The Double Eye

by William Fryer Harvey

  ‘You know,’ he went on after re-lighting his pipe, ‘there’s really a lot to be said for the old notion of bodily organs having a definite life of their own—real self-governing dominions and not just Crown Colonies run from Whitehall. I read somewhere recently that only twenty-five per cent of body energy is used up by tissues under the control of the will. And what’s true of liver and spleen may be true, to a certain extent, with an organ like the eye and that part of the brain concerned with vision. I mean that it may be far more autonomous than one generally imagines. I don’t so much mind when my liver is out of order because I don’t understand the language of its primitive inhabitants, however conscious I may be of a state of revolt. But it’s a very different matter when vision is affected. What would you do if a port had been captured, a gateway, a cable station, and all sorts of people, all sorts of messages, were creeping in?’

  He turned on me almost fiercely.

  ‘I suppose you’d sit back in your armchair, toasting your feet before the fire, and take joy in the thought that you are the captain (retired on pension) of your soul. But I—do you know what I’d do? I’d blow up the fort, I’d mine the gateway, I’d play old Harry with the damned cable station.’

  There came a gentle knocking at the door and Miss Hartigan entered the room.

  ‘I’m sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but it’s after eleven and Dan is supposed to keep early hours. I’ve brought a jug of Ovaltine and two cups in case you both feel inclined for a nightcap. If you won’t have any, Dan, I’ll pour a little into the saucer for the cat. Puss! Puss! Now, Dan, it’s too bad of you! You know she won’t come when you look at her like that. Now you’ve frightened her and she’s gone downstairs.’

  ‘Sorry, aunt, I didn’t mean to really. I’m just going to rout out some papers for old Bill to go through at his leisure and then we’ll toddle along to bed.’

  My room in Portico House looked out across the estuary. The tide had come in; the mud flats were already covered. A barge had dropped anchor almost opposite my window and seemed to fill a vast canvas framed by the black cypresses that stood on either side of the gate. Behind it were the riding lights of yachts at their moorings, and far away to the left the dim shapes of ocean-going steamers—the out-of-works of the sea—lined up awaiting charter. The wind had gone down; the lap, lap, that I heard came not from the ripple of the tide but from the leaves of the great aspen on the lawn at the side of the house.

  If Dan sought peace for healing he had surely come to the right place.

  But had he?

  I became conscious of a feeling, hitherto only half acknowledged, that there was something a little incongruous about Portico House.

  The drawing-room with its solid Victorian furniture, its footstools upholstered with beads and gay Berlin wools, the framed samplers and silhouettes of a still earlier generation, the china, valuable and ugly in its corner cupboard, the quietly respectable aspidistra—all these were in keeping with a Portico House that was successfully living down the memory of lawless days. My bedroom, again, gave the impression of having been laid up in lavender. The bottom drawers of the immense tallboys would, I felt sure, be filled with neatly folded linen, carefully marked, perhaps by that wistful little lady with the basket of roses whose portrait looked down on me from the wall above the fireplace.

  But the hall was different. On my arrival Hartigan had told me to hang my coat and hat on Adam and Eve. These were two wooden figures, almost life-size, that stood in the shadow on either side of the door. He told me that he had picked them up in Spain and thought that they had probably been the terminals of some palatial staircase, ‘though,’ he had added, ‘I’d rather like to think of them as hidden away in the choir stalls of some forgotten cathedral with an evil old bishop who had no other master than the devil. Late seventeenth century, I put them down as. If they could speak they’d cry aloud for clothes.’

  There was something distinctly horrible in those leering figures crowned with hats askew. Scarves and cloaks instead of screening only seemed to emphasise their essential iniquity.

  No, I did not like Dan’s doorkeepers. His study again, was a restless, a divided room. The sheep-like, white-faced china statuette of John Wesley on the mantelpiece had been placed there, I fancied, because it was so completely out of keeping with its surroundings. The world may have been his parish, but here John Wesley was most certainly not at home.

  Again I felt that my first impression of peace was false; there was fraternisation of armed forces; there were whispers only of an armistice.

  I felt little inclination for sleep. I had a virgin candle to burn and in my hand was the typescript of Dan’s stories. They were, as he had given me to understand, a mixed lot. One or two might have found their way into the pages of a magazine, but I fancied that most would be difficult to place. They were too elusive for the ordinary reader—left too much to his imagination—and for the others their form was against them; they had no affinity to the fashionable conte. Nor did I see any chance of a publisher taking them up in volume form unless Dan illustrated them. They lacked the same unity that their author lacked. Yet reading them I realised that the tales had some things in common. There was a curious obsession with the idea of death. In some it was no more than a vague background—the gathering of dark clouds at sunset. In others the clouds were banked high and hung menacing. In more than one or two the lightning broke and struck with a sudden and blinding flash. Then again the stories were alike in showing little interest in women. Dan was obviously not at home with them unless they were over fifty. I thought he showed an understanding of elderly people and strangely enough of little children. There was more than a streak of Hartigan’s cynical humour, and he sometimes succeeded in conveying the old impression of being able to look round corners.

  I still think of his stories in that setting of silver flame and queer distorted shadow. I can still hear the comments of the night world, the hooting of an owl, the distant striking of the church clock—it dropped the quarter-hours after midnight—and within, the scuttling of mice behind the wainscot and the creaking of century-old floor-boards. When at last I fell asleep it was to dream of the sheep and green New Zealand paddocks that Dan had loved as a boy.

  It was raining next morning and after breakfast Dan took me upstairs to the room he used as a studio lit by two north windows that looked out on to the overgrown orchard that was Miss Hartigan’s despair. He had been commissioned to illustrate a book on smuggling in East Anglia, ‘lucrative pot-boiling,’ he described it, but as I turned over the drawings in his portfolio it was evident that the subject appealed to him strongly. He told me that Portico House itself had been a regular smugglers’ warren. There were no fewer than four staircases, and in the very room we sat in was a trap-door going down to a cellar, from which an underground passage led to a barn at the corner of the orchard where pack-horses could wait.

  ‘They would go from here to Tiptree Heath,’ said Dan. ‘Sometimes they would make a shorter stage. In the churchyard at Windringhoe there is a vault that was often used as a dumping ground in an emergency. It’s only four miles up the creek. Let’s take some sandwiches and see what the place looks like on a rainy day.’

  We set out in a drizzle along the sea wall. The path was too narrow to walk abreast, and Dan’s remarks were confined to pointing out the objects of interest, the new water tower at Hollesbury across the estuary, Rowbarrow Farm where the glass funereal jar in Colchester museum had been unearthed from the mound at the back of the orchard, the towers of Great and Little Swinfleet. On our left was the black mud of the Swinfleet Channel, on our right the saltings. The bloom of the sea lavender had gone from a landscape faintly tinted with dull washes of monochrome.

  Windringhoe seemed to consist only of a church and a ramshackle farm, once a manor house but now half derelict. It was approached on the landward side by a lane that ended in a staithe where barges once discharged and loaded.

  ‘If you walked for ten minut
es up the lane,’ said Dan, ‘you could catch the Colchester bus and be in Liverpool Street in under two hours. All the same we are at the end of the world.’

  We saw the brick vault in the graveyard surrounded by its broken iron railing, and then, as the church was locked, we sat in the porch to eat our sandwiches.

  ‘I read your stories last night,’ I said. ‘If you’ll entrust me with them I’d like to go through them again and get Tom Knightley’s opinion about them. But to return to what we were talking about last night when the unexpected entrance of the Ovaltine brought us down to earth. You are restless and dissatisfied, conscious of a divided personality. Why don’t you get psycho-analysed?’

  ‘So that’s your tack, is it?’ said Dan. ‘I suppose my aunt has been unburdening herself to you. She knows a man, a really good man, who won’t cease from his labours until it seems perfectly natural for you to become an orthodox Presbyterian. Or if I wanted to keep the exploitation of my shady past in the family, there is my cousin Joe who has written most helpful handbooks for neurotic mothers on the management of the difficult child. I wouldn’t touch any of them with a barge pole. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but do you see me casting my dreams before scientific swine for them to rout in? No, I saw enough of those gentlemen after I was shell-shocked. I talked a lot of nonsense to you last night. I suppose I had the pip. Forget all about it. If I’m a mixed lot, well, the world is too. Some people come here at high tide and fall in love with the place; then next time they come the mud flats are all uncovered and they long for miles of clean sand or pebbly beaches. For the moment I’m thoroughly enjoying the mud. And I appreciate oysters.’

  On our way back the drizzle changed into a downpour that extinguished all conversation. I for one felt that I had earned my hot bath and tea. Despite Miss Hartigan’s valiant attempts to draw him into talk—she reminded me of a neat little hen pecking about for corn and scattering grain and chaff in all directions—Dan remained morose and silent. He refused the muffin—‘and Alice brought it all the way from Colchester’—and then, saying that he had letters to write for the evening post, left us alone.

  With thankfulness I accepted Miss Hartigan’s suggestion that I should light my pipe. Obviously I was to be her confidant. She wanted a patient listener.

  She began by asking me what I thought of Dan, and seemed almost disappointed when I told her that I had seen in him no cause for real anxiety.

  ‘He’s on his guard, of course,’ she said. ‘He knows that I wanted to consult you about him. But I really think that there is something the matter with one or both of his eyes. Why instead of experimenting with a shade doesn’t he consult a proper oculist? I believe he fears they might say he is going blind. And he won’t see Dr McCandlish—he doesn’t call himself a psycho-analyst but he is deeply interested in modern psychology and has had the most wonderful results, a really good man in whom I should put implicit faith. Dan suffers dreadfully from insomnia and I’m afraid he takes drugs for it. I don’t trust our chemist here at all; he’s a clever man, but you don’t get clever men in a remote village like this without a bad reason.

  ‘He probably goes on repeating some old prescription Dan has got hold of when he has absolutely no business to. A most unsavoury character, and my nephew won’t hear a word against him. I have no doubt that it would be an excellent thing for him if he took up golf, but he only laughs when I suggest it and pours ridicule on the game and everything connected with it. What am I to do? You see, very often when Dan can’t sleep he takes to walking about at night. He tells me that he has night vision, whatever that is—I believe he wants to frighten me—and that he finds inspiration for his work. But you can’t do that sort of thing in a place like this where everybody knows everybody else. People talk, they seem to do nothing else but talk. They never listen-in to those really interesting lectures on the wireless and we haven’t even a village institute. And they say—well, they say that Dan is all right but that he’s wrong in the head. I don’t mind that so much but supposing he was all right in his head and it was his conduct that was wrong, it would be difficult to make excuses then. I sometimes wonder if I oughtn’t to leave Portico House.’

  I tried to reassure Miss Hartigan. None the less what she said impressed me. She struck me as a kind-hearted, shrewd old lady who certainly did not suffer from nerves. Dan himself had told me that when servants were hard to get and harder still to keep, for weeks together she would sleep alone in Portico House. Barges that came from nowhere in the night, four staircases, I remembered, to hear creaking, mice behind the wainscot and rats in the washhouse. No, there was nothing the matter with Miss Hartigan’s nerves.

  An incident that happened later in the evening made me wonder if I had not been a little premature in my assurances.

  Dan had gone out with his letters for the post. He had told us he did not know how long he would be. If the box at the post office was cleared he would have to walk on to Cadwick and give the letters to the driver of the bus to post in Colchester.

  Miss Hartigan settled down to her patience, only to find that a card was missing. She was reluctantly giving up thoughts of her evening game when she remembered that Dan had a pack in his room and she asked me if I would mind going upstairs to find it.

  ‘It’s sure to be somewhere lying about,’ she said. ‘I remember him telling me the night before last that he had almost succeeded in going to sleep over Double Demon.’

  As I was not able to find the cards by the light of a candle I lit the lamp and renewed the search. The lid of the desk in the corner was closed and not locked. I opened it, and there in the first pigeon-hole was the pack of cards. There was a pair of horn-rimmed glasses too.

  I don’t quite know why I took them up. I hadn’t realised that Dan wore glasses. These were broken; one of the side pieces had snapped across and Dan had evidently tried to mend it with sealing wax.

  And then I realised that there was something queer about them. The left eyepiece was fitted with dark glass, and on putting it to the test of print I found that the right glass did not alter the size of the letters. It was plain glass. I replaced the spectacles in the pigeon-hole with the feeling that I had been prying, that Dan would not have been altogether pleased at my innocent discovery.

  The broken glasses told me two things. I knew now that Dan had been absolutely serious in his talk of the evening before, that he was even acting on the wild theory he had propounded to me. I knew too that it was the left eye that he was trying to shut out.

  Miss Hartigan retired to rest early that night with an injunction that we should follow her example. I had brought down with me to Portico House a batch of proofs to correct. So far I had not looked at them, and when I told Dan to get off to bed and leave to me the necessary locking-up, he told me that I might as well bring my things upstairs. There was a table and fire in his study.

  ‘Your brooding presence—you are a broody old bird you know—may possibly induce sleep. I shan’t talk to you, When you have done your job of work, put out the light and tuck me up.’

  We went upstairs to his room. He slept in a little box-like alcove that opened out of the study and which at one time had been partitioned off by sliding panelling.

  ‘Very useful for the smugglers,’ he said. ‘There’s a trap-door in the corner from which staircase number four leads down into the kitchen. ‘ “We have our exits and our entrances and one man in his time plays many parts.” Make yourself comfortable and if you want anything you can’t find, rout around but don’t ask me. For once I’m sleepy.’

  He got into bed and watched me with a half whimsical smile.

  Correcting proofs is the dreariest of occupations, but at least it keeps the mind from wandering. For an hour I was the slave of the galley. From time to time I looked up at Hartigan. He lay with closed eyes and presently his regular breathing told me that he was asleep. Then my fountain pen began to run dry. I had still a dozen slips to correct; it seemed a pity to leave my task unfinished. I
would follow Dan’s suggestion and rout around for what I wanted—a bottle of ink. Quietly I crossed the room to his desk and opened the lid. I had noticed a bottle there when I had hunted for the patience cards earlier in the evening. I took it from the pigeon-hole next to the one that contained the spectacles, closed the desk and was about to resume my seat at the table when my glance fell on Dan.

  His left eye was wide open and was watching me with a curiosity that yet lacked all recognition. At last my task was finished. I lit my candle and put out the lamp. The counterpane had slipped from the bed. I replaced it and tucked in the blankets—a curious sensation it was, while that eye still continued to stare at me.

  ‘Sleep well!’ I said to the man who was already half asleep, and as I closed the door behind me I told myself that it was probably more than I should do.

  When Dan had first invited me to Portico House I had told him that I could only get away for a couple of nights, but on the Friday morning he pressed me to stay for another day.

  ‘Your legs would thoroughly enjoy a second walk,’ he said. ‘They can’t get nearly enough exercise in town, and it looks as if the sun was going to shine on us. You really must stay. I’m almost at the end of my tether, and though last night I slept like a top it was the worst night I’ve had for weeks.’