“It would be rather absurd to despise what one so horribly well understands. Besides, we weren’t cowards—we weren’t cowards a bit. My childhood was one long, reiterated terror—nights and nights of it. But I never had the pluck to tell anyone. No one so much as dreamt of the company I had. Ah, and you didn’t see either that my heart was absolutely in my mouth, that I was shrivelled up with fear, even at sight of the fear on your face in the dark. There’s absolutely nothing so catching. So, you see, I do know a little what nerves are; and dream too sometimes, though I don’t choose charnelhouses if I can get a comfortable bed. A coward! May I really say that to ask my help was one of the bravest things in a man I ever heard of. Bullets—that kind of courage—no real woman cares twopence for bullets. An old aunt of mine stared a man right out of the house with the thing in her face. Anyhow, whether I may or not, I do say it. So now we are quits.”
“Will you—” began Lawford, and stopped. “What I wanted to say was,” he jerked on, “it is sheer horrible hypocrisy to be talking to you like this—though you will never have the faintest idea of what it has meant and done for me. I mean... And yet, and yet, I do feel when just for the least moment I forget what I am, and that isn’t very often, when I forget what I have become and what I must go back to—I feel that I haven’t any business to be talking with you at all. "Quits!" And here I am, an outcast from decent society. Ah, you don’t know—”
She bent her head and laughed under her breath. “You do really stumble on such delicious compliments. And yet, do you know, I think my brother would be immensely pleased to think you were an outcast from decent society if only he could be thought one too. He has been trying half his life to wither decent society with neglect and disdain—but it doesn’t take the least notice. The deaf adder, you know. Besides, besides; what is all this meek talk? I detest meek talk—gods or men. Surely in the first and last resort all we are is ourselves. Something has happened; you are jangled, shaken. But to us, believe me, you are simply one of fewer friends-and I think, after struggling up Widderstone Lane hand in hand with you in the dark, I have a right to say "friends" than I could count on one hand. What are we all if we only realized it? We talk of dignity and propriety, and we are like so many children playing with knucklebones in a giant’s scullery. Come along, he will, some suppertime, for us, each in turn—and how many even will so much as look up from their play to wave us goodbye? That’s what I mean—the plot of silence we are all in. If only I had my brother’s lucidity, how much better I would have said all this. It is only, believe me, that I want ever so much to help you, if I may—even at risk, too,” she added, rather shakily, “of having that help—well—I know it’s little good.”
The lane had narrowed. They had climbed the arch of a narrow stone bridge that spanned the smooth dark Widder. A few late starlings were winging far above them. Darkness was coming on apace. They stood for awhile looking down into the black flowing water, with here and there the mild silver of a star dim leagues below. “I am afraid,” said Grisel, looking quietly up, “you have led me into talking most pitiless nonsense. How many hours, I wonder, did I lie awake in the dark last night, thinking of you? Honestly, I shall never, NEVER forget that walk. It haunted me, on and on.”
“Thinking of me? Do you really mean that? Then it was not all imagination; it wasn’t just the drowning man clutching at a straw?”
The grey eyes questioned him. “You see,” he explained in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard, “it—it came back again, and—I don’t mind a bit how much you laugh at me! I had been asleep, and had had a most awful dream, one of those dreams that seem to hint that some day THAT will be our real world, that some day we may awake where dreaming then will be of this; and I woke—came back—and there was a tremendous knocking going on downstairs. I knew there was no one else in the house—”
“No one else in the house? And you like this?”
“Yes,” said Lawford, stolidly, ‘they were all out as it happened. And, of course,” he went on quickly, ‘there was nothing for me to do but simply to go down and open the door. And yet, do you know, at first I simply couldn’t move. I lit a candle, and then—then somehow I got to know that waiting for me was just—but there,” he broke off half-ashamed, “I mustn’t bother you with all this morbid stuff. Will your brother be in now, do you think?”
“My brother will be in, and, of course, expecting you. But as for "bother," believe me—well, did I quite deserve it?” She stooped towards him. “You lit a candle—and then?”
They turned and retraced their way slowly up the hill.
“It came again.”
“It?”
“That—that presence, that shadow. I don’t mean, of course, it’s a real shadow. It comes, doesn’t it, from—from within? As if from out of some unheard-of hiding place, where it has been lurking for ages and ages before one’s childhood; at least, so it seems to me now. And yet although it does come from within, there it is, too, in front of you, before your eyes, feeding even on your fear, just watching, waiting for—What nonsense all this must seem to you!”
“Yes, yes; and then?”
“Then, and you must remember the poor old boy had been knocking all this time—my old friend—Mr Bethany, I mean—knocking and calling through the letter-box, thinking I was in extremis, or something; then—how shall I describe it?—well YOU came, your eyes, your face, as clear as when, you know, the night before last, we went up the hill together. And then...”
“And then?”
“And then, we—you and I, you know—simply drove him downstairs, and I could hear myself grunting as if it was really a physical effort; we drove him, step by step, downstairs. And—” He laughed outright, and boyishly continued his adventure. “What do you think I did then, without the ghost of a smile, too, at the idiocy of the thing? I locked the poor beggar in the drawing-room. I saw him there, as plainly as I ever saw anything in my life, and the furniture glimmering, though it was pitch dark: I can’t describe it. It all seemed so desperately real, absolutely vital then. It all seems so meaningless and impossible now. And yet, although I am utterly played out and done for, and however absurd it may sound, I wouldn’t have lost it; I wouldn’t go back for any bribe there is. I feel just as if a great bundle had been rolled off my back. Of course, the queerest, the most detestable part of the whole business is that it—the thing on the stairs—was this”—he lifted a grave and haggard face towards her again—”or rather that,” he pointed with his stick towards the starry churchyard. “Sabathier,” he said.
Again they had paused together before the white gate, and this time Lawford pushed it open, and followed his companion up the narrow path.
She stayed a moment, her hand on the bell. “Was it my brother who actually put that horrible idea into your mind?—about Sabathier?”
“Oh no, not really put it into my head,” said Lawford hollowly. “He only found it there; lit it up.”
She laid her hand lightly on his arm. “Whether he did or not,” she said with an earnestness that was almost an entreaty, “of course, you MUST agree that we every one of us have some such experience—that kind of visitor, once at least, in a lifetime.” “Ah, but,” began Lawford, turning forlornly away, “you didn’t see, you can’t have realized—the change.”
She pulled the bell almost as if in some inward triumph. “But don’t you think,” she suggested, ‘that that, like the other, might be, as it were, partly imagination too? If now you thought back.”
But a little old woman had opened the door, and the sentence, for the moment, was left unfinished.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There was no one in the room, and no light, when they entered. For a moment Grisel stood by the open window, looking out. Then she turned impulsively. “My brother, of course, will ask you too,” she said; “we had made up our minds to do so if you came again; but I want you to promise me now that you won’t dream of going back tonight. That surely would be tempting—well, not Prov
idence. I couldn’t rest if I thought you might be alone; like that again.” Her voice died away into the calling of the waters. A light moved across the dingy old rows of books and as his sister turned to go out Herbert appeared in the doorway, carrying a green-shaded lamp, with an old leather quarto under his arm.
“Ah, here you are,” he said. “I guessed you had probably met.” He drew up, burdened, before his visitor. But his clear black glance, instead of wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was almost with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his book on to a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the floor. He put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next words came up muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him. “You don’t feel worse, I hope?” He got up and faced his visitor for the answer. And for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.
“No,” he said almost gaily; “I feel enormously better.” But Herbert’s long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still fixed on his face. “I am afraid, my dear fellow,” he said, with something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, ‘the struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.”
“The question is,” answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical melancholy in his voice, ‘though I am not sure that the answer very much matters—what’s going to put me together again? It’s the old story of Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in a quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?”
“What was that?” said Herbert with unfeigned curiosity.
“Why, you said even though Sabathier had failed, though I was still my own old stodgy self, that you thought the face—the face, you know, might work in. Somehow, sometimes I think it has. It does really rather haunt me. In that case—well, what then?” Lawford had himself listened to this involved explanation much as one watches the accomplishment of a difficult trick, marvelling more at its completion at all than at the difficulty involved in the doing of it.
‘“Work in,’“ repeated Herbert, like a rather blase child confronted with a new mechanical toy; “did I really say that? well, honestly, it wasn’t bad; it’s what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we are only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot’s over the threshold, it’s nine points of the law! But I don’t remember saying it.” He shamefacedly and naively confessed it: “I say such an awful lot of things. And I’m always changing my mind. It’s a standing joke against me with my sister. She says the recording angel will have two sides to my account: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—diametrically opposite convictions, and both kinds wrong. On Sundays I am all things to all men. As for Sabathier, by the way, I do want particularly to have another go at him. I’ve been thinking him over, and I’m afraid in some ways he won’t quite wash. And that reminds me, did you read the poor chap?”
“I just grubbed through a page or two; but most of my French was left at school. What I did do, though, was to show the book to an old friend of ours—my wife’s and mine—just to skim—a Mr Bethany. He’s an old clergyman—our vicar, in fact.”
Herbert had sat down, and with eyes slightly narrowed was listening with peculiar attention. He smiled a little magnanimously. “His verdict, I should think, must have been a perfect joy.”
“He said,” said Lawford, in his rather low, monotonous voice, “he said it was precious poor stuff, that it reminded him of patchouli; and that Sabathier—the print I mean—looked like a foxy old rogue. They were, I think, his exact words. We were alone together, last night.”
“You don’t mean that he simply didn’t see the faintest resemblance?”
Lawford nodded. “But then,” he added simply, “whenever he comes to see me now he leaves his spectacles at home.”
And at that, as if at some preconcerted signal, they both went off into a simple shout of laughter, unanimous and sustained.
But this first wild bout of laughter over, the first real bursting of the dam, perhaps, for years, Lawford found himself at a lower ebb than ever.
“You see,” he said presently, and while still his companion’s face was smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone, “Bethany has been absolutely my sheet-anchor right through. And I was—it was—you can’t possibly realise what a ghastly change it really was. I don’t think anyone ever will.”
Herbert opened his hand and looked reflectively into its palm before allowing himself to reply. “I wonder, you know; I have been wondering a good deal; simply taking the other point of view for a moment; WAS it? I don’t mean "ghastly" exactly (like, say, smallpox, G.P.I, elephantiasis), but was it quite so complete, so radical, as in the first sheer gust of astonishment you fancied?”
Lawford thought on a little further. “You know how one sees oneself in a passion—why, how a child looks—the whole face darkened and drawn and possessed? That was the change. That’s how it seems to come back to me. And something, somebody, dodging behind the eyes. Yes; more that than even any excessive change of feature, except, of course, that I also seemed—Shall I ever forget that first cold, stifling stare into the looking-glass! I certainly was much darker, even my hair. But I’ve told you all this before,” he added wearily, “and the scores and scores of times I’ve thought it. I used to sit up there in the big spare bedroom my wife put me up in, simply gloating. My flesh seemed nothing more than an hallucination: there I was, haunting my body, an old grinning tenement, and all that I thought I wanted, and couldn’t do without, all I valued and prided myself on—stacked up in the drizzling street below. Why, Herbert, our bodies are only glass or cloud. They melt, don’t they, like wax in the sun once we’re out. But those first few days don’t make very pleasant thinking. Friday night was the first, when I sat there like a twitching waxwork, soberly debating between Bedlam here and Bedlam hereafter. I even sometimes wonder whether its very repetition has not dulled the memory or distorted it. My wife,” he added ingenuously, ‘seems to think there are signs of a slight improvement—a going back, I mean. But I’m not sure whether she meant it.”
Herbert surveyed his visitor critically. “You say dark," he said; “but surely, Lawford, your hair now is nearly grey; well-flecked at least.”
Although the remark carried nothing comparatively of a shock with it, yet it seemed to Lawford as if an electric current had passed over his scalp, coldly stirring every hair upon his head. But somehow or other it was easier to sit quietly on, to express no surprise, to let them do or say what they liked. “Well” he retorted with an odd, crooked smile, “you must remember I am a good deal older than I was last Saturday. I grew grey in the grave, Herbert.”
“But it’s like this, you know,” said Herbert, rising excitedly, and at the next moment, on reflection, composedly reseating himself. “How many of your people actually saw it? How many owned to its being as bad, as complete, as you made out? I don’t want for a moment to cut right across what you said last night—our talk—but there are two million sides to every question, and as often as not the less conspicuous have sounder—well—roots. That’s all.”
“I think really, do you know, I would rather not go over the detestable thing again. Not many; my wife, though, and a man I know called Danton, who—who’s prejudiced. After all, I have myself to think about too. And right through, right through—there wasn’t the least doubt of that—they all in their hearts knew it was me. They knew I was behind. I could feel that absolutely always; it’s not just eyes and ears we use, there’s us ourselves to consider, though God alone knows what that means. But the password was there, as you might say; and they all knew I knew it, all—except”—he looked up as if in bewilderment—”except just one, a poor old lady, a very old friend of my mother’s, whom I—I Sabathiered!”
“Whom—you—Sabathiered!” repeated Herbert carefully, with infinite relish, looking sidelong at his visitor. “And it is just precisely
that....”
But at that moment his sister appeared in the doorway to say that supper was ready. And it was not until Herbert was actually engaged in carving a cold chicken that he followed up his advantage. “Mr. Lawford, Grisel,” he said, “has just enriched our jaded language with a new verb—to Sabathier. And if I may venture to define it in the presence of the distinguished neologist himself, it means, ‘to deal with histrionically"; or, rather, that’s what it will mean a couple of hundred years hence. For the moment it means, ‘to act under the influence of subliminalization; To perplex, or bemuse, or estrange with OTHERNESS.’ Do tell us, Lawford, more about the little old lady.” He passed with her plate a little meaningful glance at his sister, and repeated, “Do!”
“But I’ve been plaguing your sister enough already. You’ll wish...” Lawford began, and turned his tired-out eyes towards those others awaiting them so frankly they seemed in their perfect friendliness a rest from all his troubles. “You see,” he went on, “what I kept on thinking and thinking of was to get a quite unbiased and unprejudiced view. She had known me for years, though we had not actually met more than once or twice since my mother’s death. And there she was sitting with me at the other end of just such another little seat as”—he turned—to Herbert “as ours, at Widderstone. It was on Bewley Common: I can see it all now; it was sunset. And I simply turned and asked her in a kind of a whining affected manner if she remembered me; and when after a long time she came round to owning that to all intents and purposes she did not—I professed to have made a mistake in recognising her. I think,” he added, glancing up from one to the other of his two strange friends, “I think it was the meanest trick I can remember.”
“Hm,” said Herbert solemnly: “I wish I had as sensitive a conscience. But as your old friend didn’t recognise you, who’s the worse? As for her not doing so, just think of the difference a few years makes to a man, and any severe shock. Life wears so infernally badly. Who, for that matter, does not change, even in character and yet who professes to see it? Mind, I don’t say in essence! But then how many of the human ghosts one meets does one know in essence? One doesn’t want to. It would be positively cataclysmic. And that’s what brings me around to feel, Lawford, if I may venture to say so, that you may have brooded a little too keenly on—on your own case. Tell anyone you feel ill; he will commiserate with you to positive nausea. Tell any priest your soul is in danger; will he wait for proof? It’s misereres and penances world without end. Tell any woman you love her; will she, can she, should she, gainsay you? There you are. The cat’s out of the bag, you see. My sister and I sat up half the night talking the thing over. I said I’d take the plunge. I said I’d risk appearing the crassest, contradictoriest wretch that ever drew breath. I don’t deny that what I hinted at the other night must seem in part directly contrary to what I’m going to say now.”
The Altar of the Dead And Other Morbid Tales Page 30