by Dion Fortune
For a moment his heart seemed to stop, and then it began to hammer at his ribs. She was only a dozen feet ahead instead of the usual twenty or thirty yards, and even in the thickening fog could not escape him. He followed her, drawing as close as he dared, and at the first check at the traffic lights he was at her elbow. A heavy fur round her shoulders and a wide-brimmed slouch hat prevented him from seeing her face, but he had a thrilling sense of being in her atmosphere and felt himself beginning to tremble. He crossed the road almost at her side, and then judged it advisable to drop back a little lest she became aware of his presence and resented it.
So they went, one behind the other, past the Savoy and Temple and Westminster, and then, at the old stone bridge, she turned to cross the river.
For a moment the man hesitated. Even in the fog there had been enough walkers on the Embankment pavement to make his presence in-conspicuous, but it was unlikely that, even in the fog, he could follow her over Lambeth Bridge without her becoming aware of it. However, he was determined to risk it; there was nothing in his conduct she could complain of, even if she realised he had followed her from Blackfriars Bridge; his shoes had rubber heels, he could move quietly for all his stocky build, and determined to chance his luck.
The fog grew thicker and thicker as they got out into the centre of the river, and with a sudden pang he realised that he was acting like a cad. He would frighten the life out of the woman if she detected his presence. Here was he, doing the very thing for which they had blamed him at the hospital, and to the last person in the world he wished to alarm.
But she kept on her way without turning, and the centre of the river was already overpassed. In a few minutes he heard the sound of her footsteps change as she left the hollow pavement of the bridge for the Surrey-side embankment, and realised how close he had drawn to her in the fog when almost simultaneously he felt the roadway under his own feet.
The fog was thicker here, much thicker, and he had to follow her closely, but there were more people about, and his presence passed apparently unnoticed. At any rate, she never looked round.
She crossed the road, the man dropping back a little for safety's sake, and then, after an anguished moment when he thought he had lost her, getting close on her heels again, closer than he had dared to get before. Then throwing him into complete confusion, she stopped so abruptly that he nearly trod on her heels, and saw that she was about to enter a church. She paused for a moment fumbling at the latch in the darkness; then the door yielded. Hardly knowing what he did, he snatched his opportunity. If she were attending a service, why shouldn't he? He laid his arm on the door as she turned to close it, and passed through, shutting it behind him, to find pitch darkness and perfect silence. The church, if it were a church, was empty!
The man stood thunderstruck, realising his predicament; realising only too clearly how his behaviour must appear to the woman he had been following. Struggling in vain to find words to reassure her, for she must be scared to death by his behaviour—struggling in vain to find words to explain himself, for if she turned him over to the police, as she had every right to do, he was going to find himself in an exceedingly unpleasant position, with his reputation lost beyond redemption, it seemed to him that professional ruin stared him in the face. He felt cold all down his spine at the enormity of his offense. Stepping back, he groped for the door by which he had entered, but his hand ran along panelling. Swinging round, he stood awaiting developments, involuntarily clenching a fist. Then, leaving him in doubt no longer, the beam of an electric torch shone on his face.
“What is it you want?” asked a calm, level voice.
The man gave a gasp of relief.
“I—er—I thought it was a church and I came in for the service”, he stammered.
“It is not a church any longer, it is a private house,” came the calm voice. “The door is behind you if you care to go.” He turned, and she shone the beam of her torch onto the knob of a yale lock. Thankfully he grasped it, and the door swung open. Then, on the very threshold of deliverance, he again turned and paused, unable to resist the attraction she had for him. But the light shone full on his face, blinding him. She would know him again, but he had not had a single glimpse of her. He hesitated a moment, but she kept the beam of her torch steadily in his eyes, and knowing that all the cards were stacked against him, and that explanations were as undesirable as they were impossible, he hastily clapped his hat on his head and stumbled out into fog that seemed to have suddenly thickened into an impenetrable mass of flocculent murk.
By some fluke of luck he heard a taxi discharging its load a few doors down the street, and hurrying towards it, he bade its driver get him home as best he might. Eventually it did get him home, but the route was a circuitous one, and took time. Long before he arrived at his own door Dr. Malcolm had had ample opportunity to realise the kind of hot water he was liable to get himself into if he went on like this; and what with the telling-off he had had at the hospital, and the realisation of the kind of fool, and also the kind of cad, he had made of himself, his stock stood very low in his own estimation when he let himself into his dreary rooms and found little enough there to put heart into him.
A friendless and unsociable man, without hobbies or any interest outside his work, if anything succeeded in penetrating the tough epidermis with which he had encased himself, it got him very badly on the raw, for there was nothing to mitigate it; no friend with whom he could talk things over, nothing with which he could distract his mind; moreover, a man of his deadly earnestness and cast-iron sense of duty was incapable of laughing at his own foibles. The sole consolation life held for him was his dream-woman—who had just shone an electric torch in his eyes till she blinded him and given him a very broad hint that if he did not take himself off he would be handed over to the police. He knew only too well the motive of the kind of elderly satyr that pesters decent women, and probably so did she, if she were any sort of woman of the world, as her calmness in an unpleasant situation indicated; how was he to explain to her that he wasn't that kind of brute? He couldn't explain anything to her—all he could do was to leave her alone. He must sacrifice his dream along with all the other sacrifices that life had demanded of him, and stick rigidly to the one thing he knew, the one thing he could do, his professional work. The minute he left that narrow path, he was in trouble.
He walked over to the window and put back the curtain. In some way he associated the cloaked woman with the lighted church—why, he had never been able to imagine, save that he could only find her when the light was extinguished in the church across the water. He stared out into the blackness of the foggy night, but even the slight consolation of seeing the familiar light was denied him. The fog smothered everything and only a faint glow from the nearer lamps was visible.
Then suddenly an idea leapt to his mind. The woman he had followed had crossed the river and entered a church on the Surrey side. She had said that it was no longer used as a church, but had become a private house. Was it by any chance possible that the lit-up facade he had so often gazed at was her actual dwelling-place? Allowing for the curve of the river, and the way they had turned after crossing the bridge, it appeared quite possible. The capricious hours of the lighting and darkening of the window would then be explained.
Dr. Malcolm leant his elbows on the ledge of the window and tried to penetrate the impenetrable blackness by sheer concentration. He was a man accustomed to intense concentration. When at work it could easily have happened to him as to Isaac Newton, that his papers had caught fire without his noticing it. He was also a man with a vivid pictorial imagination, who could draw without reference to books or specimens any ramification of the nervous system and its anatomical background. Despite the fog, he could see the lit-up facade of the church across the water as clearly as if he stood in front of it. He could see its door, the pointed, iron-studded door of conventional modern Gothic; he could feel the cold, fog-dewed iron of the heavy latch under his hand; could feel the warm air in his fac
e as he entered on the heels of the cloaked woman—but instead of the painful debacle of actuality, he found himself, not in a church, but in a lofty and beautiful room with a large open fireplace where a fire of logs was burning. For one second he perceived it as if he actually saw it with his physical eyes, and then it vanished.
He turned away from the window, letting the curtain fall back against the gloom outside. He knew it was merely a trick of the imagination, a curious, involuntary feat of fantasy, in which his rational mind had no part; but it had wiped out the unpleasant taste left behind by his sordid adventure, and left him not merely at peace, but curiously uplifted.
He knew perfectly well that, according to all the accepted canons of psychiatry he was playing dangerous tricks with his mind; nevertheless each contact left him calmer and happier than he had been for many a long day.
He dropped into the worn leather armchair beside the fire and tried to consider the situation as objectively as he could. He had obviously built up a fantasy around the figure of a woman seen two or three times in the dusk. There was nothing out of the way in that. Plenty of imaginative men did that sort of thing. He had done it himself as a young fellow, before his marriage. Once he had become engaged to Eva, he had rigidly cut it out, or rather had limited his imaginations to her face and form, and then only within the strictest limits of propriety. He did not think he had, even in imagination, ever let himself go where women were concerned. He had made up for it, however, by some magnificent scientific battles, and was not averse to personal rumpusses with anyone who was disposed to show fight.
He saw, however, that he was within measurable distance of breaking his own rule, for although his feeling was idealised to the verge of tenuity, it was nevertheless a surprisingly strong feeling, and not one that ought to be harboured by a married man; and when it led him into following a flesh and blood woman for miles through the London streets, forcing his way into her house, and generally making an unmitigated nuisance of himself, even if no stronger term were applicable, it was decidedly not a feeling that a professional man with any regard for his career was wise to give way to. The dream must be cut out, and that was that. He had nipped complications in the bud before, and they had died stillborn and given no trouble. There had been a nurse once at the hospital, a woman medical student at one of the clinics, and—the thing of which he was most ashamed—one of Miss Humphreys’ little maids. The two former had never, he was certain, had any suspicion of the feelings they had aroused in him; the third, the little wretch, had deliberately set herself to arouse those feelings, and, to his eternal shame and amazement, had succeeded with the greatest ease. But the moment he realised what was happening he had stalked down to Miss Humphreys in her underground den and said straight out: “That girl goes, or I do, and she goes now.” and handed the startled and indignant landlady the necessary month's wages.
But cutting out his new obsession was going to be an entirely different matter. He had enjoyed her companionship for several months, had, in fact, sedulously cultivated her. Fantasy though she was, she had wrapped herself round the very roots of his being. But he had trained himself, like Napoleon, to close the drawers of his mind on their pigeon-holed subjects, and he slammed this one shut resolutely, rang for his supper, got out the papers relevant to an address he was preparing, and when his supper arrived, ate it with one hand and wrote his notes with the other, thus allowing no scope for wild beasts from Ephesus.
He worked late, but when he went to throw open the window before getting into bed, he saw through the clearing fog that the church across the water was still lit up. He turned away, trying to put the whole business out of his head by recalling certain points in his paper, but even as he switched off the bedside lamp he knew that he had as much chance of getting to sleep as he had of flying to the moon. He had a heavy day ahead of him, and a presidential address to give in the evening, and the prospect was not pleasant.
He lay flat on his back, his arms across his face, trying to get his mind under control. But it was no use, the Ephesian beasts were out of their cages.
He got out of bed and went across in his thin pyjama suit to the wide open window, where the last of the fog was blowing clammily into the room. Involuntarily he looked across the river. The light was out in the church on the Surrey side—if he yielded to the temptation he could get his lady any time he wanted her. He turned back to the bed again and sat down on its edge, elbows on knees, head in hands, and groaned aloud. Surely she was better than the beasts of Ephesus? But that was nonsense, just sophistry. It was only a matter of time before she ended at Ephesus. He had got enough sense to know that. The only thing to do was to cut the whole thing out—cut it out—cut it out.
Then suddenly, through the fingers that pressed against his eye-balls, he saw the cloaked woman face to face. She stood in the room before him. She spoke.
“Do not be disturbed. All is well.”
He lifted his head from his hands, giddy, sweating, shaken, but she was no longer there. She had gone as she had come.
He was trembling all over like a frightened horse. He could feel the sweat trickling down his chest and his thin pyjama jacket was sticking to his back. He had too much sense of risk pneumonia, and rolled into bed and lay there panting. Then there came to him, as he grew warm between the blankets, the most extraordinary sense of peace and relaxation. Muscle by muscle, the overwrought man slacked off. He turned over onto his side, almost asleep as he did so, and it seemed to him, from some configuration of the pillow, that his head lay on a woman's shoulder.
CHAPTER THREE
Next morning the fog had cleared away and Spring was in the air. At the hospital they found their formidable physician singularly vernal, which surprised no one more than himself, for no one knew better than he did the kind of wreckage left behind by such storms as that of the preceding night. He felt well disposed towards the whole world. He was glad to give the students a helping hand—explaining to them instead of cursing them for not knowing what they had come there to learn. He even achieved a kind of grim geniality towards the patients.
“Old boy's fallen in love,” was the perspicacious comment of the students. Little did they know how far from falling in love was Dr. Rupert Malcolm—that the lady in the case had turned him out of her house like a stray dog, and that he had resolved to cut her out of his life and thoughts for ever.
Nevertheless she was there—she was there like a kind of running accompaniment to all he did. He had not seen her face, so his imagination had free rein. Being himself a fair-skinned man, he naturally idealised her as a brunette. Not a lissome young girl—he could see even through the veiling cloak that she was not that, and in any case he, a hard-bitten man of forty-five, had nothing in common with young girls—but a woman in the maturity of her beauty, which is quite a different thing from girlish charm. He tried to call to mind pictures that might have resembled her, resuscitating the memories of his abortive visit to the National Gallery and determining to go there again and see if he could find a picture that would represent her to him, for he felt that only among the work of the Old Masters would he find her. She was too dynamic and natural for a Society beauty; too sophisticated and cultured for a professional of the studios.
But even as the ideas rose in rapid succession to his mind, her image came clear of its own accord, and he saw her face as a rather long, pale oval framed in blackness. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped; her nose slightly aquiline; her mouth scarlet-lipped after the modern fashion. Her eyes gazed at him steadily, velvety brown, gentle and inscrutable. He could not tell what she was thinking; he could not, fantasy how he would, picture the personality behind those eyes. She remained aloof, with her inner life concealed, and yet there was about her a kindness that was infinitely comforting to the lonely man.
He had, though his colleagues would never have believed it, an odd taste for martyrdom hidden deep in his heart. He could never feel justified to his own conscience unless he were over-driving hims
elf—denying himself minor luxuries—doing acts of impersonal service for which he neither expected nor received any thanks. As a young man his choice had fallen on a helpless, clinging little bit of prettiness whom he could cherish and protect; now that he was an older man, and beginning to get a little weary, a change had come over the spirit of his dream; he still wanted to make a martyr of himself, but he no longer desired to go pricking across the plain looking for dragons; he no longer wanted a clinging maiden in distress to minister to the ideal of manhood he was trying to realise. He wanted to be martyred after another manner; he wanted to find himself in the hands of a possessive woman who would make demands on him. He was tired of martyring himself; the satisfaction this afforded had begun to pall since he had been disillusioned with regard to his wife's need of him. He shrank from the pain of presenting any more unacceptable sacrifices; he wanted to know exactly what was required in the way of burnt offerings before he laid himself on the altar again.
And because of this, the sense of latent and aloof strength in his dream-woman appealed to him. If such a woman as that made demands on him, he would pour out his life like wine for her. Most men would hate her for being an ever-unconquerable fortress, but she delighted him.
Viewed from this angle, he decided that there was no reason why he should not day-dream about her as much as he liked; there was no disloyalty to his marriage vows in such a spirit of service. He must cut out the woman in the cape and Embankment walks, that was quite certain; but the dream was another matter. That harmed nobody, and helped him beyond all reason or belief. In his feeling for her there was nothing of sex or sensuality. She was just a dream-woman, an ideal that in some inexplicable way calmed him and soothed him and met his emotional need of a woman, not his physical one. It seemed to him, provided this aspect was kept out of it and never allowed to debase either of them, that there was no harm in enjoying imagined companionship.