The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  He was cried out on for his heresy to his own art – for his confession of its soullessness.

  ‘Soul,’ he contended at that, ‘is not wanted in art, nor is religion; but only the five unperturbed and explorative senses. Pan, I think, would have made the ideal artist.’

  I saw Howick, who was sitting silently apart, suddenly hug himself at these words, bending forward and stiffening his lips, as a man does who mutely traverses a sentiment he is too shy or too superior to discuss. I did not know which it was with him; but inclined to the latter. There was something bonily professorial in his aspect.

  While we were talking Lamont came in. He had not appeared at dinner, and I had not yet seen him. He was a compact, stubby man, in astigmatic glasses, and very dark, with a cleft chin, and a resolute mouth under a moustache in keeping with his strong, thick eyebrows. He gave me somehow in the connection a feeling of much greater fitness than did Penn-Howard. There was no expression of the esprit-fort about him, and I got an idea that, though only the technical collaborator, the right atmosphere of the book, if and when it appeared, would be due more to him than to the other. He spoke little, but authoritatively; and I remember he told us that night some queer things about photography – such, for instance, as its mysterious relation to something in light-rays, which was not heat and was not light, and yet like light could reveal the hidden, as a mirror reveals to one the objects out of sight behind one’s back. Thence, touching upon astral charts and composite portraits by the way, he came to his illustration, which was creepy enough. He had once for some reason, it appeared, taken a post-mortem photograph. The man, the subject, had cut in life a considerable figure in the parliamentary world as an advanced advocate of social and moral reform, and had died in the odour of political sanctity. In securing the negative, circumstances had necessitated a long exposure; but accident had contrived a longer and a deadlier, in the double sense. The searchlight of the lens, being left concentrated an undue time on the lifeless face, had discovered things hitherto impenetrable and unguessed-at. The nature of the real horror had been drawn through the superimposing veil, and the revelation of what had been existing all the time under the surface was not pleasant. The photograph had not appeared in the illustrated paper for which it was intended, and Lamont had destroyed the negative.

  So he told us, in a forcible, economic way which was more effective than much verbal adornment; and again my attention was caught by Howick, who seemed dwelling upon the speaker’s words with an expression quite arresting in its ungainly intensity. Later on I saw the two in earnest conversation together.

  That was in October, and I left Hawkesbury on the following day. Full ten months passed before I saw Penn-Howard again; and then one hot evening towards dusk he walked into my chambers in Brick Court and asked for a cigarette.

  He seemed distraught, withdrawn, like a man who, having something on his mind, was pondering an uncompromising way of relief from it. Quite undesignedly and inevitably I gave him his cue by asking how the book progressed. He heaved out a great, smoke-laden sigh at once, stirred, drew up and dropped his shoulders, and looked at the fiery point of his cigarette before replacing the butt between his lips.

  ‘O, the book!’ he said. ‘It’s ready for the press, so far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘And Lamont?’

  ‘Yes, and J.B.’

  He got up, paced the width of the room and back, and stood before me, alternately drawing at and withdrawing his cigarette.

  ‘There’s one thing that won’t go into it,’ he said, his eyes suggesting a rather forced evasion of mine.

  ‘O! What’s that?’

  Again, as if doubtful of himself, he turned to tramp out his restlessness or agitation; thought better of it, and sat resolutely down in a chair against the dark end of the bookcase.

  ‘Would you care to know?’ he said. ‘Truth is, I came to tell you – if I could; to ask your opinion on the thing. There’s the comfort of the judicial brain about you: I can imagine, like a client, that simply to confide one’s case to such is to feel relieved of a load of responsibility. It won’t go into the book, I say; but I want it to go out of me. I’m too full of it for comfort.’

  ‘Of it? Of what?’

  ‘What?’ he said, as if in a sudden spasm of violence. ‘I wish to God you’d tell me.’

  He sat moodily silent for some minutes, and I did nothing to help him out. A hot, sour air came in by the open window, and the heavy red curtains shrank and dilated languidly in it, as if they were the lungs of the stifling room. Outside the dusty roar of the traffic went on unceasingly, with a noise like that of overhead machinery. I was feeling stale and tired, and wished, in the Rooseveltian phrase, that Penn-Howard would either get on or get out.

  ‘It’s a queer thing, isn’t it,’ he said suddenly, with an obvious effort, ‘that of all the stuff collected for that book you were speaking of, the only authentic instance for which I can personally vouch is the only instance to be excluded? All the rest was on hearsay.’

  ‘Well, you surprise me,’ I said, quietly, after a pause. ‘Not because any authentic instance, about which I know nothing, is excluded, but because, by your own confession, there is one to exclude.’

  ‘I know what you mean, of course,’ he answered; and quoted: ‘“But, spite of all the criticising elves, those who would make us feel must feel themselves.” Quite right. I never really believed in supernatural influences. Do I now? That is what I want you to decide for me.’

  He laughed slightly; sighed again, and seemed rather to shrink into his dusky corner.

  ‘I’m going to tell you at a run,’ he said. ‘Bear with me, like an angelic fellow. You remember that man Howick at Lady Caroon’s?’

  ‘Yes, quite well.’

  ‘It seemed, when he learnt our business, Lamont’s and mine, that there was something he wished to tell us. He pitched upon J.B. as the more responsible partner; and I’m not sure he wasn’t right.’

  ‘Nor am I.’

  ‘O! you aren’t, are you? Well, Jemmy was my choice, anyhow, and for the sake of the qualities you think I lack. He has a way of getting behind things – always had, even at Oxford. Some men seem to know the trick by instinct. He is a very queer sort, and the featest with the camera of any one I’ve ever seen or heard of. It was for that reason I asked him to come – to get the ghostliest possible out of ghostly buildings and haunted rooms. You remember what he told us that night? I’ve seen some of his spirit photographs, though without feeling convinced. But his description of that dead face! My God! I thought at the time he was just improvising to suit the occasion; but—’

  He stopped abruptly. There was something odd here. It was evident that, for an unknown reason, the thought of that time was not the thought of this. I detected an obvious emotion, quite strange to it, in Penn-Howard’s voice. His face, from our positions and the dusk, was almost hidden from me. I made no comment; and thenceforth he spoke on uninterruptedly, while the room slowly darkened about us as we sat.

  ‘Howick wanted us, at the end of our visit, to go with him to his house. Something was happening there, he said, for which he was unable to account. We could not, however, consent, owing to our engagements; but we undertook to include him sooner or later in our ghostly itinerary. He was obliged; but, being so put off, would give us no clue to the nature of the mystery which was disturbing him. As it turned out, we had no choice but to take Haggarts the very last on our list.’

  ‘That is the name of his place?’

  ‘Yes. It sounds a bit thin and eerie, doesn’t it? but in point of fact, I believe, haggart is a local word for hawthorn. We went there last of all, and we went there intending to stay a night, and we stayed seven. It was a queer business; and I come to you fresh from it.

  ‘The estate lies slap in the middle of Hampshire. To reach it you alight at a country station which might serve roughly on the map for the hub of the county wheel. The train slides from a tunnel into a ravine of chalk, deep and dazzling
, and you have to get on a level with the top of that ravine; and there at once you find immeasurable silence and loneliness. Nothing in my home peregrinations has struck me more forcibly than the real insignificance of urban expansion in its relation to the country as a whole. Towns, however they grow and multiply, remain but inconsiderable freckles on that vast open countenance. Outside the City man’s possible radius, and excepting the great manufacturing centres, two miles, one mile beyond the boundary of ninety-nine towns out of a hundred will find you in pastoral solitudes apparently limitless. Here, with Winchester lying but eight miles southward, it was so. From the top of the tunnel we had just penetrated came into view, first a wilderness of thorn-scattered downs, dipping steeply and ruggedly into the railway cutting, then an endlessly extended panorama of wood and waste and field, seemingly houseless and hamletless, and broken only by the white scars of roads, mounting few and far like the crests of waves on a desert sea. Howick had sent a car to meet us, and we switchbacked on monotonously, by unrailed pastures, by woody bottoms, by old hedges grey with dust and draggled with straw. We saw the house long before we headed for it – a strange, ill-designed structure standing out by itself in the fields. It was an antique moat-house, disproportionately tall for its area, and its front flanked by a couple of brick towers, one squat, one lofty. One wound about the lanes to reach it, having it now at this side, now at that, now fairly at one’s back, until suddenly it came into close view, a building far more grandiose and imposing than one had surmised. There was the ancient moat surrounding it, and much water channelling the flats about. But there was evidence too, at close quarters, of what one had not guessed – rich, quiet gardens, substantial outbuildings, and a general atmosphere of prosperity.

  ‘An odd, remote place, but in itself distinctly attractive. And Howick did us well. You remember him? A tall stick of a fellow, without a laugh to his whole anatomy, and the hair gone from his temples at thirty; but with the grand manner in entertaining. We had some ’47 port that night – a treat – one of a few remaining bottles laid down by his granduncle, Roger Howick, of whom more in a little. And everything was in mellow keeping – pictures, furniture, old crusted anecdote. Only our host was, for all his gracious unbending, somehow out of tone with his environments – in that connection of fruitiness, like the dry nodule on a juicy apple. Constitutionally reserved, I should think, circumstance at that time had drained him of the last capacity for spontaneity. The little fits of abstraction and the wincing starts from them; the forced conversation; the atmosphere of brooding trouble felt through his most hospitable efforts – all pointed to a state of mind which he could neither conceal nor as yet indulge. Often I detected him looking furtively at J.B., often, still more secretively, at his sister, who was the only other one present at the dinner-table.’

  For a moment Penn-Howard ceased speaking; and I heard him shift his position, as if suddenly cramped, and slightly clear his throat.

  ‘I mention her now for the first time,’ he went on presently. ‘She came in after we were seated, and there was the briefest formal introduction, of which she took no notice. She was a slender, unprepossessing woman – her brother’s senior by some ten years, I judged – with a strange, unnatural complexion, rather long, pale eyes in red rims, and a sullen manner. Responding only after the curtest fashion to any commonplaces addressed to her, she left us, much to my relief, before dessert, and we saw her no more that evening.

  ‘“Unfit for society”? Most assuredly she was. I remembered her brother’s words spoken ten months before, and concluded that nothing had occurred, since then to qualify his verdict. A most disagreeable person; unless, perhaps—

  ‘It came to me all at once: was she connected with the mystery, or the mystery with her? A ghost seer, perhaps – neurotic – a victim to hallucinations? Well, Howick had not spoken so far, and it was no good speculating. I turned to the pious discussion of the ’47.

  ‘After dinner we went into the gardens where, the night being hot and still, we lingered until the stars came out. During the whole time Howick spoke no word of our mission; but, about the hour the household turned in, he took us back to the hall – a spacious, panelled lounge between the towers – where we settled for a pipe and nightcap. And there silence, like a ghostly overture to the impending, entered our brains and we sat, as it were, listening to it.

  ‘Presently Howick got up. The strained look on his face was succeeded all at once by a sort of sombre light, odd and revealing. All sound in the house had long since ceased.

  ‘“I want you to come with me,” he said quietly.

  ‘We rose at once; and he went before, but a few paces, and opened a door.

  ‘“Yes, here,” he said, in answer to a look of J.B.’s, “quite close, quite domestic; no bogey of rat-infested corridors or tumble-down attics – no bogey at all, perhaps. It lies under the east tower, this room. When we first came here I thought to make it my study.”

  ‘He seemed to me then, and always, like a man whose strait concepts of decency had suffered some startling offence, as it might be with one into whose perfectly planned tenement had crept the insidious poison of sewer-gas. Sliding his hand along the wall, he switched on the electric light (Haggarts had its own power station), and the room leapt into being. We entered, I leading a little. You must remember I was by then a hardened witchfinder, and inured to atmospheres concocted of the imagination.

  ‘It was not a large room, and it was quite comfortable. There was a heavily clothed table in the middle, a few brass-nailed, leather-backed and seated Jacobean chairs, a high white Adams mantelpiece surmounted by a portrait, a full Chippendale bookcase to either side of it, and on the walls three or four pictures, including a second portrait, of a woman, half-length in an oval frame, which hung opposite the other.

  ‘“Miss Howick, I see,” I murmured, turning with a nod to our host. He heard me, as his eyes denoted: but he gave no answer. And then the portrait over the mantelpiece drew my attention. It was in a very poor style of art; yet somehow, one felt, crudely truthful in an amateurish way. There is a class of peripatetic painters, a sort of pedlars in portraiture among country folk, which, having a gift for likenesses, often succeeds photographically in delineating what a higher art inclines to idealise – the obvious in character. Such a one, I concluded, had worked here, painting just what he saw, and only too faithfully. For the obvious was not pleasant – a dark, pitiless face, with a brutal underlip and challenging green eyes, that seemed for ever fixed on the face on the wall opposite. It was that of a middle-aged man, lean and thin-haired, and must have dated, by the cut of its black, brass-buttoned coat, from the late Georgian era.

  ‘I turned again questioningly to Howick. This time he enlightened me. “Roger Howick,” he said, “my great-uncle. It is said he painted that himself, looking in the glass. He had a small gift. Most of the pictures in this room are by him.”

  ‘Instinctively I glanced once more towards the oval frame, and thought: “Most – but not that one.” Unmistakably it was a portrait of our host’s sister – the odd complexion, the sullen, fixed expression, the very dress and coiffure, they were all the same. I wondered how the living subject could endure the thought of that day-long, night-long stare focused for ever on her painted presentment.

  ‘And then silence ensued. We were all in the room, and not a word was spoken. I don’t know how long it lasted; but suddenly Lamont addressed me, in a quick, sharp voice:

  ‘“What’s the matter, Penn-Howard?”

  ‘The shock of the question took me like a blow out of sleep. I answered at once: “Something’s shut up here. Why don’t you let it out?”

  Howick pushed us from the room, and closed the door. “That’s it,” he said, and that was all. I felt dazed and amazed. I wanted to explain, to protest. A most extraordinary sensation like suppressed tears kept me dumb. I felt humiliated to a degree, and inclined to ease all my conflict of emotions in hysterical laughter. Curse the thing now! It makes me go hot to thi
nk of it.

  ‘Howick showed me up to my bedroom. “We’ll talk of it tomorrow,” he said, and he left me. I was glad to be alone, to get, after a few moments, resolute command of myself. I had a good night after all, and awoke, refreshed and sane, in the clear morning.

  ‘I learned, when I came downstairs, that J.B. and our host were gone out together for an early stroll in the cool. Pending their return, I came to a resolution. I would go and face the room alone, in the bright daylight. Both my pride and my principles were at stake, and I owed the effort to myself. There was nothing to prevent me. I found the door unlocked, and I went in.

  ‘There was some sunlight in the room, penetrating through a thickish shrubbery outside the two windows. I thought the place peculiarly quiet, with an atmosphere of suspense in it which suggested the inaudible whisperings of some infernal inquisition. Nothing was watching me: the green eyes of the man were fixed eternally on the face opposite; and yet I was being watched by everything. It was indescribable, maddening. Determined not to succumb to what I still insisted to myself was a mere trick of the nerves, I walked manfully up to the oval portrait to examine it at close hand. A name and date near the lower margin caught my eye – T. Lawrence, 1828. I fairly gasped, reading it. A “Lawrence”, and of that remoteness? Then it was not our host’s sister! I turned sharply, hearing light breathing – and there she was behind me.

  ‘“What are you doing here?” she said, in a small, cold voice. “Don’t you know it is my room?”

  ‘How can I convey the impression she made upon me by daylight? I can think only of one fantastic image to describe her complexion – the hands of a young laundress, puffed and mottled and mealily wrinkled after many hours work at the tub. So in this face was somehow spoilt and slandered youth, subdued, like the dyer’s hand, to “what it worked in”. And yet it was the face of the portrait, even to the dusty gold of the hair.