“But you’ve seen this—you’ve really seen this yourself?”
“Oh yes, twice,” replied Herbert cheerfully. “And my sister, quite by haphazard, once saw him from the garden. She was shelling peas one evening for Sallie, and she distinctly saw him shamble out of the window here, and go shuffling along, mid-air, across the roaring washpot down below, turn sharp round the high corner of the house, sheer against the stars, in a kind of frightened hurry. And then, after five minutes” concentrated watching over the shucks, she saw him come shuffling back again—the same distraction, the same nebulous snuff colour, and a candle trailing its smoke behind him as he whisked in home.”
“And then?”
“Ah, then,” said Herbert, lagging along the bookshelves, and scanning the book-backs with eyes partially closed: he turned with lifted teapot, and refilled his visitor’s cup; “then, wherever you are—I mean,” he added, cutting up a little cake into six neat slices, “wherever the chance inmate of the room happens to be, he comes straight for you, at a quite alarming velocity, and fades, vanishes, melts, or, as it were, silts inside.”
Lawford listened in a curious hush that had suddenly fallen over his mind. ‘“Fades inside? silts?"—I’m awfully stupid, but what on earth do you mean?” The room had slowly emptied itself of daylight; its own darkness, it seemed, had met that of the narrowing night, and Herbert deliberately lit a cigarette before replying. His clear pale face, with its smooth outline and thin mouth and rather long dark eyes, turned with a kind of serene good-humour towards his questioner.
“Why,” he said, “I mean frankly just that. Besides, it’s Grisel’s own phrase; and an old nurse we used to have said much the same. He comes, or IT comes towards you, first just walking, then with a kind of gradually accelerated slide or glide, and sweeps straight into you,” he tapped his chest, “me, whoever it may be is here. In a kind of panic, I suppose, to hide, or perhaps simply to get back again.”
“Get back where?”
“Be resumed, as it were, via you. You see, I suppose he is compelled to regain his circle, or Purgatory, or Styx, whatever you like to call it, via consciousness. No one present, then no revenant or spook, or astral body, or hallucination: what’s in a name? And of course even an hallucination is mind-stuff, and on its own, as it were. What I mean is that the poor devil must have some kind of human personality to get back through in order to make his exit from our sphere of consciousness into his. And naturally, of course to make his entrance too. If like a tenuous smoke he can get in, the probability is that he gets out in precisely the same fashion. For really, if you weren’t consciously expecting the customary impact (you actually jerk forward in the act of resistance unresisted), you would not notice his going. I am afraid I must be horribly boring you with all these tangled theories. All I mean is, that if you were really absorbed in what you happened to be doing at the time, the thing might come and go, with your mind for entrance and exit, as it were, without your being conscious of it at all.” There was a longish pause, in which Herbert slowly inhaled and softly breathed out his smoke.
“And what—what is the poor wretch searching FOR? And what—why, what becomes of him when he does go?”
“Ah, there you have me! One merely surmises just as one’s temperament or convictions lean. Grisel says it’s some poor derelict soul in search of peace—that the poor beggar wants finally to die, in fact, and can’t. Sallie smells crime. After all, what is every man?” he talked on; “a horde of ghosts—like a Chinese nest of boxes—oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front—in our ancestors, back and back, until—”
‘“Until?’“ Lawford managed to remark.
“Ah, that settles me again. Don’t they call it an amoeba? But really I am abjectly ignorant of all that kind of stuff. We are ALL we are, and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is after all just what the old boy said—it’s only the impossible that’s credible; whatever credible may mean....”
It seemed to Lawford as if the last remark had wafted him bodily into the presence of his kind, blinking, intensely anxious old friend, Mr Bethany. And what leagues asunder the two men were who had happened on much the same words to express their convictions.
He drew his hand gropingly over his face, half rose, and again seated himself. “Whatever it may be,” he said, ‘the whole thing reminds me, you know—it is in a way so curiously like my own—my own case.”
Herbert sat on, a little drawn up in his chair, quietly smoking. The crash of the falling water, after seeming to increase in volume with the fading of evening, had again died down in the darkness to a low multitudinous tumult as of countless inarticulate, echoing voices.
‘“Bizarre," you said; God knows I am.” But Herbert still remained obdurately silent. “You remember, perhaps,” Lawford faintly began again, “our talk the other night?”
“Oh, rather,” replied the cordial voice out of the dusk.
“I suppose you thought I was insane?”
“Insane!” There was a genuinely amused astonishment in the echo. “You were lucidity itself. Besides—well, honestly, if I may venture, I don’t put very much truck in what one calls one’s sanity: except, of course, as a bond of respectability and a means of livelihood.”
“But did you realise in the least from what I said how I really stand? That I went down into that old shadowy hollow one man, and came back—well—this?”
“I gathered vaguely something like that. I thought at first it was merely an affectation—that what you said was an affectation, I mean—until—well, to be frank, it was the ‘this" that so immensely interested me. Especially,” he added almost with a touch of gaiety, “especially the last glimpse. But if it’s really not a forbidden question, what precisely was the other? What precise manner of man, I mean, came down into Widderstone?”
“It is my face that is changed, Mr Herbert. If you’ll try to understand me—my FACE. What you see now is not what I really am, not what I was. Oh, it is all quite different. I know perfectly well how absurd it must sound. And you won’t press me further. But that’s the truth: that’s what they have done for me.”
It seemed to Lawford as if a remote tiny shout of laughter had been suddenly caught back in the silence that had followed this confession. He peered in vain in the direction of his companion. Even his cigarette revealed no sign of him. “I know, I know,” he went gropingly on; “I felt it would sound to you like nothing but frantic incredible nonsense. YOU can’t see it. YOU can’t feel it. YOU can’t hear these hooting voices. It’s no use at all blinking the fact; I am simply on the verge, if not over it, of insanity.”
“As to that, Mr Lawford,” came the still voice out of the darkness; ‘the very fact of your being able to say so seems to me all but proof positive that you’re not. Insanity is on another plane, isn’t it? in which one can’t compare one’s states. As for what you say being credible, take our precious noodle of a spook here! Ninety-nine hundredths of this amiable world of ours would have guffawed the poor creature into imperceptibility ages ago. To such poor credulous creatures as my sister and I he is no more and no less a fact, a personality, an amusing reality than—well, this teacup. Here we are, amazing mysteries both of us in any case; and all round us are scores of books, dealing just with life, pure, candid, and unexpurgated; and there’s not a single one among them but reads like a taradiddle. Yet grope between the lines of any autobiography, it’s pretty clear what one has got—a feeble, timid, creeping attempt to describe the indescribable. As for what you say your case is, the bizarre—that kind very seldom gets into print at all. In all our make-believe, all our pretence, how, honestly, could it? But there, this is immaterial. The real question is, may I, can I help? What I gather is this: You just trundled down into Widderstone all among the dead men, and—but one moment, I’ll light up.”
A light flickered up in the dark. Shading it in his han
d from the night air straying through the open window, Herbert lit the two candles that stood upon the little chimneypiece behind Lawford’s head. Then sauntering over to the window again, almost as if with an affectation of nonchalance, he drew one of the shutters, and sat down. “Nothing much struck me,” he went on, leaning back on his hands, “I mean on Sunday evening, until you said goodbye. It was then that I caught in the moon a distinct glimpse of your face.”
“This,” said Lawford, with a sudden horrible sinking of the heart.
Herbert nodded. “The fact is, I have a print of it,” he said.
“A print of it?”
“A miserable little dingy engraving.”
“Of this?” Herbert nodded, with eyes fixed. “Where?”
“That’s the nuisance. I searched high and low for it the instant I got home. For the moment it has been mislaid; but it must be somewhere in the house and it will turn up all in good time. It’s the frontispiece of one of a queer old hotchpotch of pamphlets, sewn up together by some amateur enthusiast in a marbled paper cover—confessions, travels, trials and so on. All eighteenth century, and all in French.”
“And mine?” said Lawford, gazing stonily across the candlelight.
Herbert, from a head slightly stooping, gazed back in an almost birdlike fashion across the room at his visitor.
“Sabathier’s,” he said.
“Sabathier’s!”
“A really curious resemblance. Of course, I am speaking only from memory; and perhaps it’s not quite so vivid in this light; but still astonishingly clear.”
Lawford sat drawn up, staring at his companion’s face in an intense and helpless silence. His mouth opened but no words came.
“Of course,” began Herbert again, “I don’t say there’s anything in it—except the—the mere coincidence,” he paused and glanced out of the open casement beside him. “But there’s just one obvious question. Do you happen to know of any strain of French blood in your family?”
Lawford shut his eyes, even memory seemed to be forsaking him at last. “No,” he said, after a long pause, ‘there’s a little Dutch, I think, on my mother’s side, but no French.”
“No Sabathier, then?” said Herbert, smiling. “And then there’s another question—this change; is it really as complete as you suppose? Has it—please just warn me off if I am in the least intruding—has it been noticed?”
Lawford hesitated. “Oh, yes,” he said slowly, “it has been noticed—my wife, a few friends.”
“Do you mind this infernal clatter?” said Herbert, laying his fingers on the open casement.
“No, no. And you think?”
“My dear fellow, I don’t think anything. It’s all the craziest conjecture. Stranger things even than this have happened. There are dozens here—in print. What are we human beings after all? Clay in the hands of the potter. Our bodies are merely an inheritance, packed tight and corded up. We have practically no control over their main functions. We can’t even replace a little fingernail. And look at the faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of any kind of image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion, fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent convulsive effort from outside one’s body might change. It answers with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions today, and may be nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford, consider man’s abysmal impudence.” He smoked on in silence for a moment. “You say you fell asleep down there?”
Lawford nodded. Herbert tapped his cigarette on the sill. “Just following up our ludicrous conjecture, you know,” he remarked musingly, “it wasn’t such a bad opportunity for the poor chap.”
“But surely,” said Lawford, speaking as it were out of a dream of candle-light and reverberating sound and clearest darkness, towards this strange deliberate phantom with the unruffled clear-cut features—“surely then, in that case, he is here now? And yet, on my word of honour, though every friend I ever had in the world should deny it, I am the same. Memory stretches back clear and sound to my childhood. I can see myself with extraordinary lucidity, how I think, my motives and all that; and in spite of these voices that I seem to hear, and this peculiar kind of longing to break away, as it were, just to press on—it is I,—I myself, that am speaking to you now out of this—this mask.”
Herbert glanced reflectively at his companion. “You mustn’t let me tire you,” he said; “but even on our theory it would not necessarily follow that you yourself would be much affected. It’s true this fellow Sabathier really was something of a personality. He had a rather unusual itch for life, for trying on and on to squeeze something out of experience that isn’t there; and he seemed never to weary of a magnificent attempt to find in his fellow-creatures, especially in the women he met, what even—if they have it—they cannot give. The little book I wanted to show you is partly autobiographical and really does manage to set the fellow on his feet. Even there he does absolutely take one’s imagination. I shall never forget the thrill of picking him up in the Charing Cross Road. You see, I had known the queer old tombstone for years. He’s enormously vivid—quite beyond my feebleness to describe, with a kind of French verve and rapture. Unluckily we can’t get nearer than two years to his death. I shouldn’t mind guessing some last devastating dream swept over him, held him the breath of an instant too long beneath the wave, and he caved in. We know he killed himself; and perhaps lived to regret it ever after.
“After all, what is this precious dying we talk so much about?” Herbert continued after a while, his eyes restlessly wandering from shelf to shelf. “You remember our talk in the churchyard? We all know that the body fades quick enough when its occupant is gone. Supposing even in the sleep of the living it lies very feebly guarded. And supposing in that state some infernally potent thing outside it, wandering disembodied, just happens on it—like some hungry sexton beetle on the carcass of a mouse. Supposing—I know it’s the most outrageous theorising—but supposing all these years of sun and dark, Sabathier’s emanation, or whatever you like to call it, horribly restless, by some fatality longing on and on just for life, or even for the face, the voice, of some "impossible she" whom he couldn’t get in this muddled world, simply loathing all else; supposing he has been lingering in ambush down beside those poor old dusty bones that had poured out for him such marrowy hospitality—oh, I know it; the dead do. And then, by a chance, one quiet autumn evening, a veritable godsend of a little Miss Muffet comes wandering down under the shade of his immortal cypresses, half asleep, fagged out, depressed in mind and body, perhaps: imagine yourself in his place, and he in yours!” Herbert stood up in his eagerness, his sleek hair shining. ‘the one clinching chance of a century! Wouldn’t you have made a fight for it? Wouldn’t you have risked the raid? I can just conceive it—the amazing struggle in that darkness within a darkness; like some dazed alien bee bursting through the sentinels of a hive; one mad impetuous clutch at victory; then the appalling stirring on the other side; the groping back to a house dismantled, rearranged, not, mind you, disorganised or disintegrated....” He broke off with a smile, as if of apology for his long, fantastic harangue.
Lawford sat listening, his eyes fixed on Herbert’s colourless face. There was not a sound else, it seemed, than that slightly drawling scrupulous voice poking its way amid a maze of enticing, baffling thoughts. Herbert turned away with a shrug. “It’s tempting stuff,” he said, choosing another cigarette. “But anyhow, the poor beggar failed.”
“Failed?”
“Why, surely; if he had succeeded I should not now be talking to a mere imperfect simulacrum, to the outward illusion of a passing likeness to the man, but to Sabathier himself!” His eyes moved slowly round and dwelt for a moment with a dark, quiet scrutiny on his visitor.
“You say a passing likeness; do you MEAN that?”
&
nbsp; Herbert smiled indulgently. “If one CAN mean what is purely a speculation. I am only trying to look at the thing dispassionately, you see. We are so much the slaves of mere repetition. Here is life—yours and mine—a kind of plenum in vacuo. It is only when we begin to play the eavesdropper; when something goes askew; when one of the sentries on the frontier of the unexpected shouts a hoarse "Qui vive?"—it is only then we begin to question; to prick our aldermen and pinch the calves of our kings. Why, who is there can answer to anybody’s but his own satisfaction just that one fundamental question—Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures, or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust? As for identity or likeness or personality, we have only our neighbours” nod for them, and just a fading memory. No, the old fairy tales knew better; and witchcraft’s witchcraft to the end of the chapter. Honestly, and just of course on that one theory, Lawford, I can’t help thinking that Sabathier’s raid only just so far succeeded as to leave his impression in the wax. It doesn’t, of course, follow that it will necessarily end there. It might—it may be even now just gradually fading away. It may, you know, need driving out—with whips and scorpions. It might, perhaps, work in.”
Lawford sat cold and still. “It’s no good, no good,” he said, “I don’t understand; I can’t follow you. I was always stupid, always bigoted and cocksure. These things have never seemed anything but old women’s tales to me. And now I must pay for it. And this Nicholas Sabathier; you say he was a blackguard?”
The Altar of the Dead And Other Morbid Tales Page 25