The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  A score of rabid snouts budded through the gloom before him. He clutched at the hilt. Some latent memory, perhaps, of the stinging thrash of the weapon it looked upon kept the pack at bay a moment. But clutch and tear as the priest might, the blade would not come forth. The lust of hatred that had sheathed it, wet with the life of its victim, had recoiled upon itself. Corporal Lacoste still claimed his sword – claimed it by testimony of his blood, that had dried upon it, gluing it within its scabbard.

  A low laugh issued from the thick of the pack – an unearthly bark confusedly blended of the utterance of beast and man. It was as if some one brute, intelligent above its fellows, had realised the humour of the situation.

  A grey snout, grinning and slavering from a single long tooth, came nozzling itself through the herd.

  The priest screamed and fell upon his knees.

  THE GLASS BALL

  It happened in the winter of 1881 (said my friend). You remember that winter? It began to freeze hard early in November, and the frost never fairly broke until the second or third week in March. I had come up to town by the South-Western Railway, travelling through a white and windless country; and the cold was stupefying. I lay most of the way in a sort of torpor, gelid from toe to brain, and only just sensible of the still and silent flow of things outside the window. A desolate day, with hardly a human shape aboard to emphasise its loneliness. I don’t know if I slept at all. I was alone in my compartment, and in a sort of mental stupor, as I say. And then suddenly I was awake and staring. It was snowing outside, and something had spoken to me – or tried to speak. There was an impression in my brain as of a little, black, leaning figure, infinitely small as if infinitely distant – a mere oblique accent on the sheeted immensity of things – of a staggered white face, of a loud, subconscious voice. And here, without and within, were only void and running silence. I shook, as one shakes escaping by a hair’s-breadth the insidious clutch of a nightmare. It had been a nightmare, I supposed, of the kind that discovers a minute rent in the veil over the unseen, synchronously with some malefic horror on the further side. And, as always, the rent had been closed, only just timely for me. Such dreams are momentarily demoralising: oddly enough the fear of this one dwelt with me for days. I could not shake off its memory, in the tremor of which was mingled, nevertheless, a strange emotion like pity. Imagine some lone survivor in the Arctic wastes uttering instinctively, as he sinks to his death, that call for human aid which none, even the most daring, may forego at the last. For some nameless reason that image, or its like, hung constantly in my mind, until presently it wrought in me an only half-reluctant desire to have my dream again. What, I thought, if that dreadful approaching face seen through the rent had been addressed to me not in malignity, but in an agony of supplication?

  That was a morbid fancy, resolutely to be dismissed. A few strenuous days in London promised to see the last of it. Christmas was near, and with it an engagement to a family of young relatives, who would certainly expect seasonable presents. I prepared for the sacrifice.

  It was then that the name of John Trent swam suddenly into my field of mental vision, and with a click, stood focused there. Who was John Trent? I knew no more than that he was a lost gentleman, whose whereabouts his family, or lawyers, or natural representatives were daily seeking through advertisement in the papers and police-stations. It was only one case like fifty others, and there was no known reason why it should suddenly absorb my attention. Yet quite unaccountably it did. Each morning I turned for first news to that reiterated paragraph in the agony column offering money for whatsoever information as to the movements of the vanished John Trent. He had last been seen, it appeared, on the afternoon of my journey to London (perhaps it was that slight coincidence which attracted me), when he had left his lodgings at Winchfield for a walk; and thereafter he had been seen no more. Some later particulars gave his age as forty, his disposition as solitary, his temper as peculiar and inclined to rashness. He had been something wont, in the past, to self-obliterations, it seemed; yet hardly after this senseless fashion. And there the tale of him ended.

  One afternoon I walked down to the Lowther Arcade, then drearily existent, to effect my purchases. It was all a long medley of toys and fancy stuff from which to select; but I chose with an eye to meetness and economy, even down to the baby, on whose behalf I had the inspiration to buy a glass snowing-ball. You know the sort? I hadn’t seen one since I was a child myself, and I was delighted. There is a man inside, with a little wintry landscape, and a Swiss châlet, and when you turn the ball upside down and round again, thick snow is falling. That is the rule, but I observed at once that the specimen I received from the superior young lady was an exception to the rule. It had inside it only the solitary figure of a man, and the man was skating. Yes, he skated actually, moving in little swoops and circles over a sheet of ice which seemed to dissect the ball; and as he skated the snow fell.

  I stood staring stupidly and, as I stared, the man went through the ice and disappeared.

  ‘That’s different from the others,’ I said loudly to the girl. I suppose my tone startled her; I’m sure it startled me. ‘Is it?’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’ And no more it was. When I looked again at the thing in my hand, there were the peasant and the châlet, and the little landscape, all correct and all motionless in their places.

  I didn’t buy the ball, but something else; and from the Arcade I went straight to the nearest police-station where, among the posted bills, figured that relating to the disappearance of John Trent. ‘I think,’ I said to the inspector, ‘I can tell you where he is. He is under the ice in Fleet pond.’

  And so he was; and thence they dragged him when the bitter frost came to an end. The little oblique accent on the whirling white sheet half seen, half dreamt, by me, the mortal expression, the loud cry – they had all represented the fate of John Trent skating, like a madman, solitary and unsuspected, on that vast plane of ice beside the track. He had gone insanely to his doom, on that stark, inhuman day, without a word to, and unseen by, a solitary soul save myself, and by me only in that exchange of sub-conscious recognitions which obliterates intervening space. To mine alone, in all that running, close-shut train, had his been able to appeal – yet with what purpose from such a man?

  I think I know. He had a young child – one – legitimately and wholly dependent on him. Until they could produce certain evidence that he, John Trent, was dead and not merely disappeared, that child would be a beggar. And that was why he had wanted his fate to be definitely known – why, to my still deficient understanding, he had turned its little inmates out of their glass snowing-house, and had taken their place.

  POOR LUCY RIVERS

  The following story was told to a friend – with leave, conditionally, to make it public – by a well-known physician who died last year.

  I was in Paul’s typewriting exchange (says the professional narrator), seeing about some circulars I required, when a young lady came in bearing a box, the weight of which seemed to tax her strength severely. She was a very personable young woman, though looking ill, I fancied – in short, with those diathetic symptoms which point to a condition of hysteria. The manager, who had been engaged elsewhere, making towards me at the moment, I intimated to him that he should attend to the newcomer first. He turned to her.

  ‘Now, madam?’ said he.

  ‘I bought this machine second-hand of you last week,’ she began, after a little hesitation. He admitted his memory of the fact. ‘I want to know,’ she said, ‘if you’ll change it for another.’

  ‘Is there anything wrong with it, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said; ‘No!’ she said; ‘Everything!’ she said, in a crescendo of spasms, looking as if she were about to cry. The manager shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Very reprehensible of us,’ said he; ‘and hardly our way. It is not customary; but, of course – if it doesn’t suit – to give satisfaction—’ he cleared his throat.

  ‘I don’
t want to be unfair,’ said the young woman. ‘It doesn’t suit me. It might another person.’

  He had lifted, while speaking, its case off the typewriter, and now, placing the machine on a desk, inserted a sheet or two of paper, and ran his fingers deftly over the keys.

  ‘Really, madam,’ said he, removing and examining the slip, ‘I can detect nothing wrong.’

  ‘I said – perhaps – only as regards myself.’

  She was hanging her head, and spoke very low.

  ‘But!’ said he, and stopped – and could only add the emphasis of another deprecatory shrug.

  ‘Will you do me the favour, madam, to try it in my presence?’

  ‘No,’ she murmured; ‘please don’t ask me. I’d really rather not.’ Again the suggestion of strain – of suffering.

  ‘At least,’ said he, ‘oblige me by looking at this.’

  He held before her the few lines he had typed. She had averted her head during the minute he had been at work; and it was now with evident reluctance, and some force put upon herself, that she acquiesced. But the moment she raised her eyes, her face brightened with a distinct expression of relief.

  ‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m sure it’s all my fault. But – but, if you don’t mind. So much depends on it.’

  Well, the girl was pretty; the manager was human. There were a dozen young women, of a more or less pert type, at work in the front office. I dare say he had qualified in the illogic of feminine moods. At any rate, the visitor walked off in a little with a machine presumably another than that she had brought.

  ‘Professional?’ I asked, to the manager’s resigned smile addressed to me.

  ‘So to speak,’ said he. ‘She’s one of the “augment her income” class. I fancy it’s little enough without. She’s done an occasional job for us. We’ve got her card somewhere.’

  ‘Can you find it?’

  He could find it, though he was evidently surprised at the request – scarce reasonably, I think, seeing how he himself had just given me an instance of that male inclination to the attractive, which is so calculated to impress women in general with the injustice of our claims to impartiality.

  With the piece of pasteboard in my hand, I walked off then and there to commission ‘Miss Phillida Gray’ with the job I had intended for Paul’s. Psychologically, I suppose, the case interested me. Here was a young person who seemed, for no practical reason, to have quarrelled with her unexceptionable means to a livelihood.

  It raised more than one question; the incompleteness of woman as a wage earner, so long as she was emancipated from all but her fancifulness; the possibility of the spontaneous generation of soul – the divina particula aurae – in man-made mechanisms, in the construction of which their makers had invested their whole of mental capital. Frankenstein loathed the abortion of his genius. Who shall say that the soul of the inventor may not speak antipathetically, through the instrument which records it, to that soul’s natural antagonist? Locomotives have moods, as any engine-driver will tell you; and any shaver, that his razor, after maltreating in some fit of perversity one side of his face, will repent, and caress the other as gently as any sucking-dove.

  I laughed at this point of my reflections. Had Miss Gray’s typewriter, embodying the soul of a blasphemer, taken to swearing at her?

  It was a bitterly cold day. Snow, which had fallen heavily in November, was yet lying compact and unthawed in January. One had the novel experience in London of passing between piled ramparts of it. Traffic for some two months had been at a discount; and walking, for one of my years, was still so perilous a business that I was long in getting to Miss Gray’s door.

  She lived West Kensington way, in a ‘converted flat’, whose title, like that of a familiar type of Christian exhibited on platforms, did not convince of anything but a sort of paying opportunism. That is to say, at the cost of some internal match-boarding, roughly fitted and stained, an unlettable private residence, of the estimated yearly rental of forty pounds, had been divided into two ‘sets’ at thirty-five apiece – whereby fashion, let us hope, profited as greatly as the landlord.

  Miss Gray inhabited the upper section, the door to which was opened by a little cockney drab, very smutty, and smelling of gas stoves.

  ‘Yes, she was in.’ (For all her burden, ‘Phillida’, with her young limbs, had outstripped me.) ‘Would I please to walk up?’

  It was the dismallest room I was shown into – really the most unattractive setting for the personable little body I had seen. She was not there at the moment, so that I could take stock without rudeness. The one curtainless window stared, under a lid of fog, at the factory-like rear of houses in the next street. Within was scarce an evidence of dainty feminine occupation. It was all an illustration of the empty larder and the wolf at the door. How long would the bolt withstand him? The very walls, it seemed, had been stripped for sops to his ravening – stripped so nervously, so hurriedly, that ribbons of paper had been flayed here and there from the plaster. The ceiling was falling; the common grate cold; there was a rag of old carpet on the floor – a dreary, deadly place! The typewriter – the new one – laid upon a little table placed ready for its use, was, in its varnished case, the one prominent object, quite healthy by contrast. How would the wolf moan and scratch to hear it desperately busy, with click and clang, building up its paper rampart against his besieging!

  I had fallen of a sudden so depressed, into a spirit of such premonitory haunting, that for a moment I almost thought I could hear the brute of my own fancy snuffling outside. Surely there was something breathing, rustling near me – something—

  I grunted, shook myself, and walked to the mantelpiece. There was nothing to remark on it but a copy of some verses on a sheet of notepaper; but the printed address at the top, and the signature at the foot of this, immediately caught my attention. I trust, under the circumstances (there was a coincidence here), that it was not dishonest, but I took out my glasses, and read those verses – or, to be strictly accurate, the gallant opening quatrain – with laudable coolness. But inasmuch as the matter of the second and third stanzas, which I had an opportunity of perusing later, bears upon one aspect of my story, I may as well quote the whole poem here for what it is worth.

  Phyllis, I cannot woo in rhyme,

  As courtlier gallants woo,

  With utterances sweet as thyme

  And melting as the dew.

  An arm to serve; true eyes to see;

  Honour surpassing love;

  These, for all song, my vouchers be,

  Dear love, so thou’lt them prove.

  Bid me – and though the rhyming art

  I may not thee contrive—

  I’ll print upon thy lips, sweetheart,

  A poem that shall live.

  It may have been derivative; it seemed to me, when I came to read the complete copy, passable. At the first, even, I was certainly conscious of a thrill of secret gratification. But, as I said, I had mastered no more than the first four lines, when a rustle at the door informed me that I was detected.

  She started, I could see, as I turned round. I was not at the trouble of apologising for my inquisitiveness.

  ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘I saw you at Paul’s Exchange, got your address, and came on here. I want some circulars typed. No doubt you will undertake the job?’

  I examined her narrowly while I spoke. It was obviously a case of neurasthenia – the tendril shooting in the sunless vault. But she had more spirit than I calculated on. She just walked across to the empty fireplace, collared those verses, and put them into her pocket. I rather admired her for it.

  ‘Yes, with pleasure,’ she said, sweetening the rebuke with a blush, and stultifying it by affecting to look on the mantelpiece for a card, which eventually she produced from another place. ‘These are my terms.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘What do you say to a contra account – you to do my work, and I to set my professional attendance agains
t it? I am a doctor.’

  She looked at me mute and amazed.

  ‘But there is nothing the matter with me,’ she murmured, and broke into a nervous smile.

  ‘O, I beg your pardon!’ I said. ‘Then it was only your instrument which was out of sorts?’

  Her face fell at once.

  ‘You heard me – of course,’ she said. ‘Yes, I – it was out of sorts, as you say. One gets fancies, perhaps, living alone, and typing – typing.’

  I thought of the discordant clack going on hour by hour – the dead words of others made brassily vociferous, until one’s own individuality would become emerged in the infernal harmonies.

  ‘And so,’ I said, ‘like the dog’s master in the fable, you quarrelled with an old servant.’

  ‘O, no!’ she answered. ‘I had only had it for a week – since I came here.’

  ‘You have only been here a week?’

  ‘Little more,’ she replied. ‘I had to move from my old rooms. It is very kind of you to take such an interest in me. Will you tell me what I can do for you?’

  My instructions were soon given. The morrow would see them attended to. No, she need not send the copies on. I would myself call for them in the afternoon.

  ‘I hope this machine will be more to the purpose,’ I said.

  ‘I hope so, too,’ she answered.

  ‘Well, she seems a lady,’ I thought, as I walked home; ‘a little anaemic flower of gentility.’ But sentiment was not to the point.

  That evening, ‘over the walnuts and the wine’, I tackled Master Jack, my second son. He was a promising youth; was reading for the Bar, and, for all I knew, might have contributed to the ‘Gownsman’.

  ‘Jack,’ I said, when we were alone, ‘I never knew till today that you considered yourself a poet.’

  He looked at me coolly and inquiringly, but said nothing.

  ‘Do you consider yourself a marrying man, too?’ I asked.