The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  But Elsie Bengough had no luck whatever in that house. A second accident befell her. Half-way down the staircase there was the sharp sound of splintering wood, and she checked a loud cry. Oleron knew the woodwork to be old, but he himself had ascended and descended frequently enough without mishap . . .

  Elsie had put her foot through one of the stairs.

  He sprang to her side in alarm. ‘Oh, I say! My poor girl!’

  She laughed hysterically.

  ‘It’s my weight – I know I’m getting fat –’

  ‘Keep still – let me clear these splinters away,’ he muttered between his teeth.

  She continued to laugh and sob that it was her weight – she was getting fat –

  He thrust downwards at the broken boards. The extrication was no easy matter, and her torn boot showed him how badly the foot and ankle within it must be abraded.

  ‘Good God – good God!’ he muttered over and over again.

  ‘I shall be too heavy for anything soon,’ she sobbed and laughed.

  But she refused to reascend and to examine her hurt.

  ‘No, let me go quickly – let me go quickly,’ she repeated.

  ‘But it’s a frightful gash!’

  ‘No – not so bad – let me get away quickly – I’m – I’m not wanted.’

  At her words, that she was not wanted, his head dropped as if she had given him a buffet.

  ‘Elsie!’ he choked, brokenly and shocked.

  But she too made a quick gesture, as if she put something violently aside.

  ‘Oh, Paul, not that – not you – of course I do mean that too in a sense – oh, you know what I mean! . . . But if the other can’t be, spare me this now! I – I wouldn’t have come, but – but – oh, I did, I did try to keep away!’

  It was intolerable, heartbreaking; but what could he do – what could he say? He did not love her . . .

  ‘Let me go – I’m not wanted – let me take away what’s left of me –’

  ‘Dear Elsie – you are very dear to me –’

  But again she made the gesture, as of putting something violently aside.

  ‘No, not that – not anything less – don’t offer me anything less – leave me a little pride –’

  ‘Let me get my hat and coat – let me take you to a doctor,’ he muttered.

  But she refused. She refused even the support of his arm. She gave another unsteady laugh.

  ‘I’m sorry I broke your stairs, Paul . . . You will go and see about the short stories, won’t you?’

  He groaned.

  ‘Then if you won’t see a doctor, will you go across the square and let Mrs Barrett look at you? Look, there’s Barrett passing now –’

  The long-nosed Barrett was looking curiously down the alley, but as Oleron was about to call him he made off without a word. Elsie seemed anxious for nothing so much as to be clear of the place, and finally promised to go straight to a doctor, but insisted on going alone.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  And Oleron watched her until she was past the hatchet-like ‘To Let’ boards, as if he feared that even they might fall upon her and maim her.

  That night Oleron did not dine. He had far too much on his mind. He walked from room to room of his flat, as if he could have walked away from Elsie Bengough’s haunting cry that still rang in his ears. ‘I’m not wanted – don’t offer me anything less – let me take away what’s left of me –’

  Oh, if he could only have persuaded himself that he loved her!

  He walked until twilight fell, then, without lighting candles, he stirred up the fire and flung himself into a chair.

  Poor, poor Elsie! . . .

  But even while his heart ached for her, it was out of the question. If only he had known! If only he had used common observation! But those walks, those sisterly takings of the arm – what a fool he had been! . . . Well, it was too late now. It was she, not he, who must now act – act by keeping away. He would help her all he could. He himself would not sit in her presence. If she came, he would hurry her out again as fast as he could . . . Poor, poor Elsie!

  His room grew dark; the fire burned dead; and he continued to sit, wincing from time to time as a fresh tortured phrase rang again in his ears.

  Then suddenly, he knew not why, he found himself anxious for her in a new sense – uneasy about her personal safety. A horrible fancy that even then she might be looking over an embankment down into dark water, that she might even now be glancing up at the hook on the door, took him. Women had been known to do those things . . . Then there would be an inquest, and he himself would be called upon to identify her, and would be asked how she had come by an ill-healed wound on the hand and a bad abrasion of the ankle. Barrett would say that he had seen her leaving his house . . .

  Then he recognised that his thoughts were morbid. By an effort of will he put them aside, and sat for a while listening to the faint creakings and tickings and rappings within his panelling . . . If only he could have married her! . . . But he couldn’t. Her face had risen before him again as he had seen it on the stairs, drawn with pain and ugly and swollen with tears. Ugly – yes, positively blubbered; if tears were women’s weapons, as they were said to be, such tears were weapons turned against themselves . . . suicide again . . .

  Then all at once he found himself attentively considering her two accidents.

  Extraordinary they had been, both of them. He could not have left that old nail standing in the wood; why, he had fetched tools specially from the kitchen; and he was convinced that that step that had broken beneath her weight had been as sound as the others. It was inex­plicable. If these things could happen, anything could happen. There was not a beam nor a jamb in the place that might not fall without warning, not a plank that might not crash inwards, not a nail that might not become a dagger. The whole place was full of life even now; as he sat there in the dark he heard its crowds of noises as if the house had been one great microphone . . .

  Only half conscious that he did so, he had been sitting for some time identifying these noises, attributing to each crack or creak or knock its material cause; but there was one noise which, again not fully conscious of the omission, he had not sought to account for. It had last come some minutes ago; it came again now – a sort of soft sweeping rustle that seemed to hold an almost inaudibly minute crackling. For half a minute or so it had Oleron’s attention; then his heavy thoughts were of Elsie Bengough again.

  He was nearer to loving her in that moment than he had ever been. He thought how to some men their loved ones were but the dearer for those poor mortal blemishes that tell us we are but sojourners on earth, with a common fate not far distant that makes it hardly worth while to do anything but love for the time remaining. Strangling sobs, blearing tears, bodies buffeted by sickness, hearts and mind callous and hard with the rubs of the world – how little love there would be were these things a barrier to love! In that sense he did love Elsie Bengough. What her happiness had never moved in him her sorrow almost awoke . . .

  Suddenly his meditation went. His ear had once more become conscious of that soft and repeated noise – the long sweep with the almost inaudible crackle in it. Again and again it came, with a curious insistence and urgency. It quickened a little as he became increas­ingly attentive . . . it seemed to Oleron that it grew louder . . .

  All at once he started bolt upright in his chair, tense and listen-ing. The silky rustle came again; he was trying to attach it to something . . .

  The next moment he had leapt to his feet, unnerved and terrified. His chair hung poised for a moment, and then went over, setting the fire-irons clattering as it fell. There was only one noise in the world like that which had caused him to spring thus to his feet . . .

  The next time it came Oleron felt behind him at the empty air with his hand, an
d backed slowly until he found himself against the wall.

  ‘God in Heaven!’ The ejaculation broke from Oleron’s lips. The sound had ceased.

  The next moment he had given a high cry.

  ‘What is it? What’s there? Who’s there?’

  A sound of scuttling caused his knees to bend under him for a moment; but that, he knew, was a mouse. That was not something that his stomach turned sick and his mind reeled to entertain. That other sound, the like of which was not in the world, had now entirely ceased; and again he called . . .

  He called and continued to call; and then another terror, a terror of the sound of his own voice, seized him. He did not dare to call again. His shaking hand went to his pocket for a match, but found none. He thought there might be matches on the mantelpiece –

  He worked his way to the mantelpiece round a little recess, without for a moment leaving the wall. Then his hand encountered the mantelpiece, and groped along it. A box of matches fell to the hearth. He could just see them in the firelight, but his hand could not pick them up until he had cornered them inside the fender.

  Then he rose and struck a light.

  The room was as usual. He struck a second match. A candle stood on the table. He lighted it, and the flame sank for a moment and then burned up clear. Again he looked round.

  There was nothing.

  There was nothing; but there had been something, and might still be something. Formerly, Oleron had smiled at the fantastic thought that, by a merging and interplay of identities between himself and his beautiful room, he might be preparing a ghost for the future; it had not occurred to him that there might have been a similar merging and coalescence in the past. Yet with this staggering impossibility he was now face to face. Something did persist in the house; it had a tenant other than himself; and that tenant, whatsoever or whosoever, had appalled Oleron’s soul by producing the sound of a woman brushing her hair.

  7

  Without quite knowing how he came to be there Oleron found himself striding over the loose board he had temporarily placed on the step broken by Miss Bengough. He was hatless, and descending the stairs. Not until later did there return to him a hazy memory that he had left the candle burning on the table, had opened the door no wider than was necessary to allow the passage of his body, and had sidled out, closing the door softly behind him. At the foot of the stairs another shock awaited him. Something dashed with a flurry up from the disused cellars and disappeared out of the door. It was only a cat, but Oleron gave a childish sob.

  He passed out of the gate, and stood for a moment under the ‘To Let’ boards, plucking foolishly at his lip and looking up at the glimmer of light behind one of his red blinds. Then, still looking over his shoulder, he moved stumblingly up the square. There was a small public-house round the corner; Oleron had never entered it; but he entered it now, and put down a shilling that missed the counter by inches.

  ‘B–b–bran–brandy,’ he said, and then stooped to look for the shilling.

  He had the little sawdusted bar to himself; what company there was – carters and labourers and the small tradesmen of the neigh­bourhood – was gathered in the farther compartment, beyond the space where the white-haired landlady moved among her taps and bottles. Oleron sat down on a hardwood settee with a perforated seat, drank half his brandy, and then, thinking he might as well drink it as spill it, finished it.

  Then he fell to wondering which of the men whose voices he heard across the public-house would undertake the removal of his effects on the morrow.

  In the meantime he ordered more brandy.

  For he did not intend to go back to that room where he had left the candle burning. Oh no! He couldn’t have faced even the entry and the staircase with the broken step – certainly not that pith-white, fascin­ating room. He would go back for the present to his old arrange­­ment, of workroom and separate sleeping-quarters; he would go to his old landlady at once – presently – when he had finished his brandy – and see if she could put him up for the night. His glass was empty now . . .

  He rose, had it refilled, and sat down again.

  And if anybody asked his reason for removing again? Oh, he had reason enough – reason enough! Nails that put themselves back into wood again and gashed people’s hands, steps that broke when you trod on them, and women who came into a man’s place and brushed their hair in the dark, were reasons enough! He was querulous and injured about it all. He had taken the place for himself, not for invisible women to brush their hair in; that lawyer fellow in Lincoln’s Inn should be told so, too, before many hours were out; it was out­rageous, letting people in for agreements like that!

  A cut-glass partition divided the compartment where Oleron sat from the space where the white-haired landlady moved; but it stopped seven or eight inches above the level of the counter. There was no partition at the farther bar. Presently Oleron, raising his eyes, saw that faces were watching him through the aperture. The faces disappeared when he looked at them.

  He moved to a corner where he could not be seen from the other bar; but this brought him into line with the white-haired landlady.

  She knew him by sight – had doubtless seen him passing and repassing; and presently she made a remark on the weather. Oleron did not know what he replied, but it sufficed to call forth the further remark that the winter had been a bad one for influenza, but that the spring weather seemed to be coming at last . . . Even this slight contact with the commonplace steadied Oleron a little; an idle, nascent wonder whether the landlady brushed her hair every night, and, if so, whether it gave out those little electric cracklings, was shut down with a snap; and Oleron was better . . .

  With his next glass of brandy he was all for going back to his flat. Not go back? Indeed, he would go back! They should very soon see whether he was to be turned out of his place like that! He began to wonder why he was doing the rather unusual thing he was doing at that moment, unusual for him – sitting hatless, drinking brandy, in a public-house. Suppose he were to tell the white-haired landlady all about it – to tell her that a caller had scratched her hand on a nail, had later had the bad luck to put her foot through a rotten stair, and that he himself, in an old house full of squeaks and creaks and whispers, had heard a minute noise and had bolted from it in fright – what would she think of him? That he was mad, of course . . . Pshaw! The real truth of the matter was that he hadn’t been doing enough work to occupy him. He had been dreaming his days away, filling his head with a lot of moonshine about a new Romilly (as if the old one was not good enough), and now he was surprised that the devil should enter an empty head!

  Yes, he would go back. He would take a walk in the air first – he hadn’t walked enough lately – and then he would take himself in hand, settle the hash of that sixteenth chapter of Romilly (fancy, he had actually been fool enough to think of destroying fifteen chapters!) and thenceforward he would remember that he had oblig­ations to his fellow-men and work to do in the world. There was the matter in a nutshell.

  He finished his brandy and went out.

  He had walked for some time before any other bearing of the matter than that on himself occurred to him. At first, the fresh air had increased the heady effect of the brandy he had drunk; but afterwards his mind grew clearer than it had been since morning. And the clearer it grew, the less final did his boastful self-assurances become, and the firmer his conviction that, when all explanations had been made, there remained something that could not be explained. His hysteria of an hour before had passed; he grew steadily calmer; but the disquieting conviction remained. A deep fear took possession of him. It was a fear for Elsie.

  For something in his place was inimical to her safety. Of them­selves, her two accidents might not have persuaded him of this; but she herself had said it. ‘I’m not wanted here . . . ’ And she had declared that there was something wrong with the place. She had seen
it before he had. Well and good. One thing stood out clearly: namely, that if this was so, she must be kept away for quite another reason than that which had so confounded and humiliated Oleron. Luckily she had expressed her intention of staying away; she must be held to that intention. He must see to it.

  And he must see to it all the more that he now saw his first impulse, never to set foot in the place again, was absurd. People did not do that kind of thing. With Elsie made secure, he could not with any respect to himself suffer himself to be turned out by a shadow, nor even by a danger merely because it was a danger. He had to live somewhere, and he would live there. He must return.

  He mastered the faint chill of fear that came with the decision, and turned in his walk abruptly. Should fear grow on him again he would, perhaps, take one more glass of brandy . . .

  But by the time he reached the short street that led to the square he was too late for more brandy. The little public-house was still lighted, but closed, and one or two men were standing talking on the kerb. Oleron noticed that a sudden silence fell on them as he passed, and he noticed further that the long-nosed Barrett, whom he passed a little lower down, did not return his good-night. He turned in at the broken gate, hesitated merely an instant in the alley, and then mounted his stairs again.

  Only an inch of candle remained in the Sheffield stick, and Oleron did not light another one. Deliberately he forced himself to take it up and to make the tour of his five rooms before retiring. It was as he returned from the kitchen across his little hall that he noticed that a letter lay on the floor. He carried it into his sitting-room, and glanced at the envelope before opening it.

  It was unstamped, and had been put into the door by hand. Its handwriting was clumsy, and it ran from beginning to end without comma or period. Oleron read the first line, turned to the signature, and then finished the letter.

  It was from the man Barrett, and it informed Oleron that he, Barrett, would be obliged if Mr Oleron would make other arrange­ments for the preparing of his breakfasts and the cleaning-out of his place. The sting lay in the tail, that is to say, the postscript. This consisted of a text of Scripture. It embodied an allusion that could only be to Elsie Bengough . . .