There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man

by There Is a Graveyard That Dwells in Man (retail) (epub)

  Oleron had moments of deep uneasiness about this Elsie Bengough. Or rather, he was not so much uneasy about her as restless about the things she did. Chief of these was the way in which she persisted in thrusting herself into his thoughts; and, whenever he was quick enough, he sent her packing the moment she made her appearance there. The truth was that she was not merely a bore; she had always been that; it had now come to the pitch when her very presence in his fancy was inimical to the full enjoyment of certain experiences… She had no tact; really ought to have known that people are not at home to the thoughts of everybody all the time; ought in mere politeness to have allowed him certain seasons quite to himself; and was monstrously ignorant of things if she did not know, as she appeared not to know, that there were certain special hours when a man's veins ran with fire and daring and power, in which… well, in which he had a reasonable right to treat folk as he had treated that prying Barrett—to shut them out completely… But no, up she popped: the thought of her, and ruined all. Bright towering fabrics, by the side of which even those perfect, magical novels of which he dreamed were dun and grey, vanished utterly at her intrusion. It was as if a fog should suddenly quench some fair-beaming star, as if at the threshold of some golden portal prepared for Oleron a pit should suddenly gape, as if a bat-like shadow should turn the growing dawn to mirk and darkness again. Therefore, Oleron strove to stifle even the nascent thought of her.

  Nevertheless, there came an occasion on which this woman Bengough absolutely refused to be suppressed. Oleron could not have told exactly when this happened; he only knew by the glimmer of the street lamp on his blind that it was some time during the night, and that for some time she had not presented herself.

  He had no warning, none, of her coming; she just came—was there. Strive as he would, he could not shake off the thought of her nor the image of her face. She haunted him.

  But for her to come at that moment of all moments!… Really, it was past belief! How she could endure it, Oleron could not conceive! Actually, to look on, as it were, at the triumph of a Rival… Good God! It was monstrous! tact—reticence—he had never credited her with an overwhelming amount of either: but he had never attributed mere—oh, there was no word for it! Monstrous—monstrous! Did she intend thenceforward… Good God! To look on!…

  Oleron felt the blood rush up to the roots of his hair with anger against her.

  “Damnation take her!” he choked…

  But the next moment his heat and resentment had changed to a cold sweat of cowering fear. Panic-stricken, he strove to comprehend what he had done. For though he knew not what, he knew he had done something, something fatal, irreparable, blasting. Anger he had felt, but not this blaze of ire that suddenly flooded the twilight of his consciousness with a white infernal light. That appalling flash was not his—not his that open rift of bright and searing Hell—not his, not his! His had been the hand of a child, preparing a puny blow; but what was this other horrific hand that was drawn back to strike in the same place? Had he set that in motion? Had he provided the spark that had touched off the whole accumulated power of that formidable and relentless place? He did not know. He only knew that that poor igniting particle in himself was blown out, that—Oh, impossible!—a clinging kiss (how else to express it?) had changed on his very lips to a gnashing and a removal, and that for very pity of the awful odds he must cry out to her against whom he had lately raged to guard herself… guard herself…

  “Look out! ” he shrieked aloud…

  The revulsion was instant. As if a cold slow billow had broken over him, he came to to find that he was lying in his bed, that the mist and horror that had for so long enwrapped him had departed, that he was Paul Oleron, and that he was sick, naked, helpless, and unutterably abandoned and alone. His faculties, though weak, answered at last to his calls upon them; and he knew that it must have been a hideous nightmare that had left him sweating and shaking thus.

  Yes, he was himself, Paul Oleron, a tired novelist, already past the summit of his best work, and slipping downhill again empty-handed from it all. He had struck short in his life's aim. He had tried too much, had over-estimated his strength, and was a failure, a failure…

  It all came to him in the single word, enwrapped and complete; it needed no sequential thought; he was a failure. He had missed… And he had missed not one happiness, but two. He had missed the ease of this world, which men love, and he had missed also that other shining prize for which men forgo ease, the snatching and holding and triumphant bearing up aloft of which is the only justification of the mad adventurer who hazards the enterprise. And there was no second attempt. Fate has no morrow. Oleron's morrow must be to sit down to profitless, ill-done, unrequired work again, and so on the morrow after that, and the morrow after that, and as many morrows as there might be.

  He lay there, weakly yet sanely considering it.

  And since the whole attempt had failed, it was hardly worth while to consider whether a little might not be saved from the general wreck. No good would ever come of that half-finished novel. He had intended that it should appear in the autumn; was under contract that it should appear; no matter; it was better to pay forfeit to his publishers than to waste what days were left. He was spent; age was not far off; and paths of wisdom and sadness were the properest for the remainder of the journey.

  If only he had chosen the wife, the child, the faithful friend at the fireside, and let them follow an ignis fatuus—that list!…

  In the meantime it began to puzzle him exceedingly why he should be so weak, that his room should smell so overpoweringly of decaying vegetable matter, and that his hand, chancing to stray to his face in the darkness, should encounter a beard.

  “Most extraordinary!” he began to mutter to himself. “Have I been ill? Am I ill now? And if so, why have they left me alone?… Extraordinary!…”

  He thought he heard a sound from the kitchen or bathroom. He rose a little on his pillow, and listened… Ah! He was not alone, then! It certainly would have been extraordinary if they had left him ill and alone—Alone? Oh no. He would be looked after. He wouldn't be left, ill, to shift for himself. If everybody else had forsaken him, he could trust Elsie Bengough, the dearest chum he had, for that… bless her faithful heart!

  But suddenly a short, stifled, spluttering cry rang sharply out: “Paul! ”

  It came from the kitchen.

  And in the same moment it flashed upon Oleron, he knew not how, that two, three, five, he knew not how many minutes before, another sound, unmarked at the time but suddenly transfixing his attention now, had striven to reach his intelligence. This sound had been the slight touch of metal on metal— just such a sound as Oleron made when he put his key into the lock.

  “Hallo!… Who's that?” he called sharply from his bed. He had no answer.

  He called again. “Hallo!… Who's there?… Who is it?”

  This time he was sure he heard noises, soft and heavy, in the kitchen.

  “This is a queer thing altogether,” he muttered. “By Jove, I'm as weak as a kitten too… Hallo, there! Somebody called, didn't they?… Elsie! Is that you?…”

  Then he began to knock with his hand on the wall at the side of his bed.

  “Elsie!… Elsie!… You called, didn't you?… Please come here, whoever it is!…”

  There was a sound as of a closing door, and then silence. Oleron began to get rather alarmed.

  “It may be a nurse,” he muttered; “Elsie'd have to get me a nurse, of course. She'd sit with me as long as she could spare the time, brave lass, and she'd get a nurse for the rest… But it was awfully like her voice… Elsie, or whoever it is!… I can't make this out at all. I must go and see what's the matter…”

  He put one leg out of bed. Feeling its feebleness, he reached with his hand for the additional support of the wall…

  But before putting out the other leg he stopped and considered, picking at his new-found beard. He was suddenly wondering whether he dared go into the kitchen.
It was such a frightfully long way; no man knew what horror might not leap and huddle on his shoulders if he went so far; when a man has an over-mastering impulse to get back into bed he ought to take heed of the warning and obey it.

  Besides, why should he go? What was there to go for? If it was that Bengough creature again, let her look after herself; Oleron was not going to have things cramp themselves on his defenceless back for the sake of such a spoilsport as she! If she was in, let her let herself out again, and the sooner the better for her! Oleron simply couldn't be bothered. He had his work to do. On the morrow, he must set about the writing of a novel with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning…

  He let go the wall and fell back into bed again as—oh, unthinkable!—the other half of that kiss that a gnash had interrupted was placed (how else convey it?) on his lips, robbing him of very breath…

  XII

  In the bright June sunlight a crowd filled the square, and looked up at the windows of the old house with the antique insurance marks in its walls of red brick and the agents’ notice-boards hanging like wooden choppers over the paling. Two constables stood at the broken gate of the narrow entrance-alley, keeping folk back. The women kept to the outskirts of the throng, moving now and then as if to see the drawn red blinds of the old house from a new angle, and talking in whispers. The children were in the houses, behind closed doors.

  A long-nosed man had a little group about him, and he was telling some story over and over again; and another man, little and fat and wide-eyed, sought to capture the long-nosed man's audience with some relation in which a key figured.

  “…and it was revealed to me that there'd been something that very afternoon,” the long-nosed man was saying. “I was standing there, where Constable Saunders is—or rather, I was passing about my business, when they came out. There was no deceiving me, oh, no deceiving me! I saw her face…”

  “What was it like, Mr Barrett?” a man asked.

  “It was like hers whom our Lord said to, ‘Woman, doth any man accuse thee?’—white as paper, and no mistake! Don't tell me!… And so I walks straight across to Mrs Barrett, and ‘Jane,’ I says, ‘this must stop, and stop at once; we are commanded to avoid evil,’ I says, ‘and it must come to an end now; let him get help elsewhere.’ And she says to me, ‘John,’ she says, ‘it's four-and-sixpence a week’—them was her words. ‘Jane,’ I says, ‘if it was forty-six thousand pounds it should stop’… and from that day to this she hasn't set foot inside that gate.”

  There was a short silence: then,

  “Did Mrs Barrett ever… see anythink, like?” somebody vaguely inquired.

  Barrett turned austerely on the speaker.

  “What Mrs Barrett saw and Mrs Barrett didn't see shall not pass these lips; even as it is written, keep thy tongue from speaking evil,” he said.

  Another man spoke.

  “He was pretty near canned up in the Waggon and Horses that night, weren't he, Jim?”

  “Yes, ’e ’adn't ’alf copped it…”

  “Not standing treat much, neither; he was in the bar, all on his own…”

  “So ’e was, we talked about it…”

  The fat, scared-eyed man made another attempt.

  “She got the key off of me—she ’ad the number of it—she came into my shop of a Tuesday evening…”

  Nobody heeded him.

  “Shut your heads,” a heavy labourer commented gruffly, “she hasn't been found yet. ’Ere's the inspectors; we shall know more in a bit.”

  Two inspectors had come up and were talking to the constables who guarded the gate. The little fat man ran eagerly forward, saying that she had bought the key of him. “I remember the number, because of it's being three one's and three three's—111333!” he exclaimed excitedly.

  An inspector put him aside.

  “Nobody's been in?” he asked of one of the constables.

  “No, sir.”

  “Then you, Brackley, come with us; you, Smith, keep the gate. There's a squad on its way.”

  The two inspectors and the constable passed down the alley and entered the house. They mounted the wide carved staircase.

  “This don't look as if he'd been out much lately,” one of the inspectors muttered as he kicked aside a litter of dead leaves and paper that lay outside Oleron's door. “I don't think we need knock— break a pane, Brackley.”

  The door had two glazed panels; there was a sound of shattered glass; and Brackley put his hand through the hole his elbow had made and drew back the latch.

  “Faugh!”… choked one of the inspectors as they entered. “Let some light and air in, quick. It stinks like a hearse—”

  The assembly out in the square saw the red blinds go up and the windows of the old house flung open.

  “That's better,” said one of the inspectors, putting his head out of a window and drawing a deep breath. “That seems to be the bedroom in there; will you go in, Simms, while I go over the rest?… ” They had drawn up the bedroom blind also, and the waxy-white, emaciated man on the bed had made a blinker of his hand against the torturing flood of brightness. Nor could he believe that his hearing was not playing tricks with him, for there were two policemen in his room, bending over him and asking where “she” was. He shook his head.

  “This woman Bengough… goes by the name of Miss Elsie Bengough… d’ye hear? Where is she?… No good, Brackley; get him up; be careful with him; I'll just shove my head out of the window, I think…”

  The other inspector had been through Oleron's study and had found nothing, and was now in the kitchen, kicking aside an ankle-deep mass of vegetable refuse that cumbered the floor. The kitchen window had no blind, and was overshadowed by the blank end of the house across the alley. The kitchen appeared to be empty.

  But the inspector, kicking aside the dead flowers, noticed that a shuffling track that was not of his making had been swept to a cupboard in the corner. In the upper part of the door of the cupboard was a square panel that looked as if it slid on runners. The door itself was closed.

  The inspector advanced, put out his hand to the little knob, and slid the hatch along its groove.

  Then he took an involuntary step back again.

  Framed in the aperture, and falling forward a little before it jammed again in its frame, was something that resembled a large lumpy pudding, done up in a pudding-bag of faded browny red frieze.

  “Ah!” said the inspector.

  To close the hatch again he would have had to thrust that pudding back with his hand; and somehow he did not quite like the idea of touching it. Instead, he turned the handle of the cupboard itself. There was weight behind it, so much weight that, after opening the door three or four inches and peering inside, he had to put his shoulder to it in order to close it again. In closing it he left sticking out, a few inches from the floor, a triangle of black and white check skirt.

  He went into the small hall.

  “All right!”

  he called.

  They had got Oleron into his clothes. He still used his hands as blinkers, and his brain was very confused. A number of things were happening that he couldn't understand. He couldn't understand the extraordinary mess of dead flowers there seemed to be everywhere; he couldn't understand why there should be police officers in his room; he couldn't understand why one of these should be sent for a four-wheeler and a stretcher; and he couldn't understand what heavy article they seemed to be moving about in the kitchen—his kitchen…

  “What's the matter?” he muttered sleepily…

  Then he heard a murmur in the square, and the stopping of a four-wheeler outside. A police officer was at his elbow again, and Oleron wondered why, when he whispered something to him, he should run off
a string of words— something about “used in evidence against you.” They had lifted him to his feet, and were assisting him towards the door…

  No, Oleron couldn't understand it at all.

  They got him down the stairs and along the alley. Oleron was aware of confused angry shoutings; he gathered that a number of people wanted to lynch somebody or other. Then his attention became fixed on a little fat frightened-eyed man who appeared to be making a statement that an officer was taking down in a notebook. “I'd seen her with him… they was often together she came into my shop and said it was for him… I thought it was all right… 111333 the number was,” the man was saying.

  The people seemed to be very angry; many police were keeping them back; but one of the inspectors had a voice that Oleron thought quite kind and friendly. He was telling somebody to get somebody else into the cab before something or other was brought out; and Oleron noticed that a four-wheeler was drawn up at the gate. It appeared that it was himself who was to be put into it; and as they lifted him up he saw that the inspector tried to stand between him and something that stood behind the cab, but was not quick enough to prevent Oleron seeing that this something was a hooded stretcher. The angry voices sounded like a sea; something hard, like a stone, hit the back of the cab; and the inspector followed Oleron in and stood with his back to the window nearer the side where the people were. The door they had put Oleron in at remained open, apparently till the other inspector should come; and through the opening Oleron had a glimpse of the hatchet-like “To Let” boards among the privet-trees. One of them said that the key was at Number Six…

  Suddenly the raging of voices was hushed. Along the entrance-alley shuffling steps were heard, and the other inspector appeared at the cab door.

  “Right away,” he said to the driver.

  He entered, fastened the door after him, and blocked up the second window with his back. Between the two inspectors Oleron slept peacefully. The cab moved down the square, the other vehicle went up the hill. The mortuary lay that way.