The House of Dr. Edwardes

by Francis Beeding

  And now, having made up her mind, she gave free play to her imagination. Her dissections might be lacking in neatness and precision; there were gaps in her knowledge of the pharmacopoeia, and she knew nothing at all of mental science. But she intended to do well in her profession, and the chances were all in her favor. She was to assist Doctor Edwardes in his investigations, only a secretary perhaps, but what an opportunity! And what a setting for that awful riddle by which her young intelligence was already intrigued—the riddle of human minds, ruined or deformed, in which, nevertheless, a personality, or soul, call it what you please, must somewhere remain intact, and by some means accessible. She had formed already a picture of Chateau Landry; it was, she knew, a castle, in fact as well as in name, which had weathered the Middle Ages, and survived even the destructive zeal of Richelieu.

  She saw it as described by Doctor Edwardes, high up among the rocks and pines of Savoy, secluded at the end of a secret valley, with one small village about two miles away, a small collection of châlets, with half a dozen stone houses and a single inn.

  There, behind the impenetrable walls, in rooms formerly strewn with rushes and hung with tapestry, she would find, incongruously, every modern comfort and device—modern science in possession of an ancient stronghold.

  Modern science, perhaps, dauntless, inquisitive, throwing its feeble ray into the heart of darkness. But where was its victory? Central heating and electric light, a little reasonable care of sick bodies, a little insight into the mechanism of a brain diseased—were these the sum of its achievement in face of the enigma with which it was confronted in that House of Rest?

  II

  It was a bad crossing, whatever the offensive young man next behind her when she crossed the gangway might maintain. His remark, “Nothing like a good breath of sea air; freshens your face up so,” delivered in the tone of one who was a good sailor, or a hearty Christian, or a crashing bore, irritated her almost to the point of comment. Why not, at least, be accurate? Sea air was not good for the complexion, and the rolling of the channel steamer was worse, even though you did not happen to be really ill.

  Luckily, however, the ordeal was brief, and soon she was struggling forward to the firm land of France, tightly wedged in the crowd, trying not to be parted from her handbag, despatch case, passport and landing ticket—murmuring below her breath, as though it were of mystical significance, the number 179 stamped in greasy brass on the cap of the Calais porter who had possessed himself of her suitcase while he had gestured with someone else’s towards the douanes. Thrust eventually past a shabby French official, redolent of garlic, sweat and sour wine, who glanced at her passport upside down, she found herself, bewildered by the noise and squalor of her surroundings, trying hard to overcome her conviction that the English were a superior people. The neat officials of Dover, its clean customs house, the dignified figure of the English stationmaster in his dark blue uniform,—these were behind her, symbols of the law, order and familiar standards of the land for which she was already homesick. In their place was a seething rabble, unwashed and insolent, yet oh so eager for the hundred sous with which its services must be rewarded.

  “Must pull myself together,” thought Constance, some minutes later, when she had successfully passed through the customs house without having had to open her bag, “or I shall develop a francophobe complex.”

  She found her registered luggage, which was opened and very perfunctorily searched. But there again she happened to be unfortunate, for the official fumbling among her silk underclothes shot a glance at her capable of only one interpretation. “Filthy beasts,” was her comment, aimed, to be fair, less at the man in front of her than at the sex in general.

  Constance had viewed with mingled dislike and pity such young men as had attempted any sentimental advances towards her, but anything in the nature of the purely animal instinct disgusted her. Men were like that, children in the open expression of their impulses, curiously unable to hide their primitive emotions.

  The train for a wonder arrived punctually at the Gare du Nord, and at a quarter to seven Constance found herself at the little hotel on the Quai Voltaire where she had stayed on a previous occasion when she had found herself in Paris. Her windows overlooked the Seine, and, as she brushed her hair and got herself ready to dine in one of the little restaurants of the quartier before going to the play, she watched the barges drifting slowly down the Seine between the zinc cases of the second-hand bookstalls and the classic outline of the Louvre on the farther bank. The evening sky to the west was a golden haze, and the city lay like Danaë beneath the shower. The floating dust was of gold, and that golden light on the river was filtered through the thin veils of the poplars beside the water. Through the open window came the noisy riot of Paris, so different from the dull roar of London or the staccato rattle of New York. Each noise was individual, and swiftly identified. The sharp querulous hoot of taxis, the rumbling of a great autobus over the cobbles, with its rear platform packed with humanity like the overgrown garrison of a mediaeval castle as depicted in the margins of illuminated MSS, the slow click-clock of hoofs with the crack and rattle of a cart carrying empty bottles and siphons, and every now and again the beat of waves against the stone parapets as some river steamer bustled on its way to Auteuil.

  She dined in a little restaurant in the Rue Jacob where, calling for an evening paper, she saw that a new play of H. R. Lenormand was being performed at the Odéon, near at hand. She was not particularly “up” in the French theater, but she had heard of Lenormand from one of her medical friends in London, who had taken up psycho-analysis. “Pretty useful point of view,” he had told her. “He dramatizes the subconscious, you know. It’s like a lot of complexes walking about; very chatty they are, too, and most informing.”

  She bought a fauteuil and was soon watching a performance of “La Dent Rouge.” Now and then she wondered at the chance that had brought her to that particular place on that particular evening. For it seemed curiously to fit in with her present adventure. It might even be taken for a gipsy’s warning. Was she not on her way to wrestle with just those powers of evil which all through the play were militant and in the end victorious? There too, on the stage, was just that mountain village which lay at the gates of Château Landry. That girl on the stage might be the shadow of herself.

  She watched the progress of the play with a curious, intimate excitement. That girl had come back to her native village. She had, in the ordinary sense, been educated. She had outgrown the primitive superstitions which still linger in the remoter Alpine valleys. And that young peasant had married her, drawn towards beauty and freedom, defying the ignorance and cruelty of his kind. Would they not together be able to defeat the suggestions of the credulous folk who through the long winter went softly in fear of the demons of the mountain? But no; inexorably as the winter closed down on them, bringing with it the terrible, intimate seclusion of a primitive community cut off from every form of intelligent life, the demons of the mountain recovered their dominion even over the souls of those who had seemed to elude it. And now the young peasant, for all his proud defiance, was dead, and the girl a sorceress who had slain him with an evil thought.

  Constance, that night, slept badly. Most of the time, indeed, she was in a state between waking and dreaming. Pictures and phrases came and went in her tired brain, and she allowed them to pass, occasionally trying to give them form and coherence. Was she dreaming now, or was she really lying under the rafters in an Alpine valley? The old man had died, and, because it was winter, and the ground frozen to the hardness of steel, they were unable to bury him in the earth. Besides, they would not bury him in any case, though she had begged them to do so. It was his right to lie up there, out on the roof, just above her head, rigid and brittle, staring up at the sky. Did they defraud the old man of his right, he would wander in a cold wrath forever among the mountains, or come down among the hamlets, pressing his haunted face against the pane. So he must lie up there till the eart
h was soft enough to bed him. And now she was explaining all this to Doctor Edwardes, who smiled and pointed to the roof of Château Landry, where, neatly, in long rows, they lay side by side, smiling stiffly up at the stars. “Every modern convenience,” he was saying. But she had thought it was only a dormitory.

  And there was Doctor Murchison. She looked quickly at his left foot, but it was really human, and he seemed to be quite a pleasant young man, and she asked him whether it might not be insanitary. “No,” he said at once, “not till the spring sets in, and then, of course, we shall be obliged to put them in the ground.” And suddenly it was spring, and there was a huge fellow who came down from the forest with a gigantic pick slung over his shoulder. He attacked the ground with heavy blows—knocking—knocking.

  It was the chambermaid who entered, with coffee and rolls.

  III

  She traveled all that day, with the exception of an hour spent in the restaurant car, with two American tourists and a French officer on leave. The chatter of the tourists got on her nerves, and she answered abruptly the few questions which they put to her, mostly about the country through which they were passing. The French officer paid no attention to anyone, but sat reading a book whose title stared at her almost pointedly: “Sous le Soleil de Satan.”

  She arrived at about four in the afternoon at Thonon, having been fortunate enough to catch the connection at Bellegarde.

  And now she was on the threshold, and she gazed about her with interest.

  Beyond the steep-built town shimmered the Lake of Geneva, a trap for all the rays of the sun; embracing it were the gracious lines of the Jura, while, far away, across the water, the light, striking the windows in houses at Ouchy and Lausanne, signaled meaninglessly across the air.

  She went into the station courtyard, dusty and surrounded by shabby houses. There appeared to be no one to meet her, but as she stood, uncertain what to do, a dusty Citroen, with the hood up to protect the driver from the glare of the summer day, came to a stand beside her with a grinding of brakes.

  “Pour le Chateau Landry?” said the man at the wheel, who in his linen coat with blue cuffs and flat cap presented a very tolerable imitation of a smart chauffeur.

  Constance assented, and the man, taking her luggage, which he stowed at the back of the car, opened the door and invited her to enter. Constance, however, elected to sit beside him, considering the windscreen would protect her from the dust.

  They drove off, and the chauffeur apologized for not having brought the big Voisin, which he said, was under repair.

  The car turned to the right and began to run up a river (the Dranse, so the chauffeur informed her) through a narrow valley into the hills. The lake was behind her, and the pleasant plain with its villages and vines and orchards. In front was the climbing road, overawed by limestone crags. The road ran on beside the stream, alternately to the right and to the left, through rough-hewn tunnels, and they passed great rocks whose feet were set in foam. Soon the road began to climb more steeply, and, leaving the river, they reached the narrowest part of the valley, which was here only some two hundred yards broad.

  “Encore dix minutes,” said the chauffeur, and he pointed vaguely ahead.

  Here the mountain side rose abruptly on her right, covered with undergrowth and scrub, with bare patches of grass and rock and straggling pines, while on the left the river was lost amid a tangle of rocks and trees. They swept round a bend, and came upon a notice board painted in red and clamped to the naked rock: “Gorge du Diable,” and an arrow pointed to the left down the mountain side which now dropped sheer from the road. Constance glanced over the edge of the car. The gorges, whatever they were, were below her, hidden in the woods, but above the distress of the little Citroen she could hear the sound of water, remote and terrible, crying through the leaves of the wood beneath her, whose giant trees seemed from that height to be no more than shrubs and whose leaves held no bird or any living thing.

  The place was terrible in its desolation, yet kindly in the sunlight, for it was green with the late grass of a mountain summer, and the trees bore their full panoply of foliage.

  Then, suddenly, a new sound broke on her ears. Thin and shrill it rose in the afternoon air, a queer note of desperate hope and a sadness which would never be appeased. The car swept round a bend of the road and abruptly stopped.

  Before her moved a strange company. First came an old man in a faded livery of scarlet and black, bearing a rusty halberd fringed with frayed crimson cord, and an old rapier at his side. There followed after him a mountain lad with red cheeks and the eyes of an ox, his great boots roughly cleaned and the frayed ends of his corduroy trousers showing beneath a black cassock, too short by a foot, over which he wore a white surplice. He bore in his hands a black pole surmounted by a silver crucifix, the polished figure of the dying Christ flashing in the afternoon sun. At his side walked two small boys, out of step, one carrying a censer which he swung noisily from side to side, and which glowed red, and the other a pewter basin holding a wet draggled brush at the end of a brass handle. Next came six peasants in their Sunday black, their heads bare and glistening with the heat. They walked in step, very slowly, bearing upon their shoulders a pine coffin, very new, with a brass plate on the lid and two ornate handles. Then came three children, carrying wreaths of immortelles, the waxen flowers twined fantastically about with black wire. There followed three or four women, dressed in black, one of whom was weeping, and finally the priest, in a crumpled alb, dusty and bedraggled at the edges, trimmed with soiled lace, a great black cope edged with silver askew across his shoulders. He held a book whose greasy pages were covered with unfamiliar black notes and hieroglyphics, and as he passed the car his voice rose, thin and out of tune, crying out the melody In paradisum perducant te angeli. But his voice cracked on the final word. The crowd, before and after him, tried to follow the chant, fumbling with the books they held, clasped in fat fingers with broken nails.

  The chauffeur, as the coffin passed him, took off his hat and crossed himself. Constance bowed her head, but quickly raised it again, gazing with wide curious eyes on the pageant.

  It was then that she perceived, following apart, a tall young man, with a black frock coat and a bared head. His silk hat glistened in his hand, and he looked what he evidently was, the smart young medical practitioner, as strange an apparition among the dusty villagers as could well be imagined.

  As he passed the car he turned his head, and his eyes met for an instant those of Constance.

  He smiled and made a little motion of his hands, and she noticed that above his right eye was a big strip of plaster. Then he passed on with the procession, among the dust and the singing.

  “That is the new doctor,” said the chauffeur in a low voice. “He is following my murdered colleague to his grave.”

  Chapter Two

  I

  For a moment she hesitated. Already the chauffeur had left the car and had joined the procession with the villagers. She did not wish to intrude upon a ceremony in which she had no real call to participate; but, equally, on the other hand, she felt she must avoid remaining too conspicuously aloof.

  Finally, she descended from the car and unobtrusively followed the crowd; and, very soon, she began to lose her sense of being an interloper, and to be affected along with the rest.

  The procession plodded forward in the dust, away from the village, and up the hillside, where the grass was a vivid green, until presently they turned a corner and found themselves entering a little cemetery. It was surrounded by a white wall of stuccoed stone and contained a series of graves, most of them hung or overlaid with the wire skeletons of decaying wreaths, and shabby immortelles.

  Here she waited for some moments, gazing at the great shoulder of the mountain behind, the blue sky without a cloud, and far away a hawk or an eagle, she did not know which, swaying on spread pinions, balanced in the easy air.

  It was not like an English funeral, she reflected. People were not silen
t with grief. Rather they were disposed to comment, without reserve, and, when the hymn was done, the chatter became quite general as the bearers lowered the coffin on to a framework of low trestles by the open grave. The young man with the cross stood now at the head, and the old priest, clearing his throat and spitting to the side of the path, began the prayers which consign the body to its native earth.

  She could not follow the mumbled Latin, or understand the practiced, mechanical gestures of the priest as he sprinkled with water the wooden shell, and presently motioned with his hand to the bearers to lower it into the grave.

  The young doctor stood bareheaded, a little apart, while the villagers filed one by one before the open grave, casting into it handfuls of earth which rattled dryly on the coffin lid below.

  She noticed after a time that the villagers eyed him curiously, and not, she fancied, without hostility. One woman, indeed, wearing the customary black of the Savoy peasant, pulled her child, a small boy of eight or nine, sideways as they passed him by.

  The young doctor appeared to take no notice of this, but gazed with absorption at the priest and at the acolytes, who, now that the ceremony was over, were preparing to depart with a callous disregard of the solemnity due to the occasion. The acolyte bearing the cross slung it across his shoulder, as though it were a vine pole or a pitchfork, and pushed quickly towards the gate of the cemetery, cuffing automatically one of the smaller boys who got in his way. The cross which he was carrying cast an edged shadow on the white wall of the cemetery, and his sudden movement disturbed the balance of the pole, so that the shadow flickered and then ran swiftly up the body of the young doctor from his feet to his head, to become still and clear-cut again as the acolyte paused to settle the pole more firmly on his shoulders. The young doctor started nervously, almost as though it had been the heavy metal cross itself and not the shadow which had struck him.