The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  ‘Why, it’s all over the place.’

  ‘Well, we may as well pick it up.’

  But in the hearth charred pieces were found, and more and more charred pieces.

  ‘That seems to have gone west all right,’ a squire in a beaver hat remarked; and they turned to other matters.

  ‘Whose idiotic idea was this rag, anyway?’

  ‘Pamela’s, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It would be.’

  ‘But did nobody see Gervaise?’

  Nobody had.

  ‘Well, mine’s Bedfordshire. You fellows going to stay up all night?’

  They finished their drinks and yawned.

  ‘Do we turn out here, or are the servants still up?’

  ‘Better leave a night-light in case.’

  ‘Pity about Lady Harow’s jig.’

  ‘Well, ’night, everybody.’

  They sought their candles and filed up the stairs. Philip’s green frilled ankles were the last to go. On the table under the newel-post the night-light burned. Except for that, the glow of the dying fire, and the little gleams that came and went along the guests’ wing, the Abbey on its rounded hill was in darkness.

  12

  Gervaise had heard their calling as she had fled past them, but she was not their hostess now. They must make shift to put themselves to bed without help from her. Usually they flocked in a body into her room, perched themselves on the edge of her bed, brushed their hair, chattered, laughed, made free with her toilet things, and remained until she shooed them out. But tonight she could not have endured their prattle. She had long since began to weary of it. She did not intend to go near her own room at all until they should have settled down for the night. She turned away in another direction, avoiding the corridors by which she had passed a few hours before.

  It was immeasurably more than a question of Freddy Lampeter now, a thousand times more than the Abbey itself, with its crushing burden of maintenance and mortgages and debt. She had now to face the whole range of her own nature and its widest extremes, from her ecstasies if she had any, down to the last of her bodily hungers. And especially she must face that strange midway lack which, when all that she asked was to be allowed to give, kept her for ever inhibited and immured.

  Only to be allowed to give, only to offer herself; like a box of alabaster, to be broken open and have her treasure spilt in sweetness! Was it too much to ask, with the rest of the world intent upon nothing but getting? Why should she be mistress of so many gifts and not of the final gift of giving? Is there no escape from that draconian law that is written in the blood of every individual heart that beats, that what we are we are, and so we must remain till the end? Oh, we seem free as the winds that blow! From our cradles to our graves we move in the illusion of liberty. We establish ourselves upon our fellows, do as they do, think their thoughts, and become indistinguishable from them. And then, lo, of a sudden there comes to us an hour. The unsharable thing has found us out in the midst of the multitude. One voice only reaches us in our isolation, the voice of our forgotten, nay, of our unlearned selves. For an hour, face to face with the void, we lie upon a bed that is only an anticipation of the bed of death itself.

  And so it was with Gervaise. She must find an outlet for her generosities, her charities, her passionate love, her mere physical cravings, or break down. She must brave the angel with the sword, and force her way out of the Eden that had become her Hell. If prayer would save her she must pray. If it would not, better to sin with humanity than to die of heart-hunger in their midst.

  She stood in a narrow, plastered passage with dim lancet-windows on her right hand. It led by the northern circuit of the house to the muniment-room, whence, by another passage, the picture-gallery could be reached. And it may have been that already she was on the threshold of one of those nuits blanches of hers, in which the ancient place itself played so fantastic a part. She knew where she was, but knew it as it were with an added sense. That old feeling of timeless familiarity with every winding of the house had begun to enwrap her. She knew that she had stood in that same passage before, not merely many times – the visitations were not to be counted in that way – but immemorially. This experience, whatever it was, was only a repeated former experience, the times between were inessential interruptions. She was seeking now what she had always sought, only with an added and immense urgency. It had nothing to do with the muniment-room – she wasn’t selling anything, consulting any plan, verifying any title. It was not the picture-gallery – there was nothing there but scars on the dull red walls and a wintry old woman whose clothes she appeared to be wearing at that moment. What she sought she did not know – but she was going to know in a moment. She did not quite remember its magic name – but that name was imminently in her ears. And when the thing for which she was looking did come, it would be one of those always-known things, that the day kept under lock and key, but the night like a thief unpicked again. Why not? Was she one of the farm-animals, to be yoked to her diurnal task and given nothing but her portion of nightly straw at the end of it? This was her own hour, when she was released from responsibility. Whatever beckoned was implicitly to be followed. There was not a riddling door in the whole of that dream-haunted Abbey but sooner or later would open upon its own reply . . .

  Suddenly and confidently, she put out her hand. She had a little thrill of joy as her fingers encountered what she had known they would encounter – a door in the plaster wall. She had no key for it, but out of some remembered knowledge of the day it seemed to communicate its own secret. She had only to put her fingers under a ledge, to lift and push gently with her shoulder, and open it would come. She pushed and lifted, and the door stood open.

  The muniment-room. The slight increase of light told her that. It was a small octagonal room, with a roof-lantern that looked directly to the zenith; but the moon that peeped down on her was but a leaden moon now. Cobwebs, dust, dead leaves, the droppings and deposits of the years since the lantern had last been cleaned, besmirched its brightness. About her stood the dim array of chests, strapped and ironbound like church-doors, nail-studded chests, chests of peeling leather, coffers of wood, boxes of japanned tin, piled up against the walls, scattered over the floor. Old calf bindings looked through wire lattices, and in corners maps and plans stood rolled up like stovepipes.

  But these were all. There was no revelation. Whatever she sought was not in the muniment-room.

  But as she stood under the lantern, spectral in the stiff linen head-dress, one lace-cuffed hand resting on the table, all at once a light tremor took her. It was as if for the first time some insecurity menaced her suspended state. Her moving fingers had touched a piece of paper that lay like a dead moth on the dusty table. And in the same moment there broke in on her consciousness the distant memory of a voice, flat and jarring and without modulation. The piece of paper was one on which she had made notes the last time she had been there. The voice was the remembered voice of some estate-agent’s young man or other, perhaps the one with the spots whom she had hoped they would not send again.

  ‘Quaint – I won’t deny as it’s quaint – ’ that voice that set her teeth on edge seemed to be saying, ‘ – but a fancy property in a manner of speaking – not every buyer’s money – now what about “Or near offer” ?’

  Her agitation increased. Those people again! Even in the quiet night they must force themselves upon her, with their trade-cards and their orders-to-view and their notebooks and their pencils behind their ears!

  She looked wildly about her, and suddenly, with a swift spring, was at the second door of the room.

  It had a modern spring-lock, and, with her hand on the little milled knob, she opened the door just sufficiently widely to allow the slipping through of her body. Then, with a bang that resounded along the passage, she drew the door violently to again. She stood, panting and listening, almost a
s if she expected to hear an im­pris­oned young man beating upon the panels.

  Those odious associations! Those unwanted presences! Then, as the echoes of the slammed door died away and no further sound came, she gave a deep ‘Ah!’

  But it had been touch-and-go, that!

  13

  To tell the truth it had been very much worse. That tranced solitude of hers had been threatened, if not actually invaded. And if one set of people could break in on her by mere force of memory like that, so could others. What others?

  No need to look far! Almost anybody Gervaise could have named seemed to have this power over her. It was not for her, their hostess, to comment on these guests who slept under the Abbey roofs that July night. Pride forbade that she should whisper even to herself that they had outstayed their welcome. They might remain for months for all the sign that Gervaise would make. And she admitted that after all they were there at her mother’s invitation.

  But what was the good of talking to her mother? Her mother always made such haste to agree.

  ‘I know, darling, I know! But it’s only Philip and darling Pamela – it’s ages since we’ve seen dear Philip, and Pamela will do her own room. You look tired, sweetheart – do run out and have a blow –’

  No, no, they must not come near her! These unconscionable guests were not the people she had set out in the stillness of the night to find! She was looking for those older, more deeply-known friends of hers, the loving, understanding people, the helpful ones, who knew without telling what was in her heart and could draw it out, all the stored sweetness of her life, like wild honey found in the heart of a wall. Any others were only the weary day all over again. What she must now have, and quickly, was just the boon of mere rest. She wanted a hand laid without passion on her hair, the kiss of peace on her lids, a quiet breast on which to forget. Rest from night-wandering for her tired body, rest for her bruised spirit! Any seat into which she could sink would do for the first; as for the second, can there, except in Hell, exist such a thing as an unappeasable need? No, no, no! If God is not mocked, neither does He mock. To seek is to find! To hunger is to be satisfied at the last!

  Heavily she stumbled along the black passage, wearily she pushed at the door at the farther end of it. She stood at the top of the three shallow steps at the gallery’s end. She descended them, and dragged her feet to the embrasure of the nearest of the diamond-paned windows. She had reached the breaking-point. She sank into the window-seat, while the Jane of the canvas looked down on her from the wall.

  Time she supposed, would use her so too. A year or two longer of beauty, a year or two more after that, and nobody would remember as much of her as her name. That inanimate thing on the wall would immeasurably outlive her; her portrait had never been painted.

  Foolish, ever to have thought she could sell that Artist Unknown! Love her or hate her, the tie between them was indissoluble . . . Gervaise envied her her starkness. At any rate trouble was over now for her . . .

  Across the grasscourt the wallflower and valerian lay velvety-black along the top of the Norman wall. At the wall’s foot a single glow­worm burned in the grass, like a broken-off crumb of the unseen moon. Somewhere in the July night a hunted thing began to scream in agony. The screaming persisted intermittently for a time, and then ceased. But Gervaise heard nothing of it. With the linen-dressed head fallen on one gallooned shoulder, she slept.

  That is to say she must have slept; for how else could she awake? She supposed she must call it an awakening, yet never before had she awoke after so strange a fashion. The chamber was a warm clear dusk, and somehow differently placed with regard to herself. She saw all its altered angles, not from the floor-level, but from above. She saw the thick dust on the upper edge of the portrait of the Lady Jane and the fastenings that secured the picture to the wall. The sheeted couch and the mantelpiece with the box of kitchen matches upon it seemed some yards below her. She felt light, free, and suddenly laughing to herself with tenderness and happy tears.

  No need to look further for her peace. Here, in this unlocated, so oddly uplifted place, she had found it.

  Nevertheless her eyes did range further. Past the sheeted couch, past the matchbox on the mantelpiece, she saw a huddled and widely-staring figure in tableau-garments in the corner of the window-seat. If that figure on which she looked down breathed, its breathing would not have stirred a feather; if an artery pulsed, then the pulse of the Lady Jane on the wall might equally have stirred. Gervaise knew that she had left that empty tenement of herself. She, the ecstatic one, was sublimated from that poor shell of thwarted desires. Unless she chose to re-enter it, that Gervaise in the mummer’s dress was dead.

  And why return? Why fear to gaze at the last upon one’s own elements, these made pure, the others cast aside? There had been no pain. It had been the gentlest of subtractions, as if from some white beam a hue had been withdrawn, or as if some super-imposition, imperfectly coinciding, made the double image. Gervaise yearned divinely over that untenanted body in the window-seat that also was Gervaise. She put out her arms to that her lifeless sister, showering down on her an unimaginable love.

  ‘Sleep, sleep, poor tired thing!’ she silently cried. ‘Sleep, for I have taken from you the honey that was in your breast! I flow with it, it gushes from me out of the Seven Wounds with which my heart was pierced! See, I put out my breast to you like the pelican! Eat of me, feed on me, poor girl with the locked and hungry heart! For I am your angel, who was kept from you for a time and times and half-a-time, but bring you comfort now!’

  So she rained it down, the thing that passes understanding, showers of gentleness and pity, gifts of honey and oil and wine, Samarias of love.

  But all at once she felt a pang. The body in the window had made a feeble movement. The gallery too seemed to have shifted again, so that she no longer saw the dust on the picture’s top, nor the cracks of its varnish. She was sinking, being summoned back, re-entering . . . A fleece that crossed the moon dimmed the clear obscurity of the chamber. The old hangings took on a sombrer red. New and recent gashes appeared on them. The figure in the win­dow seat seemed to be looking for that other half of her, drawing gropingly nearer . . .

  Then came a moment rather than endure which death itself might have been preferred. Her heart gave a horrible bound, and she was back, on her feet, numbed and tingling, her hands fumbling about her sleeves, headdress, busk.

  What had happened?

  Where had she been?

  She did not remember. Neither did she know what she was doing there in the picture-gallery at all. Her brows were knitted, as she tried to remember.

  They had been playing some kind of a game, but that had been hours ago. And she had taken it into her head to dress as the Lady Jane. Again her hands went to her head, as if to make sure. Yes, it was so. She looked up at the picture on the wall, and there rushed back on her the mood of the afternoon.

  How she hated the woman, with her pitch-black unsheltered eyes and mocking bony look! Never tell Gervaise that she had never had her fling in her day. Gervaise did not know where she had this knowledge from, but she would have taken her oath that all had not been denial in that handkerchief-dropping lady’s story! She had been Sir Everard’s lady; that had been her room with the antique black four-poster between the two gilt French chairs; but – foolish Sir Everard, if he had not watched her comings and goings! The Abbey was large, and it was not difficult to push at the wrong door! (Look like that as much as you please, Jane, but don’t tell these things to those whose descent is from your own body!) There had been some­body, somebody to ask her private and disturbing questions, and to choose delicately among her nerves until he had found the exquisite innermost one of all, and then to twang out its piercing note!

  And probably he had not even pretended to be faithful to her, this lover who had exchanged glances with those pitchy eyes behind Sir Everard�
��s back! Gervaise knew these gallants! Fear them in the field, but dread them exceedingly in the bower! To look at them one would think they had lain among cushions all their life! They went from house to house, from love to love –

  Gervaise began to tremble violently.

  Yes, from love to love – Blanche Chayter, a dozen others, even weak hysterical little Pamela –

  Pamela, dressed as a paysanne, in wooden shoes and bare legs –

  It all came back to Gervaise again – those two standing under the dim chandelier, he a bloody Mephistophelian red, like those gashes on the walls, her face seen for a moment against the poppy’s heart and then swiftly covered up –

  In vivid cinema-flashes it broke over her, shock on shock, some­times in sequence, sometimes not –

  His mocking story about the princess with the arm – Gervaise’s own hands feverishly gathering up her mother’s puzzle and casting it on the fire – his talk with her on the hill that afternoon –

  ‘Friends as much as you like, Freddy, but I have your measure – ’ they were her own words –

  She had not his measure – she never would have his measure – he had hers –

  Friends! What friendship could there be with a man whom she despised when he was not there, but to whose lifted finger she fell again the moment he made his reappearance?

  And what had all that rant been of quiet breasts to lean on, kisses that weren’t kisses placed on eyes, cool guardian hands placed on hair such as Gervaise Harow’s? Was that a woman’s business? Even wretched little Pamela had known better than that! True, she had begun by refusing, as a woman may well do –

  ‘No, no, Freddy – that was this afternoon –’

  Then his soft masterful laugh: ‘Isn’t it a bit too late now? –’

  She seemed to be at the head of the dark service-stairs again, listening to words beyond the panel that no doubt had been intended for her to hear –