She was tired. The moonlight had grown too bright and too cold. She went back to her bedroom, turned off the light, threw the rose-colored gown across a chair and got into bed. Here the moonlight was reduced. It gave a sense of warmth where it stretched across the rose-colored gown. A lethargy settled over her, and she felt herself sinking into a great emptiness.
She awoke shaking, drenched with a strange, sweet terror. There was light still in the room, but of a faintly opalescent tinge that merged with shadows, so that everything was indistinct. Some sickly thought about a waning moon entered her mind, but a line of Turgenev washed it away, “In the garden the nightingale was singing his last song before the dawn.” Listen.... Yes, a bird was singing, but not a nightingale. Dawn had emerged, wan and weak, from the womb of night.
Would she ever dare to sleep again? For in her sleep she had been ravished, in all the various meanings of that word. All her ifs had been bowled over like tenpins by a bowl from the hand of a crack player. The dead had risen. The young man had descended from the frame. Like a strip-teaser, she had tossed off the years one by one until she lay clothed only in the soft flesh of a few years past twenty. He had looked at her and had found her desirable.
She could feel a flush spread over the whole surface of her body. For a moment or two she lay relaxed with memory; but another fit of shivering seized her. She roused to a sense that the room was icy.
I’m sick. Let’s face it. I’m a sick woman. It’s the solitude. I’ve never been alone like this before. But truth interrupted to say that there had always been a sense of somebody close at hand. Closer in every way than the caretaker and his wife—too close, maybe. And though once she would have smiled at the implication of that, she now shivered again and sighed.
Resolutely she got up. She would make some toast and coffee and get to work again. She would work without stint until she could conscientiously say that she had earned money already received and then she would resign.
Braced by the coffee, she started for the galley; but on impulse, wrapped in the cloak that the morning chill made necessary, she decided to take a stroll on the terrace, which would probably be warmer than the house.
The rising sun told that the day would be warm—one of those days when a haze hung over the river, one of those days when she loved to sit and dream, or feel, because it was a feeling of reality into which she slipped, shaking off a world of which she had no part.
Resolutely she squared her shoulders and went in. But when she came to her desk in the gallery, she decided that it was not yet light enough to work. She might as well go up to the tower until the day was full-born.
The tower was shadowy. But day breaking over the river would be all the more impressive with a twilight gloom at her back. And then she felt the blood chill. She reached a chair by the table, sat down and lowered her head to her knees, trying at the same time to raise her eyes sufficiently to keep the window in view.
If he made one move toward her, she would scream; and once started, she believed she never would stop. When the faintness had passed and slowly she straightened, there was nobody in the room. She thought the daylight advanced with unusual rapidity. Light streamed through the window, giving it a borrowed effect of stained glass. Though she could see that the window seat was unoccupied, she had but to close her eyes to see him clearly again. A gnomelike man with a slit lip, with face seamed and pitted, with nose awry, with eyes that— Gradually she saw only the eyes and, seeing them, felt that she had seen all the sorrows of the world. Compassion streamed over her, agonizing regret that, by the look of horror, fear and abhorrence, she had added her bit to his weight of sorrow. Her own misfortune, her cheek stained with an ugly birthmark, told her something of what it must be like to be condemned to go through life like that, to know that women turned away in revulsion, that children probably hid from him in fright, that even men...
The caretaker must have seen him. How else could he have got in? But when she spoke to him about it, he said no, of course not. No one had entered, unless he came through the French door she had left unlocked.
“Unless he slipped through the keyhole!” she said with nerve-racked asperity. “How could he have got through the door without my seeing him, and up to the tower ahead of me?”
But when he asked, with a skeptical look, what sort of man he was, she found herself tongue-tied. She could not bear to say, “The most repulsive-looking man in the world.” When he said something about the tower’s being dim at so early an hour, she agreed and turned away.
By noon she was wondering if she really had seen anyone. If not, she was definitely ill—not only because she was having hallucinations but because her mind could create such a fearful one. At that thought she felt the eyes reproach her and was torn with longing to assuage the wound.
She kept away from the tower all day, though desire to go there, to recapture the old trancelike rapture, rasped her nerves like the craving for dope.
As she surveyed the work she had done, she saw that through some intense driving power she had accomplished in half a day what would ordinarily have taken a day and a half. Her love of the work took possession of her again. She stretched back in her chair and closed her eyes, conscious for the first time that she was tired. She could see, could feel the river flowing by.
Bits of imagery from half-forgotten poems drifted through her mind; bits that conveyed only feebly the sense of the marvelous transformation that took shape as she looked out, letting her gaze project itself farther and farther toward infinity. She jerked out of an uncomfortable sleep; coming back to reality with the fretfulness of a child.
It was the caretaker’s wife, with an embarrassed and worried look upon her face. “Do you mind if I speak a bit that’s in my mind, Miss Reed?”
“Of course not. What’s worrying you?”
“You, if you don’t mind my saying so. I’ll wager you weigh fifteen pounds less than the day you came. You haven’t seen a human being to speak to except Sam and me. It’s not good to stick to work as you do.”
Mrs. Brown was worried about her—about anything more than her thinness? Had she been doing queer things?
“If I were you I’d change over to the inn for the nights. Lord, nothing would tempt me to sleep up here all by myself. I’d have bats in my belfry if I so much as tried it.”
She took a deep breath. Fresh air seemed to flow over her. She had not faced the thought of night because she lacked the courage, but knew that when the time comes, a person can usually face what can’t be avoided. But to be free of nights here while reveling in the days!
“I like the idea of the inn. I’ll admit that the bedroom is somewhat damp and chilly.” There, she had got by that nicely. Both of them relaxed. “Do you suppose I can get a room at such short notice?”
“At this time of the year, yes. Shall I telephone?”
“If you will be so kind.”
She awoke from a night of dreamless sleep, with a sense of buoyancy that made her smile at thought of sickness. Thin, yes. Maybe if she had both breakfast and dinner at the inn she’d plump up a bit. Even though she had no desire to make acquaintances, yet eating in the company of others might give food a more savory taste.
Again she settled down to work, punishing her mind with mental arithmetic, which it hated, whenever it teased for just one look from the tower, just one glimpse of paradise. Not until five o’clock, she said firmly.
It was in the middle of the afternoon that she came across the gray notebook, in a large book on the bottom shelf—a dingy book with an unprepossessing title. Its leaves had been hollowed out. There were thin-papered letters under the notebook. She glanced at them first. Her instinctive disquiet at reading what the first line revealed to be love letters eased as she proceeded. They were so lyrical, so intense, so impassioned, they became at once associated with the loves that have become public property.
Her dream came vividly back to her and, putting a hand over the birthmark, she let the same sweet
terror it had produced sweep over her again. But the letters puzzled her. Though clearly both sides of a correspondence, all were in the same handwriting—a script in which each letter was as perfect as if typewritten, and so small that, without that perfection, it would have been almost undecipherable.
The notebook was in the same handwriting; and that was so small and at times so cryptographic, through abbreviations, that reading it was as if one with a smattering of a foreign language were trying to translate it. It seemed to be a random jotting down of notes. She saw a familiar sentence, “He who has seen paradise with earth-bound eyes.” That verified the book as Thomas Woods’s—probably the notes from which he had put his book together.
But a few pages beyond she came upon, “Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires. Heaven but the vision of fulfilled desires.” Over and over the phrase was repeated down the length of two pages, the final phrase sputtering out in a spatter of blots, as if the writer had reached the end of endurance.
A magnifying glass was needed for the fine writing. Instead of going up to the tower when her day’s work was over, she would drive into town and buy a glass.
The glass showed that the book was a repository for flashing thoughts, a writer’s net to catch each stirring fancy. She found other bits from Ultima Thule. She came across a description of her—of their—paradise that made her tremble. She recognized it even from the first line, “Across the river....” His imagery produced that same sense of shallow breathing that a long stay in the tower produced—the same sense of expectancy of being about to take off from the earth.
A few pages beyond, she came across the first personal record, “I have engaged Vernon to paint my portrait.”
So! It was his portrait. The caretaker had lied. But why?
I haven’t quite decided what I want, except that everything about it must reflect strength, vitality, wholeness—like the god which man has created in his own image and which the inhuman mover of the universe must regard with sardonic glee.
What did he mean? A portrait without warts or blemishes? Evidently he had found a compliant painter. She had no scorn for such vanity when she remembered that if necessity called for her photograph, she turned the good side of her face toward the camera.
She could not bear to put the book down even when finished. It had enmeshed her in the same spell that the tower had cast upon her—even more, for with the book she had looked upon the land of fulfilled desires in company with one who had not merely looked, but had entered into a kingdom that stretched to whatever point of ravishing beauty the imagination could conceive. And his imagination had seemed to approach the infinite.
She was glad, a few days later, that will power had continued to prevail and keep her at work. Sticking to long hours, and with an almost superhuman energy, she had made up for considerable of her previous sloth when the executor of the estate appeared. But he had come, she learned, only to fulfill the obligation that a quarterly visit should be made to see that all the necessary things were being done for preservation of the place.
“What is to be done with it eventually?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing!”
“Nothing beyond keeping it in repairs and seeing that there are competent caretakers. He established a trust fund for that and to cover the taxes. Everything is to be kept exactly as he left it—except the library. The proceeds from the sale of that are to be added to the fund.”
A swiftly born desire was expressed aloud, “I wonder— if there’s no great urge for hurry—could I change the contract? Could we settle upon a price for the complete job and let me take my time doing it?”
“But wouldn’t that mean prolonging your stay here?”
“Would that matter? To anyone but the caretakers? I don’t think Mrs. Brown would mind. I am getting two meals at the inn and have only sandwiches for lunch, which I can get myself.”
“That’s all right. But aren’t you dreadfully lonely here? I should think you would be glad to get away from it.”
“I love it. There’s no place where I’d rather be.”
“Mr. Woods once said something like that—and added, ‘Now and hereafter.’ He occasionally said fanciful things like that, though he had a wonderfully acute mind.”
“Did Mr. Woods spend much of his life here?”
“Most of it. All of the last half of his life.”
“And his family?”
“He had none. His mother died when he was born, and his father a good many years ago. He was the only child.”
“Didn’t he ever marry?”
“Good grief! No!”
He stared at her with the same sort of astonishment that the caretaker had shown when she asked about the portrait. She asked about it again. “That’s a portrait of him when young, isn’t it?”
His mouth fell open. It seemed a long time before he spoke again. “Do you mean to say that you didn’t know about him?”
“Why should I?” She sounded snappish. “I never heard of him until I was engaged to catalogue the library. What was there about him that I should have heard?”
“He was—well, frankly, in olden days he would have been thought a monster.” He lowered his voice as if it were a subject not to be broached aloud. “He was frightful to look upon.”
“With a slit lip?”
“Why, yes. I thought you said—”
“Did he look like a little old gnome?”
“No. Well—er, yes, I suppose you might say he did in the final years. All of his hair came out, and he wasted away. But in his younger days his shoulders were massive —which made it all the worse in a way.”
“In what way?”
“By way of emphasizing his deformity. His legs—they stopped at the knees. His feet were where his kneecaps should have been.”
With a blanched face she almost shouted, “How can God do such cruel inhuman things?”
“I know. I always felt that way when I saw him.” He turned toward the portrait. “He nearly drove the artist wild about that. I don’t know just what he had in mind.”
“But I do. He commissioned the making of a shell appropriate for his personality.” The phrases came back to her, Nobody will recognize it as me, but nobody ever sees the real me. “What a hell on earth!” she said, choking on the words.
“It was, of course. And he had seventy-two years of it. And yet, although I never could bear to look directly at him—he had beautiful eyes, by the way, if you could forget the rest for a minute—yes, though I was uncomfortable in his presence, when I was out of it I felt a pygmy. Partly because I knew his mind was much better than mine. But also because his words carried over in memory; and he had the most moving voice I’ve ever heard. Well, stay on and do the work as you like. It might be some recompense to him if he could know that someone had the same feeling about the place that he had.”
She did not stir until the sound of a moving car faded into nothingness. Then, breathless with eagerness, she climbed the four flights of steps to the tower. It made no difference who shared it with her—the youth of the portrait or- the gnome of her hallucination. She even liked to think that the latter was beside her, that the sorrows of the world ceased to be reflected in his eyes as they led the way, while hers followed, to the land of fulfilled desires.
* * * *
About the author:
(I pass this on, as I got it, after reading the story—JM)
Elizabeth Emmett was born in Rhode Island, in a Victorian home newly built by her English immigrant father. She came into a world made brilliant by the fall colors of New England’s flowering: 1883 was a year after Emerson and Longfellow died; nine years before Whitman and Whittier would follow; the heyday of William James, and the last decade of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Among the treasures of her past. Miss Emmett appears to value equally her mother’s Mayflower descent and her father’s English edition, three-volume, illustrated Shakespeare which, she says, �
�I still enjoy reading from more than any other copies.”
Miss Emmett submitted her first story to a magazine at the age of thirteen. Fifteen years later in 1911, she made her first sale, “for $35. Twenty-five, really, because the agent took ten as a minimum fee...” Since then, she has written and sold magazine verse, light articles, humor, history, a few short stories, and novels (“The Land He Loved,” “Secret in a Snuffbox”).
“Having always been deaf—or ‘hard of hearing’—” she writes with characteristic distaste for inaccuracy (in the name of euphemism or anything else), “I learned that whatever happiness I had must come from myself, books, garden, etc....” Modern medical technology makes the statement seem quaint; modern mores would likely supply “less a-social” refuges than books and garden.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology] Page 19