The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  The basket-chair tilted up, but righted itself again.

  ‘I told you – I told you – ’ she choked, her stockish figure shaking with rage, ‘I told you – you –’

  He put up his elbow as if to ward off a blow.

  ‘You touch me – you! – you!’ the words broke from her.

  He had put himself farther round the table. He stammered.

  ‘Here – dash it all, Bessie – what is the matter?’

  ‘You touch me!’

  ‘All right,’ he said sullenly. ‘I won’t touch you again – no fear. I didn’t know you were such a firebrand. All right, drop it now. I won’t again. Good Lord!’

  Slowly the white fist she had drawn back sank to her side again.

  ‘All right now,’ he continued to grumble resentfully. ‘You needn’t take on so. It’s said – I won’t touch you again.’ Then, as if he remembered that after all she was ill and must be humoured, he began, while her bosom still rose and fell rapidly, to talk with an assumption that nothing much had happened. ‘Come, sit down again, Bessie. The tea’s in the pot and I’ll have it ready in a couple of jiffs. What a ridiculous little girl you are, to take on like that! . . . And I say, listen! That’s a muffin-bell, and there’s a grand fire for toast! You sit down while I run out and get ’em. Give me your key, so I can let myself in again –’

  He took her key from her bag, caught up his hat, and hastened out.

  But she did not sit down again. She was no calmer for his quick disappearance. In that moment when he had recoiled from her she had had the expression of some handsome and angered snake, its hood puffed, ready to strike. She stood dazed; one would have supposed that that ill-advised kiss of his had indeed been the Master Word she sought, the Word she felt approaching, the Word to which the objects of the Museum, the book, that rustle of a sea she had never seen, had been but the ever ‘warming’ stages. Some merest trifle stood between her and those elfin cries, between her and that thin golden mist in which faintly seen shapes seemed to move – shapes almost of tossed arms, waving, brandishing objects strangely all but familiar. That roaring of the sea was not the rushing of her own blood in her ears, that rosy flush not the artificial glow of the cheap red lampshade. The shapes were almost as plain as if she saw them in some clear but black mirror, the sounds almost as audible as if she heard them through some not very thick muffling . . .

  ‘Quick – the book,’ she muttered.

  But even as she stretched out her hand for it, again came that solemn sound of warning. As if something sought to stay it, she had deliberately to thrust her hand forward. Again the high dinning calls of ‘Hasten! Hasten!’ were mingled with that deeper ‘Beware!’ She knew in her soul that, once over that terrible edge, the Dream would become the Reality and the Reality the Dream. She knew nothing of the fluidity of the thing called Personality – not a thing at all, but a state, a balance, a relation, a resultant of forces so delicately in equilibrium that a touch, and – pff! – the horror of Formlessness rushed over all.

  As she hesitated a new light appeared in the chamber. Within the frame of the small square window, beyond the ragged line of the chimney-cowls, an edge of orange brightness showed. She leaned forward. It was the full moon, rusty and bloated and flattened by the earth-mist.

  The next moment her hand had clutched at the book.

  ‘Whence came ye, merry damsels! Whence came ye

  So many, and so many, and such glee?

  Why have ye left your bowers desolate,

  Your lutes, and gentler fate?’

  ‘We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing

  A-conquering!

  Bacchus, young Bacchus! Good or ill betide

  We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide!

  Come hither, Lady fair, and joinèd be

  To our wild minstrelsy!’

  There was an instant in which darkness seemed to blot out all else; then it rolled aside, and in a blaze of brightness was gone. It was gone, and she stood face to face with her Dream, that for two thousand years had slumbered in the blood of her and her line. She stood, with mouth agape and eyes that hailed, her thick throat full of suppressed clamour. The other was the Dream now, and these! . . . they came down, mad and noisy and bright – Maenades, Thyades, satyrs, fauns – naked, in hides of beasts, ungirded, dishevelled, wreathed and garlanded, dancing, singing, shouting. The thudding of their hooves shook the ground, and the clash of their timbrels and the rustling of their thyrsi filled the air. They brandished frontal bones, the dismembered quarters of kids and goats; they struck the bronze cantharus, they tossed the silver obba up aloft. Down a cleft of rocks and woods they came, trooping to a wide seashore with the red of the sunset behind them. She saw the evening light on the sleek and dappled hides, the gilded ivory and rich brown of their legs and shoulders, the white of inner arms held up on high, their wide red mouths, the quivering of the twin flesh-gouts on the necks of the leaping fauns. And, shutting out the glimpse of sky at the head of the deep ravine, the god himself descended, with his car full of drunken girls who slept with the serpents coiled about them.

  Shouting and moaning and frenzied, leaping upon one another with libidinous laughter and beating one another with the half-stripped thyrsi, they poured down to the yellow sands and the anem­onied pools of the shore. They raced to the water, that gleamed pale as nacre in the deepening twilight in the eye of the evening star. They ran along its edge over their images in the wet sands, calling their lost companion.

  ‘Hasten, hasten!’ they cried; and one of them, a young man with a torso noble as the dawn and shoulder-lines strong as those of the eternal hills, ran here and there calling her name.

  ‘Louder, louder!’ she called back in an ecstasy.

  Something dropped and tinkled against the fender. It was one of her hairpins. One side of her hair was in a loose tumble; she threw up the small head on the superb thick neck.

  ‘Louder! – I cannot hear! Once more –’

  The throwing up of her head that had brought down the rest of her hair had given her a glimpse of herself in the glass over the mantel­piece. For the last time that formidable ‘Beware!’ sounded like thunder in her ears; the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat. He with the torso and those shoulders was seeking her . . . how should he know her in that dreary garret, in those joyless habiliments? He would as soon known his own in that crimson-bodiced, wire-framed dummy by the window yonder! . . .

  Her fingers clutched at the tawdry mercerised silk of her blouse. There was a rip, and her arms and throat were free. She panted as she tugged at something that gave with a short ‘click-click’, as of steel fastenings; something fell against the fender . . . These also . . . She tore at them, and kicked them as they lay about her feet as leaves lie about the trunk of a tree in autumn . . .

  ‘Ah!’

  And as she stood there, as if within the screen of a spectrum that deepened to the band of red, her eyes fell on the leopard-skin at her feet. She caught it up, and in doing so saw purple grapes – purple grapes that issued from the mouth of a paper bag on the table. With the dappled pelt about her she sprang forward. The juice spurted through them into the mass of her loosened hair. Down her body there was a spilth of seeds and pulp. She cried hoarsely aloud.

  ‘Once more – oh, answer me! Tell me my name!’

  Ed’s steps were heard on the oil-clothed portion of the staircase.

  ‘My name – oh, my name!’ she cried in an agony of suspense . . . ‘Oh, they will not wait for me! They have lighted the torches – they run up and down the shore with torches – oh, cannot you see me? . . . ’

  Suddenly she dashed to the chair on which the litter of linings and tissue-paper lay. She caught up a double handful and crammed them on the fire. They caught and flared. There was a c
all upon the stairs, and the sound of somebody mounting in haste.

  ‘Once – once only – my name!’

  The soul of the Bacchante rioted, struggled to escape from her eyes. Then as the door was flung open, she heard, and gave a terri­fying shout of recognition.

  ‘I hear – I almost hear – but once more . . . IO! Io, Io, Io!’

  Ed, in the doorway, stood for one moment agape; the next, ignor­ant of the full purport of his own words – ignorant that though man may come westwards he may yet bring his worship with him – ignorant that to make the Dream the Reality and the Reality the Dream is Heaven’s dreadfullest favour – and ignorant that, that Edge once crossed, there is no return to the sanity and sweetness and light that are only seen clearly in the moment when they are lost for ever – he had dashed down the stairs crying in a voice hoarse and high with terror.

  ‘She’s mad! She’s mad!’

  The Painted Face

  1

  How Mrs Van Necker had come to be in charge of the party of girls can be told in a very few words. Say that you were travelling Europe with your daughter, and business or some other reason called you home. You might then have to bring the girl back with you. But you looked round, and there was Mrs Van Necker, with a daughter of her own, ready for a consideration to undertake the responsibility till your return. She knew her Mediterranean; she still preserved a good presence; and her frank admission that her job was no sinecure gave you confidence. Here (you said) is a woman who knows that young girls are a handful, and lays her plans accord­ingly. So you said goodbye to your child, and went about your business with a mind at rest.

  In this way it had come about that the two English girls had been handed over to Mrs Van Necker in Rome, and a third, an American art-student, in Naples. With her own daughter Mollie that brought her party up to four, all between sixteen and nineteen years old, and she was to pick up a fifth girl in Palermo on her way to Northern Africa. To Palermo the party had made with all speed, descending at the hotel exactly two hours before the departure of the Tunis boat.

  Mrs Van Necker was privately a little elated. She knew Umberto Francavilla by repute as an immensely rich Sicilian, the financial power behind at least a quarter of the casinos and hotels along a ten-thousand-miles littoral. The future was not always without anxiety for Margaret Van Necker. With the daughter of such a man knitted to her by kindness and obligation the outlook would be considerably rosier.

  She was known at the Palermo hotel, and she and her four charges were shown to a tea-table. She ordered tea, and then herself dis­appeared for ten minutes or so. When she returned not an eyelash was out of place, and the silvery lock of hair that somehow made her a pretty as well as a responsible woman, lay flat exactly where she wished it to lie.

  There were not more than a dozen people in the hotel lounge, and a glance had told Mrs Van Necker which couple were father and daughter on the point of leavetaking. They sat half hidden behind an oleander in the farthest corner of the room, and on the table in front of Umberto Francavilla stood an untouched drink, in which the ice had melted to a wafer. They were hand-in-hand, and Mrs Van Necker’s eyes took in the father’s externals first – the early-bald head with the unwrinkled brow, the severe black morning-coat, and his sad, clever, unsmiling dark eyes. The sadness of parting, Mrs Van Necker reflected. A cheerful demeanour for that. After all the girl was to rejoin him in two or three weeks’ time in Algiers. So smiles and reassurances for Signor Umberto. She caught a little of what he was saying as she bore in her pale sweet-pea colours down the room.

  ‘ – not this time, little heart. You have been with me too much. It is not good for you to be alone in hotels while I am occupied all day, also there are people I do not wish you to see. You must be more with girls of your own age. They know me at the Tunisia Palace. You will be looked after. So go, little one, and do not forget to pray every night to Santa Rosalia –’

  Then the unsmiling eyes saw Mrs Van Necker’s manicured hand with the new glove dangling from the wrist, and he was on his feet.

  ‘You are Signor Francavilla? I am Margaret Van Necker. And this, I suppose – ’ she smiled at the young girl, who stood up.

  Umberto Francavilla presented his daughter Xena, and fetched another chair.

  It did not take Mrs Van Necker three minutes to decide that she couldn’t bear the man. She might as well have smiled at the tub that held the oleander as at him. Perhaps that was how he had become a financial power – by listening, and looking measuringly into people’s eyes like that, and not saying a word. His attitude to his daughter she set down as mawkish. A separation would take them out of themselves and each other and be good for them both. And she had heard him say that he wished Xena to be with girls of her own age.

  ‘That’s my brood over there,’ she said pleasantly, with a nod across the room. ‘The one with the teapot is my daughter Mollie, Xena. The girls on each side of her are Cicely and Daphne Bruce-Harries. They are English. You have been in England, Signor Francavilla?’

  ‘I have been in many places.’

  ‘Then perhaps you have met General Bruce-Harries?’

  Instead of answering her question he said abruptly, ‘Have you a car?’

  Mrs Van Necker was obliged to say that for the moment she had no car.

  ‘Then I will have one sent. You will be so good as to ask two days from now at the Tunisia Palace Hotel. It is there that I wish you to go, not to the other one, which I built. If you go to Sfax I should stay at the Hotel de France. At Sousse the Grand is the best. At the hotels or elsewhere you have only to say that this is my daughter.’

  Mrs Van Necker liked him less and less. He talked to her as if she were an untravelled person. She was to use his daughter’s name. In one breath he commended the child to Santa Rosalia, and in the next put her over Mrs Van Necker’s own head as the member of the party for whom most would be done. She glanced again at the bearer of a name so potent. The child could hardly be seven-teen yet, but she wore a perfectly mouth-watering Lanvin frock, over calves that perhaps swelled a shade unusually from her slender ankles, as if she had taken lessons in professional dancing. Her pale blue Canterbury-bell of a hat was pulled so far down that Mrs Van Necker suspected there were tears to hide. Cars despatched to Tunis because of her, as casually as if they were picture-post­cards! It slightly overpowered Mrs Van Necker. But she rose and spoke gaily.

  ‘Shall I leave you two? Or would Xena like to be introduced to the others now? Not that there’s any hurry for half an hour –’

  ‘Go to them, little one. I shall see you at the boat,’ said Umberto Francavilla, and Mrs Van Necker felt the words not so much as a permission to his daughter as a dismissal of herself as a tiresome woman.

  ‘We’re all going to be so happy,’ she said with her hand poss­essively on the young girl’s shoulder as they crossed the room; but what she was really thinking was, ‘Casinos! Well, he has that hard sort of look. But Santa Rosalia! I shouldn’t have thought that! Anyway except for this child with her frocks and cars he’s a woman-hater, not much doubt about that! . . . Molly – Daffy – Cicely – Amalia this is Xena. And her father’s having a car sent over for us.’

  The two English girls were of the half-pretty, half-plain, out-to-marry kind, both with eyebrows so light that they might as well not have had any. The taller of them said, ‘How lovely! What sort?’

  In a shy, yet strong and musical little voice, the girl murmured the names of Isotta, Lancia, Rolls; whereupon the one who had poured out tea broke in explosively.

  ‘Oh, what a nice girl to join our party! But why doesn’t your father send us over in his steam yacht?’

  Timidly the girl lifted a pair of eyes as blue as her hat. She had not been crying.

  ‘Shall I go and ask him?’ she said.

  ‘What! he has one! I was only –’

  ‘Come,
come, as if we shouldn’t all be fond of Xena for her own sake!’ Mrs Van Necker smiled, with her hand again on Xena’s shoulder.

  ‘Is it Zena like Zena Dare?’

  ‘You spell it with an X, don’t you, Xena?’

  ‘What’s her other name?’

  ‘Francavilla.’

  ‘I shall call her Frankie.’

  ‘Is that her father over there?’

  Mollie Van Necker was busy with a puff and a mirror. – ‘I like men of that age; they always smell so nice of bath-salts,’ she remarked.

  ‘Mollie!’

  ‘Well, don’t you smell men as they pass?’

  ‘We hate to call you vulgar, Mollie –’

  ‘All bath-salts and lovely cigarettes –’

  ‘They have to be bowed down with years before they can afford those things,’ the younger English girl observed.

  ‘Well, I suppose we can’t have everything –’

  ‘I shall do it like tennis-service, a jolly good smash if it comes off, and one left if it doesn’t –’

  Mrs Van Necker’s voice was heard – ‘Hadn’t somebody better be seeing about a taxi?’

  The Sicilian child had taken a step to where she could see beyond the revolving doors. She returned, and spoke unspoken-to for the first time. – ‘That’s my father’s car waiting for us,’ she said.

  ‘However many cars has her father?’

  ‘I think about eight,’ the shy, earnest voice replied. ‘He keeps them in different places. He travels a great deal.’

  ‘Eight – cars! –’

  ‘And oh, what a handsome chauffeur! What’s his name, Frankie?’

  ‘Ruggiero,’ said the child in the Lanvin frock.

  ‘Is he the one we’re going to have in Tunis?’

  ‘I don’t know. I could ask father.’

  ‘Doesn’t she speak good English!’

  ‘Just like any of us!’