wanting that forcefulness and intensity which made Josephine’s presence felt.