The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  Either Hopkins or somebody was dangerously exceeding the speed-limit. The thing was flying along its thirty yards of rail as fast as a tram, and the heavy fall-blocks swung like a ponderous kite-tail, thirty feet below. As I watched, the engine brought up within a yard of the end of the way, the blocks crashed like a ram into the broken house end, fetching down plaster and brick, and then the mechanism was reversed. The crane set off at a tear back.

  ‘Who in Hell . . . ’ I began; but it wasn’t a time to talk. ‘Hi!’ I yelled, and made a spring for a ladder.

  The others had noticed it, too, for there were shouts all over the place. By that time I was halfway up the second stage. Again the crane tore past, with the massive tackle sweeping behind it, and again I heard the crash at the other end. Whoever had the handling of it was managing it skilfully, for there was barely a foot to spare when it turned again.

  On the fourth platform, at the end of the way, I found Hopkins. He was white, and seemed to be counting on his fingers.

  ‘What’s the matter here?’ I cried.

  ‘It’s Rooum,’ he answered. ‘I hadn’t stepped out of the cab, not a minute, when I heard the lever go. He’s running somebody down, he says; he’ll run the whole shoot down in a minute – look! . . . ’

  The crane was coming back again. Half out of the cab I could see Rooum’s mottled hair and beard. His brow was ribbed like a grid­iron, and as he ripped past one of the arcs his face shone like porcelain with the sweat that bathed it.

  ‘Now . . . you! . . . Now, damn you! . . . ’ he was shouting.

  ‘Get ready to board him when he reverses!’ I shouted to Hopkins.

  Just how we scrambled on I don’t know. I got one arm over the lifting-gear (which, of course, wasn’t going), and heard Hopkins on the other footplate. Rooum put the brakes down and reversed; again came the thud of the fall-blocks; and we were speeding back again over the gulf of misty orange light. The stagings were thronged with gaping men.

  ‘Ready? Now!’ I cried to Hopkins; and we sprang into the cab.

  Hopkins hit Rooum’s wrist with a spanner. Then he seized the lever, jammed the brake down and tripped Rooum, all, as it seemed, in one movement. I fell on top of Rooum. The crane came to a standstill half-way down the line. I held Rooum panting.

  But either Rooum was stronger than I, or else he took me very much unawares. All at once he twisted clear from my grasp and stumbled on his knees to the rear door of the cab. He threw up one elbow, and staggered to his feet as I made another clutch at him.

  ‘Keep still, you fool!’ I bawled. ‘Hit him over the head, Hopkins!’

  Rooum screamed in a high voice.

  ‘Run him down – cut him up with the wheels – down, you! – down, I say! – Oh, my God! . . . Ha!’

  He sprang clear out from the crane door, well-nigh taking me with him.

  I told you it was a skeleton line, two rails and a tie or two. He’d actually jumped to the right-hand rail. And he was running along it – running along that iron tightrope, out over that well of light and watching men. Hopkins had started the travelling-gear, as if with some insane idea of catching him; but there was only one possible end to it. He’d gone fully a dozen yards, while I watched, horribly fascinated; and then I saw the turn of his head . . .

  He didn’t meet it this time; he sprang to the other rail, as if to evade it . . .

  Even at the take-off he missed. As far as I could see, he made no attempt to save himself with his hands. He just went down out of the field of my vision. There was an awful silence; then, from far below . . .

  * * *

  They weren’t the men on the lower stages who moved first. The men above went a little way down, and then they too stopped. Presently two of them descended, but by a distant way. They returned, with two bottles of brandy, and there was a hasty consultation. Two men drank the brandy off there and then – getting on for a pint of brandy apiece; then they went down, drunk.

  I, Hopkins tells me, had got down on my knees in the crane cab, and was jabbering away cheerfully to myself. When I asked him what I said, he hesitated, and then said: ‘Oh, you don’t want to know that, sir,’ and I haven’t asked him since.

  What do you make of it?

  Benlian

  1

  It would be different if you had known Benlian. It would be different if you had had even that glimpse of him that I had the very first time I saw him, standing on the little wooden landing at the top of the flight of steps outside my studio door. I say ‘studio’; but really it was just a sort of loft looking out over the timber-yard, and I used it as a studio. The real studio, the big one, was at the other end of the yard, and that was Benlian’s.

  Scarcely anybody ever came there. I wondered many a time if the timber-merchant was dead or had lost his memory and forgotten all about his business; for his stacks of floorboards, set criss-crosswise to season (you know how they pile them up) were grimy with soot, and nobody ever disturbed the rows of scaffold-poles that stood like palisades along the walls. The entrance was from the street, through a door in a billposter’s hoarding; and on the river not far away the steamboats hooted, and, in windy weather, the floorboards hummed to keep them company.

  I suppose some of these real, regular artists wouldn’t have called me an artist at all; for I only painted miniatures, and it was trade-work at that, copied from photographs and so on. Not that I wasn’t jolly good at it, and punctual too (lots of these high-flown artists have simply no idea of punctuality); and the loft was cheap, and suited me very well. But, of course, a sculptor wants a big place on the ground floor; it’s slow work that, with blocks of stone and marble that cost you twenty pounds every time you lift them; so Benlian had the studio. His name was on a plate on the door, but I’d never seen him till this time I’m telling you of.

  I was working that evening at one of the prettiest little things I’d ever done: a girl’s head on ivory, that I’d stippled up just like . . . oh, you’d never have thought it was done by hand at all. The daylight had gone, but I knew that ‘Prussian’ would be about the colour for the eyes and the bunch of flowers at her breast, and I wanted to finish.

  I was working at my little table, with a shade over my eyes; and I jumped a bit when somebody knocked at the door – not having heard anybody come up the steps, and not having many visitors anyway. (Letters were always put into the box in the yard door.)

  When I opened the door, there he stood on the platform; and I gave a bit of a start, having come straight from my ivory, you see. He was one of these very tall, gaunt chaps, that make us little fellows feel even smaller than we are; and I wondered at first where his eyes were, they were set so deep in the dark caves on either side of his nose. Like a skull, his head was; I could fancy his teeth curving round inside his cheeks; and his zygomatics stuck up under his skin like razorbacks (but if you’re not one of us artists you’ll not understand that). A bit of smoky, greenish sky showed behind him; and then, as his eyes moved in their big pits, one of them caught the light of my lamp and flashed like a well of lustre.

  He spoke abruptly, in a deep, shaky sort of voice.

  ‘I want you to photograph me in the morning,’ he said. I supposed he’d seen my printing-frames out on the window-sash some time or other.

  ‘Come in,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid, if it’s a miniature you want, that I’m retained – my firm retains me – you’d have to do it through them. But come in, and I’ll show you the kind of thing I do – though you ought to have come in the daylight . . . ’

  He came in. He was wearing a long, grey dressing-gown that came right down to his heels and made him look something like a Noah’s-ark figure. Seen in the light, his face seemed more ghastly bony still; and as he glanced for a moment at my little ivory he made a sound of contempt – I know it was contempt. I thought it rather cheek, coming into my place and –
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  He turned his cavernous eyeholes on me.

  ‘I don’t want anything of that sort. I want you to photograph me. I’ll be here at ten in the morning.’

  So, just to show him that I wasn’t to be treated that way, I said, quite shortly, ‘I can’t. I’ve an appointment at ten o’clock.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he said – he’d one of these rich deep voices that always sound consumptive.

  ‘Take that thing off your eyes, and look at me,’ he ordered.

  Well, I was awfully indignant.

  ‘If you think I’m going to be told to do things like this – ’ I began.

  ‘Take that thing off,’ he just ordered again.

  I’ve got to remember, of course, that you didn’t know Benlian. I didn’t then. And for a chap just to stalk into a fellow’s place, and tell him to photograph him, and order him about . . . but you’ll see in a minute. I took the shade off my eyes, just to show him that I could browbeat a bit too.

  I used to have a tall strip of looking-glass leaning against my wall; for though I didn’t use models much, it’s awfully useful to go to Nature for odd bits now and then, and I’ve sketched myself in that glass, oh, hundreds of times! We must have been standing in front of it, for all at once I saw the eyes at the bottom of his pits looking rigidly over my shoulder. Without moving his eyes from the glass, and scarcely moving his lips, he muttered: ‘Get me a pair of gloves, get me a pair of gloves.’

  It was a funny thing to ask for; but I got him a pair of my gloves from a drawer. His hands were shaking so that he could hardly get them on, and there was a little glistening of sweat on his face, that looked like the salt that dries on you when you’ve been bathing in the sea. Then I turned, to see what it was that he was looking so earnestly and profoundly at in the mirror. I saw nothing except just the pair of us, he with my gloves on.

  He stepped aside, and slowly drew the gloves off. I think I could have bullied him just then. He turned to me.

  ‘Did that look all right to you?’ he asked.

  ‘Why, my dear chap, whatever ails you?’ I cried.

  ‘I suppose,’ he went on, ‘you couldn’t photograph me tonight – now?’

  I could have done, with magnesium, but I hadn’t a scrap in the place. I told him so. He was looking round my studio. He saw my camera standing in a corner.

  ‘Ah!’ he said.

  He made a stride towards it. He unscrewed the lens, brought it to the lamp, and peered attentively through it, now into the air, now at his sleeve and hand, as if looking for a flaw in it. Then he replaced it, and pulled up the collar of his dressing-gown as if he was cold.

  ‘Well, another night of it,’ he muttered; ‘but,’ he added, facing suddenly round on me, ‘if your appointment was to meet your God Himself, you must photograph me at ten tomorrow morning!’

  ‘All right,’ I said, giving in (for he seemed horribly ill). ‘Draw up to the stove and have a drink of something and a smoke.’

  ‘I neither drink nor smoke,’ he replied, moving towards the door.

  ‘Sit down and have a chat, then,’ I urged; for I always like to be decent with fellows, and it was a lonely sort of place, that yard.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Be ready by ten o’clock in the morning,’ he said; and he passed down my stairs and crossed the yard to his studio without even having said ‘Good night’.

  Well, he was at my door again at ten o’clock in the morning, and I photographed him. I made three exposures; but the plates were some that I’d had in the place for some time, and they’d gone off and fogged in the developing.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ I said; ‘but I’m going out this afternoon, and will get some more, and we’ll have another shot in the morning.’

  One after the other, he was holding the negatives up to the light and examining them. Presently he put them down quietly, leaning them methodically up against the edge of the developing-bath.

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Thank you,’ he said; and left me.

  After that, I didn’t see him for weeks; but at nights I could see the light of his roof-window, shining through the wreathing river-mists, and sometimes I heard him moving about, and the muffled knock-knocking of his hammer on marble.

  2

  Of course I did see him again, or I shouldn’t be telling you all this. He came to my door, just as he had done before, and at about the same time in the evening. He hadn’t come to be photographed this time, but for all that it was something about a camera – something he wanted to know. He’d brought two books with him, big books, printed in German. They were on Light, he said, and Physics (or else it was Psychics – I always get those two words wrong). They were full of diagrams and equations and figures; and, of course, it was all miles above my head.

  He talked a lot about ‘hyper-space’, whatever that is; and at first I nodded, as if I knew all about it. But he very soon saw that I didn’t, and he came down to my level again. What he’d come to ask me was this: did I know anything, of my own experience, about things ‘photographing through’? (You know the kind of thing: a name that’s been painted out on a board, say, comes up in the plate.)

  Well, as it happened, I had once photographed a drawing for a fellow, and the easel I had stood it on had come up through the picture; and I knew by the way Benlian nodded that that was the kind of thing he meant.

  ‘More,’ he said.

  I told him I’d once seen a photograph of a man with a bowler hat on, and the shape of his crown had showed through the hat.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, musing; and then he asked: ‘Have you ever heard of things not photographing at all?’

  But I couldn’t tell him anything about that; and off he started again, about Light and Physics and so on. Then, as soon as I could get a word in, I said, ‘But, of course, the camera isn’t Art.’ (Some of my miniatures, you understand, were jolly nice little things.)

  ‘No – no,’ he murmured absently; and then abruptly he said: ‘Eh? What’s that? And what the devil do you know about it?’

  ‘Well,’ said I, in a dignified sort of way, ‘considering that for ten years I’ve been –’

  ‘Chut! . . . Hold your tongue,’ he said, turning away.

  There he was, talking to me again, just as if I’d asked him in to bully me. But you’ve got to be decent to a fellow when he’s in your own place; and by and by I asked him, but in a cold, off-hand sort of way, how his own work was going on. He turned to me again.

  ‘Would you like to see it?’ he asked.

  ‘Aha!’ thought I, ‘he’s got to a sticking-point with his work! It’s all very well,’ I thought, ‘for you to sniff at my miniatures, my friend, but we all get stale on our work sometimes, and the fresh eye, even of a miniature-painter . . . ’

  ‘I shall be glad if I can be of any help to you,’ I answered, still a bit huffish, but bearing no malice.

  ‘Then come,’ he said.

  We descended and crossed the timber-yard, and he held his door open for me to pass in.

  It was an enormous great place, his studio, and all full of mist; and the gallery that was his bedroom was up a little staircase at the farther end. In the middle of the floor was a tall structure of scaffolding, with a stage or two to stand on; and I could see the dim ghostly marble figure in the gloom. It had been jacked up on a heavy base; and as it would have taken three or four men to put it into position, and scarcely a stranger had entered the yard since I had been there, I knew that the figure must have stood for a long time. Sculpture’s weary, slow work.

  Benlian was pottering about with a taper at the end of a long rod; and suddenly the overhead gas-ring burst into light. I placed myself before the statue – to criticise, you know.

  Well, it didn’t seem to me that he needed to have turned up his nose at my ivorie
s, for I didn’t think much of his statue – except that it was a great, lumping, extraordinary piece of work. It had an out­stretched arm that, I remember thinking, was absolutely misshapen – disproportioned, big enough for a giant, ridiculously out of drawing. And as I looked at the thing this way and that, I knew that his eyes in their deep cellars never left my face for a moment.

  ‘It’s a god,’ he said by and by.

  Then I began to tell him about that monstrous arm; but he cut me very short.

  ‘I say it’s a god,’ he interrupted, looking at me as if he would have eaten me. ‘Even you, child as you are, have seen the gods men have made for themselves before this. Half-gods they’ve made, all good or all evil (and then they’ve called them the Devil). This is my god – the god of good and of evil also.’

  ‘Er – I see,’ I said, rather taken aback (but quite sure he was off his head for all that). Then I looked at the arm again; a child could have seen how wrong it was . . .

  But suddenly, to my amazement, he took me by the shoulders and turned me away.

  ‘That’ll do,’ he said curtly. ‘I didn’t ask you to come in here with a view to learning anything from you. I wanted to see how it struck you. I shall send for you again – and again –’

  Then he began to jabber, half to himself.

  ‘Bah!’ he muttered. ‘ “Is that all?” they ask before a stupendous thing. Show them the ocean, the heavens, infinity, and they ask, “Is that all?” If they saw their God face to face they’d ask it! . . . There’s only one Cause, that works now in good and now in evil, but show It to them and they put their heads on one side and begin to appraise and patronise It! . . . I tell you, what’s seen at a glance flies away at a glance. Gods come slowly over you, but presently, ah! they begin to grip you, and at the end there’s no fleeing from them! You’ll tell me more about my statue by and by! . . . What was that you said?’ he demanded, facing swiftly round on me. ‘That arm? Ah, yes; but we’ll see what you say about that arm six months from now! Yes, the arm . . . Now be off!’ he ordered me. ‘I’ll send for you again when I want you!’