She had spoken of wakeful nights, and for the first few days after our arrival at Kildale she must have had but little sleep, though the heavy air of the valley, or perhaps the unaccustomed fragrance of the pine-trees, had on me an exactly opposite effect. Yet whenever I got up in the night to see if my patient in the next room was in need of anything, I always found her lying wide-eyed and awake on her bed by the open window.
‘Go back to bed and to sleep, nurse,’ she would say. ‘I rest more easily when I know that you are sleeping.’
As she grew stronger, our walks took us farther afield. Sometimes we followed the stream up the valley, and these walks I liked the best, for the woods no longer clung to the steep hill-sides, and the dale, broadening with its farms and green pastures, brought us back into the world of men. In the meadows by the river there were in springtime, so Miss Avenal said, millions of daffodils. They were flowerless now in August; it was the moors that held the colour. From Miss Avenal I learned to recognise the birds, the white-throated dipper, that darted out from the alder-roots, and the ponderous heavy-eyed owls, that sulkily flapped from their resting-places in the hollow oaks. But more often our walks took us below the mill, where the vale was waterless, towards the church at Kildale, built by men of pagan England for the worship of their new God.
‘I think of the church,’ said Miss Avenal, ‘as the last outpost of the new religion, standing sentinel over the passes that lead to the hills. And the stream I picture as the friend of the old spirits that were driven by the priests into the fastnesses of the moor. It carries their secrets still; but lest the old sentry should discover them, it has made for itself a way underground.’
I had been at Kildale for a fortnight, when something went wrong. A feeling of lassitude such as I had never felt before stole over me. The longer walks made me weary. I slept as we lay in the fern in the daytime, slept even when Miss Avenal was talking to me; and in my dreams I heard her voice going before me, as it seemed, down long echoing corridors of black marble, or calling after me down gloomy avenues of tall clipped yews. But at night I could not sleep. It was I now who lay awake, gazing through the open window into the fir woods, listening to the cries of the nightjars or to the perpetual alarm of the corncrakes in the sun-warmed meadows up the dale. It was Miss Avenal who stole into my room on tiptoe with lighted candle, who held my hand, who smoothed my pillow. She seemed to grow stronger, to regain her hold on life with every day that passed. The sunlight sparkled in her eyes and shone back reflected from her hair. All day long she never left my side. She talked to me, telling me strange tales of her past life, that seemed, as I lay half-waking, half-sleeping in the heather or in the fern, to take me back to the very beginnings of the world.
I remember how on one brooding afternoon of thunder she led me through the fields towards Kildale Church. We stopped before we reached it, and, as we sat on a grass-covered knoll, looking towards the weather-stained tower that rose graceless and strong like the bastion of some border fortress, she sang to me a song whose words I still remember:
The valley has lost its memory;
The stream flows silent underground.
It has left the wind and the sun and the rain
To creep into the dark world again
With the secret of life that it has found.
For the stream has found the secret of life;
It has gathered its knowledge from the hills;
Of darkness and evil from the owls,
Of beauty and joy from the daffodils.
Its waters hold the memory
Of age and youth, of death and pleasure and pain.
It is creeping down to the starless world,
To the underworld of night again.
At last, when every day I felt that I was growing weaker, when every day I saw that she was growing stronger, I wrote to Miss Simpson at Yorborough asking to be allowed to come away. Then it was that I realised that I should have written before, for she misunderstood my letter. In her answer to me she said that she had heard already from Miss Avenal, and that she had offered to keep me as her guest at Kildale until I was strong enough to travel. Miss Simpson advised me to accept the invitation. Yorborough, she said, was like an oven, and she envied me the quiet and the bracing air of the moors. How poorly my letter must have expressed my thoughts! I could have said nothing of what I had meant to say.
‘And why should you go back?’ Miss Avenal asked, when I tried to speak to her about it. ‘You shall stay here with me and I will nurse you. I will be with you all day long. How can I leave you when you have given me so much?’
I was too weak to resist. Indeed, had I not then known that resistance was hopeless, I must have realised it ten days after. It was afternoon, and Miss Avenal had left me alone in the meadow by the mill, when I saw two children, a boy and a girl, coming down the stream. They walked barefoot hand in hand, their boots slung across their shoulders. They laughed as they came towards me, clambering over the slippery stones, as they crossed and recrossed the stream.
‘Hallo!’ said the boy. ‘There’s the lady of the mill. Let’s ask her the way to the cave.’
‘Please, Mrs Miller,’ said the little girl, coming up to me without a trace of shyness, ‘will you show us the cave where they found the elephants’ tusks?’
‘And the hyena’s skull,’ said the boy.
‘And the wolves’ teeth,’ said the girl. ‘It was when the plain was a lake and they crept into the cave to die. Mother has been telling us all about it.’
They brought with them all the hope of laughter and sunlight. I said I would go with them to the Kildale Cave, and I told myself that I would escape from the valley with the children. For half a mile I went with them hand in hand through the meadows; then the girl stopped.
‘There’s auntie calling us, Roger,’ she said. ‘I wonder if we ought to go back.’
‘I don’t hear her,’ the boy answered. ‘Let’s go on to the cave now that we’ve got as far as this. It may be wet tomorrow, and the holidays will be over in a week.’
‘It’s going to rain now,’ said the girl. ‘I felt a drop on my hand. And look at the big cloud that’s come from nowhere. I really think, Mrs Miller, that we ought to be going, and there’s auntie calling again.’
A voice came from high up in the valley woods. ‘Come back, children; come back, come back!’
‘I don’t believe it is auntie,’ Roger said gruffly, ‘but it’s going to rain. I expect we’d better be going home or we shan’t get any tea. Perhaps father will show us the way to the cave tomorrow. I’ll race you home, Peg!’
Away they ran across the grass, waving goodbye and saying that tomorrow they would be back.
Listlessly I retraced my steps. It was all I could do to reach the mill, and when I got there I was wet to the skin. Miss Avenal put me to bed; she herself lit the fire in my bedroom, but that night I was delirious.
I have no clear recollection of the week that followed. When I awoke on the morning of the eighth day, the first person I saw was Nurse Harrison. She used at one time to share my room at The Haven; and, though perhaps we had often quarrelled, it was like meeting my oldest friend to see her at Kildale.
‘When did you come?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been here nearly a week,’ she said, ‘and tomorrow I am going back with you to Yorborough.’
‘And Miss Avenal?’
‘Miss Avenal left this morning. You’ve been very ill, you know, and you mustn’t talk.’
I went back to Yorborough next day. I expected to be glad to leave Kildale; but when the time came, I do not think I really cared, for I was dazed, only half responsive to the life of the outside world.
Nurse Harrison was very gentle with me, and this surprised me, as at one time I had thought her rough with her patients. I asked if we should be sharing our old room together, and then she told me that, since The Haven was quite full, Miss Simpson had made arrangements for me to have one of the rooms in the new wing. I did not a
ltogether like the idea, but everyone was so kind to me that I could not well complain. I thought as the weeks went by that I was kept there apart from the other nurses in order that I might the better regain my strength; but that hope left me when I realised that my strength and beauty had been taken from me by Miss Avenal. I wondered at the strange thoughts that passed through my mind in the daytime. I thought at first that I should soon cease in the quiet and peace of Yorborough to be troubled by those stranger dreams at night. But now I understand. I know now that when Miss Avenal took away my strength, she left me with her memories.
THE DOUBLE EYE
IT WAS the chance meeting with Miss Hartigan in a Hampstead drawing-room that was the occasion of my writing this introduction to her nephew’s tales.
I had been doing my best to entertain the little old lady, who seemed to hang back rather wistfully from a turbulent stream of conversation, when a casual remark about New Zealand made me ask her if she was any relation of Dan Hartigan the artist, for Dan, I remembered, had spent the first twelve years of his life on a sheep farm somewhere in the North Island.
‘I’m only his aunt!’ she said with a smile. ‘Are you a friend of Dan’s? I’m keeping house for him just now at Bradsea in Essex. He seems to have lost touch with most of the people he knew. He’d quite forgive my two days’ dissipation in town if I could bring back news of a friend.’
I told her that we had been at school together and that in the early days of the war we had served in the same battalion. That was before he had been wounded. Later when he was attached to the New Zealand Expeditionary Force as official artist, I had lost touch with him. Only once had I seen him in the last ten years, at a Queen’s Hall concert, and then I had not been able to speak to him. I was naturally anxious for news.
Miss Hartigan told me that Dan had gone out to New Zealand to settle up his uncle’s property, that he had become an enthusiastic yachtsman and had bought this house in Essex, Portico House, ‘where,’ she said, ‘he is slowly settling down in the mud and from which nothing but a tidal wave will move him.’
When Miss Hartigan left I walked with her to the Tube station.
‘I’m really rather anxious about Dan,’ she said. ‘He sees far too much of himself and I suppose that’s why he gets so depressed. It would be a real kindness if you could look him up. Come down for a few days and see what you can do to cheer him. He hates making new friends—you know how abrupt are his moods—but he is genuinely attached to his old ones.’
I gave some sort of a promise. I knew my Hartigan and thought it very likely that he would prefer to be left alone. It was a surprise then, a week later, to get a letter from him urging me to come down if only for a couple of nights.
‘You’ll find me anything but entertaining company,’ he wrote, ‘but things are getting badly on top of me and I’ve got to make some pretty important decisions in the near future.’ Dan, the most unmethodical of men, sent me a list of trains to Colchester and a local bus guide. ‘All you have to do,’ he added, ‘is to wire or drop me a card and your bed will be ready.’
That was how I came to Bradsea. The bus put me down at the ‘Plume of Feathers’, and following the conductor’s instructions I took the road past the church and the high walled gardens of an old manor house until a sudden turn brought me to the estuary and Bradsea Hard. There was a row of shops, the biggest a marine store dealer’s with workshops at the back, some neat wooden cottages that looked as if they had once belonged to the coastguards, one or two ugly brick houses roofed with unweathered purple slate, and standing back a little from the road with two tall cypresses on either side of the white gate, Portico House.
They gave me the warmest of welcomes. Dan had changed little since the days when Ribstone camp had thrown us together. He was as tall and lanky and uncouth, flabbier perhaps and paler and quite evidently less happy. He had found however in Portico House an anchorage that was wholly to his liking.
‘When Dan has exhausted all its good points,’ said Miss Hartigan, ‘and fortunately he’s never likely to do that, you must come to me for the debit side of the account—dry rot unless I’m much mistaken, in the attics, a well in the larder—not of course drinking water—oil lamps with endless trimming of wicks, rats that are both seen and heard and probably any number of ghosts which so far have been both inaudible and invisible.’
At dinner that night the conversation more than once showed signs of flagging. Dan, I thought, resented Miss Hartigan’s assumption that I was to be made to feel at home. After all there was no ice to break, no soundings to be taken. The channels were old and familiar, at least to him. But in the drawing-room as we sat round the fire—it was burning apple-wood logs, I remember—he came out of his curmudgeon’s shell. He twitted his aunt who had been busy arranging stamps in an immense volume, on her hobby. He told her of a monarch who from innocent philandering with philately developed such a passion for Papal states and West Indian colonies that he imperilled both the Protestant succession and the peace of Europe. He sketched ribald designs for stamps of the Irish Free State. He defended their sanction of the lottery and parried Miss Hartigan’s attacks by an ingenious argument in which he invoked the doctrine of Grace—the supreme gifts of life coming unearned to the unworthy. I forget how he worked out his ingenious theory, but it was obvious that Dan enjoyed teasing the little old lady and just as obvious that she appreciated the gentle shocks he gave her.
But later in the evening, when we sat together in the study upstairs, his light-hearted mood vanished.
‘I’m very much attached to my aunt,’ he said as he filled his pipe, ‘but she is just a little too bright for me at times. When my spirits get dull and tarnished she is convinced that it is her duty to rub them up. I hate being rubbed up.
‘You said something at dinner,’ he went on after a pause, ‘about humour being a recognition of incongruity. I forget your actual words, but you were thinking of an outward incongruity. There’s more to it than that. It depends on an inward incongruity as well. The single-minded man may laugh and be cheerful but it’s not often that he has a sense of humour. He lacks stereoscopic vision. Both eyes see from the same angle instead of from a slightly different angle. Probably the first time that Adam laughed was when he sat munching the apple and was conscious of good and evil at the same time.
‘Now I’m not wasting your time talking like this. I know very well why my aunt urged you to come down. She is rather alarmed about me and wants an unprejudiced opinion. She is quite right. I am alarmed about myself. There is something radically wrong with my left eye.’
He looked at me half furtively as he spoke and then quickly turned away his head.
‘You don’t mean to say that you are losing your sight?’ I asked.
‘I almost wish I were. No, the trouble is that my left eye sees too much, or rather what it sees is different from what the right eye sees. I have literally bad-sight in my left eye.
‘You remember me at school, an insignificant brat with a gift for caricature. I wasn’t popular, I was no good at games, but somehow I held my own and avoided being bullied. Why was it? You haven’t forgotten old Pill-Box Anderson? We meet occasionally—he works under the County Medical Officer of Health—and I put the question of my general and local immunity to him.
‘ “You had,” he said, “an extraordinarily knowing wink.”
‘I remembered it then. He was quite right. I could upset the gravity of a class—quite a useful asset—and what was more I somehow succeeded in conveying the impression of being able to look round corners.’
As he spoke he turned and slightly raised his head, and his left eyelid closed slowly over a furtive dancing eye.
‘It was a useful trick,’ he went on, ‘and what is more it stood me in good stead later when I eked out my income from black-and-white work by acting as visiting art master to a new-fangled school in Norwood. Art masters and science masters are never any good at discipline, but I found that that left eye of mine could k
eep a class quiet—used sparingly, you know, so that the novelty of fear was not blurred. And now for a few more facts that fit into the picture before I begin theorising.
‘Animals don’t like me. My left eye seems to fascinate them. They are interested in it but it disturbs them. I can upset the equanimity of a cat half asleep on the hearth-rug until it paces the room like a tiger in a cage. And I find too that the dear unsophisticated peasants I meet when I’m away from civilisation, sketching, act on the supposition that I have the evil eye. Young mothers definitely prefer that I should not admire their babies, a thing I should be most unlikely to do. I remember one occasion in the west of Ireland when my anxious solicitude was given as the reason for the butter refusing to churn. All very amusing, of course, if you are more interested in folk-lore than dairymaids, which I’m not.
‘Now for another aspect of the same problem,’ he went on. ‘Obviously I’m not a harmonised personality. Any critic of my black-and-white work can see that. It’s by no means all of a piece. Those illustrations I did for the Alsatia Press edition of Cyril Tourneur (you should read the Revenger’s Tragedy) are frankly sinister, left-eyed productions. The ones for the Knight of the Burning Pestle are just as obviously right-eyed. Since the war I’ve tried my hand from time to time at short stories. I’ll give you a bundle of them to look through while you’re here. They are a collection of moods and tenses, but without much difficulty you could sort them out into left-eye and right-eye stories with a group that represents, perhaps, binocular vision.
‘Well, so much for facts. And now for theory. I have a strong visual imagination built up of sense impressions received through the eyes. But these eyes are not quite alike. At first the impressions that came through the gateways of vision were the same. Then, as time went on, one gateway seems to have been used more for one sort of traffic and unconsciously, I suppose, I encouraged this specialisation. Mark what follows: In the normal brain the travellers entering by the two gateways of vision mingle in the byways of the city and finally come to rest in well conducted caravanserais, the poor men in the attics and cellars, the princes and merchants in their rooms of state. But in my city there is not the same wholesome mixture of classes. In one quarter there are doss houses and one or two gorgeous hotels de luxe. It has a fascinating night life of its own. Another contains the family hotels and those old fashioned, expensive houses where county folk put up, rather dull, perfectly safe, and very respectable. As I said before, I’m beginning to get alarmed.
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