Homefront Horrors

by Nevins, Jess;

  Of course I said I shouldn’t dream of stopping her, and that it was very sad—it was, indeed, appalling. But it seemed to me that, though Frances had let out so much, she was still keeping something back. And a brutal instinct made me say to her:

  “What is it, then, that you dislike so much in her?”

  She took it quite simply, as if she had been prepared for it. She even smiled as she answered: “Nothing—except her obstinacy.”

  I asked her, “Wouldn’t that be precisely what would get in my way?”

  And she said, No; May’s obstinacy would consist in keeping out of it.

  Still, I objected, obstinate people are nearly always tactless.

  And Frances said, “No, not always.” She said—dear Frances!—“I’m not obstinate. But I’m tactless, if you like. Look at the horrid mess I got us both into just now. And look how she got us out. She saved us.”

  I admitted that she had.

  And Frances finished up, triumphantly: “Can’t you trust her? Can’t you see that she’s beyond? That she really won’t be there? There never was a more effaced and self-effacing person, a person more completely self-contained. I assure you none of us exist for her. So she needn’t, really, be on your mind.”

  And she wasn’t, not for a moment, from the day of her coming till the day—Though I must say, afterward—

  To begin with, she chose a week-end for her installation—a Friday till Tuesday when I was away. I literally didn’t know that she was there, so secret and so silent was she in her movements overhead. I couldn’t have believed it possible for a woman to be so effacing and effaced. It was super-feminine; it was, as Frances said, hardly human. And yet she didn’t overdo it. I had to own that the most exquisite thing about this exquisite and queer little person was her tact. By overdoing it the least bit, by insisting on her detachment, her isolation, she would have made us disagreeably aware. When you met her on the stairs (she used to run up and down them incredibly soft-footed) she smiled and nodded at you (she had really a singularly intriguing smile) as much as to say that she was in an awful hurry, life being so full of work, of a joyous activity, but still it was lucky that we could meet like this, sometimes, on the stairs.

  And she used to come in to tea, sometimes, when I had a party. She took hardly any room in the studio, and hardly any part in the conversation, but she would smile prettily when you spoke to her; the implication being that it made her happy to be asked to tea, but it was not so necessary to her happiness that you would have to ask her often. She used to come a little late and go a little early—and yet not too early—on the plea (it sounded somehow preposterous) that she was busy. Even the poor art that kept her so was tactful. It had no embarrassing pretensions, it called for no criticism, you could look at it without sacrificing your sincerity to your politeness. And if it hadn’t been May was too well-bred ever to refer to it. And it kept her. It got itself hung, as I’ve said, now and again. Supremely tactful, it spared your pity.

  In short, she made no claim on us, unless, indeed, her courage called to us to admire the spectacle it was.

  For, when you think of the horrible things that had happened to her, the wonder was how she ever contrived to smile at all. But that was what she had effaced more than anything—the long trail of her tragedy. Her reticence was inspired by the purest, the most delicate sense of honor. It was as if she felt that it wouldn’t be playing the game, the high game of life, to appeal to us on that ground, when we couldn’t have resisted. Besides, it would have hurt, and she wouldn’t for the world have hurt us. Her subtlety, you see, was anything but malign. It was beneficent, tender, supernaturally lucid. It allowed for every motive, every shade. And we took her as she presented herself—detached, impersonal, and, as Frances said, immune.

  I said to Frances: “We needn’t have worried. You were right.”

  And Frances exulted: “Didn’t I tell you? She’s quite kind to us, but she doesn’t want us.”

  She had made us forget that we hadn’t wanted her.

  She had made me forget that I had ever said she’d do things. Even now I don’t know what on earth it was I thought she’d do.

  She had been living up in that studio, I think, three years before it happened.

  I can tell you just how it was. On the evening, rather late, Frances came to see me. She asked me if I’d seen anything of May Blissett lately.

  I said: No. Had she?

  And she said: Yes, May had called that afternoon.

  I noticed something funny about Frances’s face—something that made me say, “And you weren’t very glad to see her?”

  She asked me how I knew she wasn’t, and I told her that her funny face betrayed her.

  Then, by way of extenuation, she told me the tale of May’s calling. I remember every word of it, because we went, she and I—she made me go over it again and again—afterward. She told me that she was not really at home that afternoon to anybody but Daisy Valentine. Daisy had got something on her mind that she wanted to talk about. I knew what those two were when they got together—they were as thick as thieves. And as I also knew that the something on Daisy’s mind was Reggie Cotterill, I understood that their communion would be private and intimate to the last degree.

  And it seemed that the servant had blundered and let May Blissett in upon the mysteries before they had well begun, and that she’d stayed interminably. There they were, the two of them, snug together on the sofa; their very attitude must have shown May what Daisy was there for. They were just waiting for tea to come before they settled down to it. Poor Daisy was quivering visibly with the things she’d got to say. Couldn’t I see her? I could. I gathered that the atmosphere was fairly tingling with suppressed confidence, and that May, obtuse to these vibrations, sat there and simply wouldn’t go.

  I remember I suggested that she, too, might have had something on her mind and have had things to say. But Frances said: No, she never had things. She’d come for nothing—nothing in the world. She was in one of her silences, those fits which gave her so often the appearance of stupidity. (I knew them. They were formidable, exasperating; for you never could tell what she might be thinking of; and she had a way of smiling through them, a way that we knew now was all part of her high courage, of the web she had spun, that illusion of happiness she had covered herself up in, to spare us.) Frances said she wouldn’t have minded May’s immobility for herself. It was Daisy who sat palpitating with anxiety, wondering why on earth she didn’t go.

  I wondered, too. It was so unlike her. I said so.

  And Frances, who seemed to understand May through and through, said it wasn’t. It was most characteristic. It was just May’s obstinacy. If May had made up her mind to do a thing she did it quand meme. Generally she made up her mind not to be a nuisance. She’d made it up that afternoon that she’d stay, and so she stayed.

  “I’m afraid,” Frances said, “we weren’t very nice to her. We let her see we didn’t want her.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “Oh, then, of course, she went.”

  I must say I marveled at the obstinacy that could override a delicacy so consummate as May Blissett’s. And I thought that Frances’s imagination must have been playing her tricks. It did sometimes.

  That night, about nine o’clock, I ran up to May Blissett’s studio. I knocked at her door three or four times. I knew she was there. I’d heard her come in an hour or two before. Then, remembering our compact, I went away, going rather slowly, in the hope that she’d relent. I can’t tell you whether I really heard her open her door and come out on to the stair-head after I’d got down to my own floor; whether I really thought that she leaned out over the banister to see what was there; or whether I tortured myself with the mere possibility—afterward.

  It must have been about six o’clock in the morning when they came to me, the hall porter and his son. They told me that Miss Blissett was not in her room and that they couldn’t get her studio door open. It wasn’t locked, they
said; it had given slightly, but it seemed stuck all over, and an uncommonly queer smell was coming through. They thought it was some sort of disinfectant.

  I went up with them. You could smell the disinfectant oozing steadily through a chink in the studio door. We opened the big French windows opposite, and the windows of the bedroom and the stairs outside. Then we began to get the door open with knives, cutting through the paper that sealed it up inside. The reek of the sulphur was so strong that I sent the men out to open the studio windows—they were sealed up, too—from the outside, before we finished with the door. One of them came back and told me not to go into the room.

  But when the smoke cleared a little I went.

  Oh, it was all quite decent. Trust her for that. She was lying on the couch which she’d dragged into the middle of the great bare studio, all ready, dressed in her nightgown, with a sheet drawn up to her chin. The whole place was dim with the fog of the sulphur still burning. She had set the candles, one on each side, one at the head, and one at the foot.

  No, there’s nothing stately and ceremonial about a sulphur candle. Have you ever seen one? It’s a little fat yellow devil that squats in a saucer. There’s a crimson ooze from it when it burns, as if the thing sweated blood before it began its work. One of those stinking devils would have done what she wanted, and there were four. Can’t you see her going softly round the couch in her white nightgown, lighting her candles, smiling her subtle and mysterious smile? The ghost of it was still there. I am sure she was thinking how beautifully she had managed and how she had saved us all. The dear woman couldn’t have had any other thought.

  Even Frances saw that.

  Frances nearly went off her head about it. Just as she did afterward about poor Dickinson. She declared that we, or rather she, was responsible. She’d had a letter from May Blissett written that night.

  It’s stuck in my head ever since (it wasn’t long). “Forgive me for stopping on like that. It was very thick-skinned of me when I saw you so dear and happy there together. But somehow I couldn’t help it. And you have forgiven me.”

  A perfectly sane letter. Not a word about what she meant to do. Evidently she didn’t want Frances to connect it with their reception of her.

  But of course she did. She insisted that if she had only sent Daisy Valentine away and kept May, May would have been living and happy now. She had shown her that they hadn’t wanted her, that she was in their way, and May had just gone and taken herself, once for all, out of it. In the sight of God she—she had killed May.

  I couldn’t do anything with her. I couldn’t make her see that the two things couldn’t have had anything in the world to do with each other; that the affair of the visit, to May—after what she’d been through—would be a mere pin-prick; that you don’t go through such things to be killed by a pin-prick.

  But Frances would have it that you do; that it was because of what May had been through that she was so vulnerable.

  Besides, she maintained that her responsibility went deeper and further back. It was that from the first she had been afraid of May Blissett—afraid of something about her. No, not her queerness: her loneliness. She had been afraid that it would cling, that it would get in her way. She had compelled her to suppress it. She had driven it in, and the thing was poisonous. I reminded her that May didn’t want us, and she wailed:

  “We tried to make ourselves think she didn’t. But she did. She did. She wanted us most awfully all the time.”

  If she had only known! And so on.

  I did all I could. I pointed out to her that poor May was insane. What she did proved it. In her right mind she would never have done it. She would have been incapable of that cruelty to us who cared for her. But Frances stuck to it that that was just it. She wouldn’t have done it if she’d known we did care. It was the very essence of her despair that she had thought we didn’t.

  And sometimes I wonder whether Frances wasn’t right. Whether, if I had run back that night and caught May Blissett on the staircase—

  But, you see, I wasn’t really sure that she was there. I mean, she may have lit her candles before that.

  THIRTEEN AT TABLE

  Lord Dunsany

  (1878–1957)

  Born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the man who would later write as “Lord Dunsany” (the title of 18th Baron of Dunsany passed to him when he was twenty-one) spent time growing up in Ireland but after marriage split his time between Dublin and London. He served in the Boer War, in the First World War (being wounded during the Easter Uprising in Dublin), and on the homefront during World War Two. He was also a keen hunter, pistol shooter, and chess player, and advocate for animal rights.

  Of course, to the literary world Dunsany’s considerable reputation rests upon his writings, which were extensive, across multiple media, forms, and genres. Modern fantasy fiction owes a huge debt to him, both for the example of the fantasy worlds he created and for the style in which he described them and told the tales set within them. It can fairly be said that he created the sword and sorcery genre whole in his “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” (1908). His “Jorkens” tales are perhaps the outstanding twentieth-century examples of the club story genre.

  And, of course, there are his non-series short stories, which sample equally of horror and fantasy. “Thirteen at Table,” first appearing in Dunsany’s collection Tales of Wonder (1916), is both a character study and a ghost story with a twist, with a surprisingly feel-good ending. One can easily see it as a “Jorkens” story, but it works excellently as a standalone.

  IN FRONT OF a spacious fireplace of the old kind, when the logs were well alight, and men with pipes and glasses were gathered before it in great easeful chairs, and the wild weather outside and the comfort that was within, and the season of the year—for it was Christmas—and the hour of the night, all called for the weird or uncanny, then out spoke the ex-master of foxhounds and told this tale.

  “I once had an odd experience too. It was when I had the Bromley and Sydenham, the year I gave them up—as a matter of fact it was the last day of the season. It was no use going on because there were no foxes left in the county, and London was sweeping down on us. You could see it from the kennels all along the skyline like a terrible army in grey, and masses of villas every year came skirmishing down our valleys. Our coverts were mostly on the hills, and as the town came down upon the valleys the foxes used to leave them and go right away out of the county and they never returned. I think they went by night and moved great distances. Well, it was early April and we had drawn blank all day, and at the last draw of all, the very last of the season, we found a fox. He left the covert with his back to London and its railways and villas and wire and slipped away towards the chalk country and open Kent. I felt as I once felt as a child on one summer’s day when I found a door in a garden where I played left luckily ajar, and I pushed it open and the wide lands were before me and waving fields of corn.

  “We settled down into a steady gallop and the fields began to drift by under us, and a great wind arose full of fresh breath. We left the clay lands where the bracken grows and came to a valley at the edge of the chalk. As we went down into it we saw the fox go up the other side like a shadow that crosses the evening, and glide into a wood that stood on the top. We saw a flash of primroses in the wood and we were out the other side, hounds hunting perfectly and the fox still going absolutely straight. It began to dawn on me then that we were in for a great hunt, I took a deep breath when I thought of it; the taste of the air of that perfect Spring afternoon as it came to one galloping, and the thought of a great run, were together like some old rare wine. Our faces now were to another valley, large fields led down to it, with easy hedges, at the bottom of it a bright blue stream went singing and a rambling village smoked, the sunlight on the opposite slopes danced like a fairy; and all along the top old woods were frowning, but they dreamed of Spring. The “field” had fallen off and were far behind and my only human companion was Jam
es, my old first whip, who had a hound’s instinct, and a personal animosity against a fox that even embittered his speech.

  “Across the valley the fox went as straight as a railway line, and again we went without a check straight through the woods at the top. I remember hearing men sing or shout as they walked home from work, and sometimes children whistled; the sounds came up from the village to the woods at the top of the valley. After that we saw no more villages, but valley after valley arose and fell before us as though we were voyaging some strange and stormy sea, and all the way before us the fox went dead up-wind like the fabulous Flying Dutchman. There was no one in sight now but my first whip and me, we had both of us got on to our second horses as we drew the last covert.

  “Two or three times we checked in those great lonely valleys beyond the village, but I began to have inspirations, I felt a strange certainty within me that this fox was going on straight up-wind till he died or until night came and we could hunt no longer, so I reversed ordinary methods and only cast straight ahead and always we picked up the scent again at once. I believe that this fox was the last one left in the villa-haunted lands and that he was prepared to leave them for remote uplands far from men, that if we had come the following day he would not have been there, and that we just happened to hit off his journey.

  “Evening began to descend upon the valleys, still the hounds drifted on, like the lazy but unresting shadows of clouds upon a summer’s day, we heard a shepherd calling to his dog, we saw two maidens move towards a hidden farm, one of them singing softly; no other sounds, but ours, disturbed the leisure and the loneliness of haunts that seemed not yet to have known the inventions of steam and gun-powder (even as China, they say, in some of her further mountains does not yet know that she has fought Japan).

  “And now the day and our horses were wearing out, but that resolute fox held on. I began to work out the run and to wonder where we were. The last landmark I had ever seen before must have been over five miles back and from there to the start was at least ten miles more. If only we could kill! Then the sun set. I wondered what chance we had of killing our fox. I looked at James’ face as he rode beside me. He did not seem to have lost any confidence yet his horse was as tired as mine. It was a good clear twilight and the scent was as strong as ever, and the fences were easy enough, but those valleys were terribly trying and they still rolled on and on. It looked as if the light would outlast all possible endurance both of the fox and the horses, if the scent held good and he did not go to ground, otherwise night would end it. For long we had seen no houses and no roads, only chalk slopes with the twilight on them, and here and there some sheep, and scattered copses darkening in the evening. At some moment I seemed to realise all at once that the light was spent and that darkness was hovering, I looked at James, he was solemnly shaking his head. Suddenly in a little wooded valley we saw climb over the oaks the red-brown gables of a queer old house; at that instant I saw the fox scarcely heading by fifty yards. We blundered through a wood into full sight of the house, but no avenue led up to it or even a path nor were there any signs of wheel-marks anywhere. Already lights shone here and there in windows. We were in a park, and a fine park, but unkempt beyond credibility; brambles grew everywhere. It was too dark to see the fox any more but we knew he was dead beat, the hounds were just before us,—and a four-foot railing of oak. I shouldn’t have tried it on a fresh horse the beginning of a run, and here was a horse near his last gasp. But what a run! an event standing out in a lifetime, and the hounds close up on their fox, slipping into the darkness as I hesitated. I decided to try it. My horse rose about eight inches and took it fair with his breast, and the oak log flew into handfuls of wet decay—it rotten with years. And then we were on a lawn and at the far end of it the hounds were tumbling over their fox. Fox, hounds and light were all done together at the twenty-mile point. We made some noise then, but nobody came out of the queer old house.