Tales from the Dead of Night
Page 7
Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host’s knee. ‘Look here! I’m mentioning it for the last time – positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you assured me last night, but I just want –’
Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man’s hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets, said, ‘Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?’
The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.
‘I am so glad! That’s splendid! Splendid! I hope you won’t think me ridiculous, but I’ve always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to know you better. I’ve admired your talent so greatly. That novel of yours – the – the – the one about the aloe –’
‘The Bitter Aloe?’
‘Ah, yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time.’
‘Yes, it ought to have done better.’
‘Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end.’
‘Yes, my time will come.’
The thin, piping voice went on: ‘Now, I’ve had more success than I deserved. Oh yes, I have. You can’t deny it. I’m not falsely modest. I mean it. I’ve got some talent, of course, but not so much as people say. And you! Why, you’ve got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only – I do hope you’ll forgive my saying this – perhaps you haven’t advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate – always raining – why, you’re out of things! You don’t see people, don’t talk and discover what’s really going on. Why, look at me!’
Fenwick turned round and looked at him.
‘Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays; and then I’m three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now, that’s an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way.’
Italy or Greece or somewhere!
Something turned in Fenwick’s breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how passionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies … And how this fool, this fathead, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronising …
He got up, looking out at the golden sun.
‘What do you say to a walk?’ he suggested. ‘The sun will last for a good hour yet.’
III
As soon as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster’s arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the broad silver shield of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some recumbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said, ‘You have some further design in this.’
They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water’s edge. Across the lake tones of bright yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.
The very way that Foster walked bespoke the man. He was always a little ahead of you, pushing his long, thin body along with little eager jerks, as though, did he not hurry, he would miss something that would be immensely to his advantage. He talked, throwing words over his shoulder to Fenwick as you throw crumbs of bread to a robin.
‘Of course I was pleased. Who would not be? After all, it’s a new prize. They’ve only been awarding it for a year or two, but it’s gratifying – really gratifying – to secure it. When I opened the envelope and found the cheque there – well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. You could, indeed. Of course, a hundred pounds isn’t much. But it’s the honour –’
Whither were they going? Their destiny was as certain as though they had no free will. Free will? There is no free will. All is Fate. Fenwick suddenly laughed aloud.
Foster stopped.
‘Why, what is it?’
‘What’s what?’
‘You laughed.’
‘Something amused me.’
Foster slipped his arm through Fenwick’s.
‘It is jolly to be walking along together like this, arm in arm, friends. I’m a sentimental man. I won’t deny it. What I say is that life is short and one must love one’s fellow beings, or where is one? You live too much alone, old man.’ He squeezed Fenwick’s arm. ‘That’s the truth of it.’
It was torture, exquisite, heavenly torture. It was wonderful to feel that thin, bony arm pressing against his. Almost you could hear the beating of that other heart. Wonderful to feel that arm and the temptation to take it in your hands and to bend it and twist it and then to hear the bones crack … crack … crack … Wonderful to feel that temptation rise through one’s body like boiling water and yet not to yield to it. For a moment Fenwick’s hand touched Foster’s. Then he drew himself apart.
‘We’re at the village. This is the hotel where they all come in the summer. We turn off at the right here. I’ll show you my tarn.’
IV
‘Your tarn?’ asked Foster. ‘Forgive my ignorance, but what is a tarn exactly?’
‘A tarn is a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.’
‘I should like to see that.’
‘It is some little distance – up a rough road. Do you mind?’
‘Not a bit. I have long legs.’
‘Some of them are immensely deep – unfathomable – nobody touched the bottom – but quiet, like glass, with shadows only –’
‘Do you know, Fenwick, I have always been afraid of water – I’ve never learned to swim. I’m afraid to go out of my depth. Isn’t that ridiculous? But it is all because at my private school, years ago, when I was a small boy, some big fellows took me and held me with my head under the water and nearly drowned me. They did indeed. They went further than they meant to. I can see their faces.’
Fenwick considered this. The picture leaped to his mind. He could see the boys – large, strong fellows, probably – and this skinny thing like a frog, their thick hands about his throat, his legs like grey sticks kicking out of the water, their laughter, their sudden sense that something was wrong, the skinny body all flaccid and still –
He drew a deep breath.
Foster was walking beside him now, not ahead of him, as though he were a little afraid and needed reassurance. Indeed, the scene had changed. Before and behind them stretched the uphill path, loose with shale and stones. On their right, on a ridge at the foot of the hill, were some quarries, almost deserted, but the more melancholy in the fading afternoon because a little work still continued there; faint sounds came from the gaunt listening chimneys, a stream of water ran and tumbled angrily into a pool below, once and again a black silhouette, like a question mark, appeared against the darkening hill.
It was a little steep here and Foster puffed and blew.
Fenwick hated him the more for that. So thin and spare, and still he could not keep in condition! They stumbled, keeping below the quarry, on the edge of the running water, now green, now a dirty white-grey, pushing their way along the side of the hill.
Their faces were set now towards Helvellyn. It rounded the cup of hills, closing in the base and then sprawling to the right.
Foster stumbled and caught Fenwick’s arm.
‘This twilight makes the hills look strange – like living men. I can scarcely see my way.’
‘We’re alone here,’ Fenwick answered. ‘Don’t you feel the stillness? The men will have left the quarry now and gone home. There is no one in all this place but ourselves. If you watch you will see a strange green light steal down over the hills. It lasts for but a moment and then it is dark.
‘Ah, here is my tarn. Do you know how I love this place, Foster? It seems to belong especially to me, just as much as all your work and your glory and fame and success seem to belong to you. I have this and you have that. Perhaps in the end we are even, after all. Yes …
‘But I feel as though that piece of water belonged to me and I to it, and as though we should never be separated – yes … Isn’t it black?
‘It is one of the deep ones. No one has ever sounded it. Only Helvellyn knows, and one day I fancy that it will take me, too, into its confidence, will whisper its secrets –’
Foster sneezed.
‘Very nice. Very beautiful, Fenwick. I like your tarn. Charming. And now let’s turn back. That is a difficult walk beneath the quarry. It’s chilly, too.’
‘Do you see that little jetty there?’ Fenwick led Foster by the arm. ‘Someone built that out into the water. He had a boat there, I suppose. Come and look down. From the end of the little jetty it looks so deep and the mountains seem to close round.’
Fenwick took Foster’s arm and led him to the end of the jetty. Indeed, the water looked deep here. Deep and very black. Foster peered down, then he looked up at the hills that did indeed seem to have gathered close around him. He sneezed again.
‘I’ve caught a cold, I am afraid. Let’s turn homewards, Fenwick, or we shall never find our way.’
‘Home, then,’ said Fenwick, and his hands closed about the thin, scraggy neck. For the instant the head half turned, and two startled, strangely childish eyes stared; then, with a push that was ludicrously simple, the body was impelled forward, there was a sharp cry, a splash, a stir of something white against the swiftly gathering dusk, again and then again, then far-spreading ripples, then silence.
V
The silence extended. Having enwrapped the tarn, it spread as though with finger on lip to the already quiescent hills. Fenwick shared in the silence. He luxuriated in it. He did not move at all. He stood there looking upon the inky water of the tarn, his arms folded, a man lost in intensest thought. But he was not thinking. He was only conscious of a warm, luxurious relief, a sensuous feeling that was not thought at all.
Foster was gone – that tiresome, prating, conceited, self-satisfied fool! Gone, never to return. The tarn assured him of that. It stared back into Fenwick’s face approvingly as though it said, ‘You have done well – a clean and necessary job. We have done it together, you and I. I am proud of you.’
He was proud of himself. At last he had done something definite with his life. Thought, eager, active thought, was beginning now to flood his brain. For all these years he had hung around in this place doing nothing but cherish grievances, weak, backboneless – now at last there was action. He drew himself up and looked at the hills. He was proud – and he was cold. He was shivering. He turned up the collar of his coat. Yes, there was that faint green light that always lingered in the shadows of the hills for a brief moment before darkness came. It was growing late. He had better return.
Shivering now so that his teeth chattered, he started off down the path, and then was aware that he did not wish to leave the tarn. The tarn was friendly – the only friend he had in all the world. As he stumbled along in the dark this sense of loneliness grew. He was going home to an empty house. There had been a guest in it last night. Who was it? Why, Foster, of course – Foster with his silly laugh and amiable, mediocre eyes. Well, Foster would not be there now. No, he never would be there again.
And suddenly Fenwick started to run. He did not know why, except that, now that he had left the tarn, he was lonely. He wished that he could have stayed there all night, but because it was cold he could not, and so now he was running so that he might be at home with the lights and the familiar furniture – and all the things that he knew to reassure him.
As he ran the shale and stones scattered beneath his feet. They made a tit-tattering noise under him, and someone else seemed to be running too. He stopped, and the other runner also stopped. He breathed in the silence. He was hot now. The perspiration was trickling down his cheeks. He could feel a dribble of it down his back inside his shirt. His knees were pounding. His heart was thumping. And all around him the hills were so amazingly silent, now like India-rubber clouds that you could push in or pull out as you do those India-rubber faces, grey against the night sky of a crystal purple, upon whose surface, like the twinkling eyes of boats at sea, stars were now appearing.
His knees steadied, his heart beat less fiercely, and he began to run again. Suddenly he had turned the corner and was out at the hotel. Its lamps were kindly and reassuring. He walked then quietly along the lake-side path, and had it not been for the certainty that someone was treading behind him he would have been comfortable and at his ease. He stopped once or twice and looked back, and once he stopped and called out, ‘Who’s there?’ Only the rustling trees answered.
He had the strangest fancy, but his brain was throbbing so fiercely that he could not think, that it was the tarn that was following him, the tarn slipping, sliding along the road, being with him so that he should not be lonely. He could almost hear the tarn whisper in his ear, ‘We did that together, and so I do not wish you to bear all the responsibility yourself. I will stay with you, so that you are not lonely.’
He climbed down the road towards home, and there were the lights of his house. He heard the gate click behind him as though it were shutting him in. He went into the sitting room, lighted and ready. There were the books that Foster had admired.
The old woman who looked after him appeared.
‘Will you be having some tea, sir?’
‘No, thank you, Annie.’
‘Will the other gentleman be wanting any?’
‘No; the other gentleman is away for the night.’
‘Then there will be only one for supper?’
‘Yes, only one for supper.’
He sat in the corner of the sofa and fell instantly into a deep slumber.
VI
He woke when the old woman tapped him on the shoulder and told him that supper was served. The room was dark save for the jumping light of two uncertain candles. Those two red candlesticks – how he hated them up there on the mantelpiece! He had always hated them, and now they seemed to him to have something of the quality of Foster’s voice – that thin, reedy, piping tone.
He was expecting at every moment that Foster would enter, and yet he knew that he would not. He continued to turn his head towards the door, but it was so dark there that you could not see. The whole room was dark except just there by the fireplace, where the two candlesticks went whining with their miserable twinkling plaint.
He went into the dining room and sat down to his meal. But he could not eat anything. It was odd – that place by the table where Foster’s chair should be. Odd, naked, and made a man feel lonely.
He got up once from the table and went to the window, opened it and looked out. He listened for something, A trickle as of running water, a stir, through the silence, as though some deep pool were filling to the brim. A rustle in the trees, perhaps. An owl hooted. Sharply, as though someone had spoken unexpectedly behind his shoulder, he closed the windows and looked back, peering under his dark eyebrows into the room.
Later on he went up to his bed.
VII
Had he been sleeping, or had he been lying lazily, as one does, half dozing, half luxuriously not thinkin
g? He was wide awake now, utterly awake, and his heart was beating with apprehension. It was as though someone had called him by name. He slept always with his window a little open and the blind up. Tonight the moonlight shadowed in sickly fashion the objects in his room. It was not a flood of light nor yet a sharp splash, silvering a square, a circle, throwing the rest into ebony darkness. The light was dim, a little green, perhaps, like the shadow that comes over the hills just before dark.
He stared at the window, and it seemed to him that something moved there. Within, or rather against the green-grey light, something silver-tinted glistened. Fenwick stared. It had the look, exactly, of slipping water.
Slipping water! He listened, his head up, and it seemed to him that from beyond the window he caught the stir of water, not running, but rather welling up and up, gurgling with satisfaction as it filled and filled.
He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause and then slip, slither down the incline. The odd thing was that it fell so silently.
Beyond the window there was that odd gurgle, but in the room itself absolute silence. Whence could it come? He saw the line of silver rise and fall as the stream on the window ledge ebbed and flowed.
He must get up and close the window. He drew his legs above the sheets and blankets and looked down.
He shrieked. The floor was covered with a shining film of water. It was rising. As he looked it had covered half the short stumpy legs of the bed. It rose without a wink, a bubble, a break! Over the sill it poured now in a steady flow, but soundless. Fenwick sat up in the bed, the clothes gathered up to his chin, his eyes blinking, the Adam’s apple throbbing like a throttle in his throat.