Clutching in panic at the bar in front of her, she raised herself to her feet, turned, and stumbling unsteadily along from seat to seat, leaned close over the man, the conductor, where he sat by the yawning door. ‘Where am I?’ she called at him. ‘Where are we going to? What is wrong?’
He did not stir. Only his eyes cold and blue as turquoises in his face, quietly lifted themselves and confronted her own, as if in some long-postponed and secret assignation. She thrust out her scrap of paper. He stared at it, but still said nothing. And she in turn continued to watch him, appalled yet not astonished.
‘I want to stop,’ she called at last. ‘I want to get out. There was someone …’ It was as if the driver had himself been expecting the summons. The pace of the coach had instantly slackened, the wheels drew to a standstill.
‘All I want to know is where we are – what has happened?’ she called. ‘But there,’ her voice had softened as if she were addressing a child, ‘I am sorry – sorry. I see you are ill. You, too, have suffered!’ But had she spoken, or merely supposed that she had spoken? As if in unspeakable relief, his eyelids gently obscured again the bright blue eyes. He had resumed, it seemed, an inexhaustible reverie.
Her handbag clutched under her elbow, she descended from the coach. But before she could advance even a pace or two towards the driver, she heard the grinding of the gears; and the low, stertorous throbbing of the engine – so near and inward that it seemed a pulsation in her own body rather than a movement from the outer world – had become audible once more. He mustn’t let that stop for long, she muttered cajolingly to herself; and smiled as if amused at the notion. And already, in utter silence now, the coach had vanished round the turn of the road.
It was odd that she should be less horrified, and even less confused now that she was alone, as completely alone, indeed, as a derelict ship at sea – a ship abandoned by her crew. She hesitated an instant, her eyes fixed on the constellation of the Great Bear. ‘North’ – an inward voice reminded her. At which, as if bidden, she at once began to walk in its direction, while she tried her utmost to restrain that voice from making any further comment, from asking any further questions.
Instead, she kept her inward eyes fixed on the reflected image of the face, of her own face, as she had seen it in the coach window glass. After all, she argued, so long as she kept that steadily in view she was sure of all that mattered most. She couldn’t be utterly helpless, utterly astray, with her own inward eyes for guidance. You will always have someone with you, surely, so long as you have yourself, a self, she meant, still in some degree triumphant however dreadfully cowed at – well, at this kind of experience!
The death-still, leafless woods to her left hand had begun to thin a little, and presently high iron gates, shielded, it appeared, with coats of arms, revealed themselves, glistening faintly in the gloom. But not with dew. She had realized this instantly. They were coated with the winter night’s first faint hoar-frost. She could detect the tiny, delicate crunch of the crystals even beneath her gloved fingers as she stood pondering, her hand clasping the iron bar. And at its cold, she had become suddenly as completely detached from her surroundings as a character who has escaped from a story.
A dense avenue of evergreen trees – ilex? holly? yew? – lay beyond the iron bars, a cave of impenetrable darkness. Still, this, too, was quite simple. She would go in. It seemed indeed that her dream in the coach from which she had been so rudely awakened had prepared her for this – and even for what might lie in wait.
The hinges made no sound at all as she pushed the gate open. It was as if they had been carefully oiled for her coming. There must be a well-kept and an old house beyond this, she thought to herself. Her foot fell silently on the gravel, owing, she supposed, to the moss beneath her shoe; since there were no weeds, and the turf fell gently away to its neatly trimmed edges under the dark prodigious branches. It occurred to her that ages, ages ago, she had once looked down into a place as full as this of stones. She could have counted them, although the place itself was past recollection; and very cold.
She fancied, too, she could discern wheel-marks; and even these dim rounded pebbles glimmered with the stars. So she went on, one urgent question on her lips. Apart from the diffused and dusky starshine, there was no light at all under the porch. To take breath she had paused again, her eyes on the iron bell-pull.
‘“Emmeline”,’ she whispered to herself. ‘“Emmeline”, I must remember that!’
And then the door had swung gently open, as if into a softly glowing cavern of light, dazzling at first after the dark, like Ali Baba’s. At which she secretly smiled to herself, for she had been on the very point of saying to the man who had so immediately answered her summons, Sesame! when but an instant before she had been steadily reminding herself to say, Emmeline.
Although not a single feature of it was perceptible, somewhere, somewhere, she had seen this dark lean meditative face before – these clothes even, the dove-grey waistcoat, the funereal morning coat. And, while she strove in vain to place this memory, she heard herself explaining, while he quietly listened – a face, however vigilant, that one could never suspect of eavesdropping! – that there had been an accident, a dreadful accident, and that the coach had gone on. ‘You see, I’m really not sure, not at all sure, where I am; and – and what I am. Would, do you think, this be of any help?’
It was absurdly unconventional, she knew that well enough, talking to this butler-man as though he were her father confessor; but then what does one expect in such crises as these? She might have read of it all in a book.
The man had solemnly nodded over the scrap of paper – much too solemnly to be really convincing. He might have come out of one of the Alices! ‘Yes, madam,’ he said. And now she had been definitely reminded of something real – of an hotel, of a busy entrance hall, and of someone actually with her there whom she knew very well indeed, but who was out of sight, behind her.
‘Yes, madam; this is right. This is the house. Have you any luggage?’
It seemed so preposterously meaningless a question that she had been quite unable to inquire what ‘house’ – how could it possibly be the house – before she had found herself following her guide’s sinister coat-tails as he moved on swiftly and silently in front of her, as if on wheels, over the paving stones. Paving stones! Emmeline watched them closely, as she followed him, trying, like a child, with the utmost care to avoid stepping on the cracks between them. A strange house indeed, and yet again one not wholly unfamiliar. The hall, the succession of rooms, the corridors through which she followed on, were all of stone, nothing but frigid lifeless echoing stone. It was as if a pyramid had engulfed her. Her guide then must be Cheops. She knew that name well enough – Cheops. And yet the air, while thin and stifling, was laden with the delicious odour of flowers – of spring flowers, too, beneath which, nonetheless, hung and haunted the nameless fumes of the motor-coach.
‘He seems to know his way,’ she thought to herself, ‘and soon …’ But the man had stopped, had opened a door, allowing her to pass on in front of him. ‘This is the room,’ he said. ‘My master will be here directly.’
His ‘master’! ‘But I wanted …’ she began; ‘I shouldn’t have come if …’ Her heart was throbbing now so thickly yet flutteringly – and faster far than any engine – that she could hardly utter the words. And then it was too late. The man had gone, had shut-to the door behind him. ‘My paper! My paper!’ she cried after him, in consternation.
But though she listened intently, not an echo of a footfall on the flagstones outside had answered her. She was alone again – abandoned. And this room also was of stone – floors, walls, and ceiling! and lit solely by two candles, flanking a wide chimneypiece – a chimneypiece far more closely resembling an altar stone than any she had ever seen before. And beyond it, that door-less vacancy – could that be another way out?
Out, and without an instant’s delay, and before that other, the master, came, Emmeline knew
she must get. But when, after listening again, she attempted to move, it was as if she were pushing her way through a deepening sea of heavy water, which threatened every instant to rise and engulf her. The faint light of the two candles scarcely blurred the gloom of the room beyond. But she could see there what appeared to be a bed, a bed which had no footboard and was draped with the dimly luminous whiteness of a vast sheet that hung in heavy vertical folds on either side of it down to the floor. And beneath it she knew there lay concealed what she dared not look at, and yet what also she knew with her whole soul now depended upon her. For what?
A dreadful terror seized her. She was shuddering from head to foot, as if in an unearthly cold, as though every slender bone in her body were brittle as ice. Well, she must wait a moment. That might be all that was needed. Then she would perhaps have life and strength to face this fresh ordeal. Yet all that her own heart now thirsted for was an infinite peace and silence – a nothingness – wherein to be at rest.
Besides, the Master of the House, as the man had said, might be stealing in upon her at any moment; and what kind of personage would this be, if his own servant had a face so featureless, so cold, and so indifferent?
She turned instinctively towards the light of the candles. They stood as if in mute collusion on either side of a picture, of what appeared to be a portrait – obscure and sombre. Of a more intense blackness indeed even than the star in the broken window of the coach. Whose portrait? She drew near, and, as it seemed to her, these walls, of an unendurable frigidity, heightened, as if in a dream, as she did so; so that in order to see the picture fully she had to mount the stone that stood in front of this altar-like chimneypiece, with its fireless and yawning cavity.
With extreme stealth she gently pushed one of the candlesticks a little nearer and gazed up at the picture. And, as with a sheep that has scented the slaughter-house, a sudden paroxysm of misgiving swept over her mind; and then as swiftly, in an instant, was utterly gone. This, she realized, and as plainly as if the man himself had told her so – this must be the portrait of the Master of the House. And she mustn’t stay too long to examine it because there was this other thing to do that she so much dreaded. Besides he himself would soon be here.
Nevertheless – and although the face in the portrait was as familiar to her as her own, and had been so even from her early childhood, it seemed that a complete lifetime’s scrutiny could not exhaust its mysteries, its promises. She was terrified no longer, but consoled. Indeed it was against this very consolation that, utterly weak and weary, she knew she must strive. Yet still she gazed and hungered on, her glance roving insatiably over the arch of the bare bone above the brows, the fretted exquisite zigzag sutures, like brooks in a wilderness, traversing it north and south, and east and west. Once, however familiar, she could not have endured for long the fleshlessness of this countenance, the dark double vacancy where its nostrils should have been. But to say it ‘grinned’ – those even teeth set in that narrow arc in their regular sockets – why, even its owner, Emmeline almost smiled at the conviction, would have scoffed at such an insult!
And the vacant orbits gazed back at her, tonguelessly declaring their inexhaustible resources. If you peer down into a grave, it is nothing but a black shallow four-cornered cavity dug out of the passive surface of the earth. But these inscrutable hollows, surely, conveyed an assurance of the immortal mind that had had its dwelling behind, them, even though all memory there (at which irony she again smiled softly to herself) appeared to have vanished.
‘This, Emmeline,’ she was repeating to herself, ‘this, Emmeline, is the Master of the House. This, Emmeline, is the Master of the House.’ The childish syllables sounded on in consciousness like a tiny runlet of water threading a dried-up bed of pebbles.
So engrossed had she become that, although her inward attention had for many moments been aware of the inscription beneath the portrait, she had not yet attempted to read it. And now when she endeavoured to do so, the task proved all but as difficult as had been the deciphering of the scrap of paper which she had found in her bag. And yet again like a child she was compelled to spell out the letters. The candles bathed her eyelids with their beams as she stood there, almost become a child again. ‘All hope abandon ye who enter here!’
What? What? There must be some mistake! This couldn’t be so – not after the serene silence of the blue-eyed conductor, his chin cupped in his hands. She leaned the candle closer till it guttered. No, no, not ‘all’. It was she herself who had made the mistake. It was not ‘all hope’; it was ‘no hope’. Why, then, if so, she promised the all-promising but unpromising sockets whence radiant eyes must once have shone, she need do nothing more than merely wait.
And at this, yet again the frenzied fear seized her that she must – that there was still that other ordeal to be faced, that on this depended her everlasting peace, and that in but another moment she would be too late. She seized one of the candlesticks and hastened into the further room, the stones beneath her feet seeming to withdraw themselves as she did so, so that this brief journey left her almost completely exhausted.
Come to the bed, she paused and listened, steadily surveying the shape that was now outlined there beneath her eyes. Sleeping Prince Charming, and she the Beauty! Again she smiled, but in a languid, self-pitying, wistful fashion, as if under the influence of a dense narcotic. ‘What dreams may come …’ she was whispering to herself. That was because of Yorick, of course. How cold these lips must be – would be! And did she really want to waken the sleeper? Even for his own sake? – when the Master of the House might …
Hsst! What was that? Had a door opened? A chill breath as of jonquils and of that detestable, that odious other sweetness had rilled into the room. A sickening moment of agony followed. Why try? And then suddenly she had stooped and had lifted the uppermost corner of the sheet …
And now it was not Emmeline who was the child, but this Naughty One whom she had found hiding under the sheet in the Master’s house, pretending, shamming. Cold lips, indeed! Emmeline in all her dreams had never seen a face so youthful or more lovely. It was drawing nearer to her, too, the lips a little parted as if in astonished welcome of her kiss …
And now she had really opened her eyes, to find herself gazing intently into the similitude of this very face, not a dream-face, but a real face, that of a fair young woman, her young head surmounted by a nurse’s cap, her downcast gaze fixed on the hands of a watch which she held in her right hand, the fingers of the other hand gently but firmly encircling Emmeline’s wrist. For a while Emmeline never so much as stirred. Hardly even her eyes moved except first to survey the strange spotless whiteness of the ceiling above her head, and then to slide tardily downwards and sideways until they rested on a glass-full of jonquils, that stood in the scintillating rays of a little electric lamp beside her bed. Theirs, then, was this delicious fragrance in the air. Motionless, their green stalks piercing the bright and vivid water. They refreshed her thirsty eyes – a miracle of beauty. For centuries, as it seemed – though it can but have been seconds, since the nurse herself was counting them – Emmeline then struggled to make her lips say but one word. They faltered, just like an infant’s when it is about to cry, but at last the three syllables managed to escape from them.
‘Sesame!’ she whispered, solemnly. No less solemnly the young nurse had lifted her eyelids – eyes blue as the flower of the chicory.
‘That’s better!’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of. That’s all you need say.’
‘But I must,’ began Emmeline, groping with hovering fingers over the bandage on her head, ‘I must tell you just one thing … I have been dreaming of you and – and … Who was that?’ she broke off to exclaim, as if in a momentary panic.
‘Ssh now! You must keep very, very quiet,’ said the nurse. ‘That was only the doctor.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Emmeline tremblingly drew her hand down from her head, and in so doing caught the glimmer of the sapphires on her ring f
inger. The faintest frown of perplexity masking the clear pallor of her brow, she continued for a while steadily scrutinizing them. And then – as if a curtain had soundlessly lifted in the little theatre of her mind – recognition came.
‘Look,’ she said, holding the finger up to the nurse’s inspection. ‘Is – is he … safe?’
The blue eyes hadn’t faltered. ‘Waiting,’ she replied.
‘Well – in that case,’ murmured an ever drowsier voice, ‘I am …’ – there was a long pause – ‘glad.’
And with that Emmeline had already escaped from actuality again, had fallen asleep; and not even the most vigilant and skilful of nurses can keep a chart of her patient’s dreams.
* As printed in BS (1942). First published in John O’London’s Weekly, 1 December 1934.
Cape Race*
It was still early – marvellously sharp and clear and early; and the tang of the open sea simply swept over Lettie from head to foot as she stepped over the brass-bound coaming of the doorway on to the water-darkened deck. Cooped up in her cabin, it seemed that she had been listening to the sailors swabbing down that deck for hours. ‘All through the night’, in fact. The muffled swish and thump of their mops had sounded faintly on even in her dreams as she lay, rocked in her narrow berth, between sleeping and waking. But now the deck was not only swept and garnished, it was deserted. It just dipped with its slow gentle lurch and then swam back again. And along the whole length of it there was nothing but empty chairs to be seen – chairs in a long gaping wooden row, naked and vacant, that had themselves watched out life together the whole dark through.
Just now, however, chairs as empty as possible were all the company Lettie needed, and she pushed off into the full glare of the bright windy morning. Like a guinea embedded in black sealing-wax her gold-sleeked head stood out sharply against the diamond-clear deep darkness of the sea – which, having recovered from its childish fit of rage and petulance overnight, was now with its scattering crystal foam-beads rocking itself to sleep. Even if the brine-laden breezes were not actually bragging about it, it was plain how early the morning was, for the globe of the burning sun was still low in the east, immense and refulgent, and Lettie was alone.
Short Stories 1927-1956 Page 32