The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  By a terrace door in an angle of the façade the driver tugged at an iron bellrod. After a longish interval the door was opened by an elderly, bald, greybearded man in a red baize apron, behind whom stood a meagre woman in black. These were evidently the Marsacs, who were to look after him during his convalescence. Without a word the man reached behind him for a huge umbrella and came forward to hold it over James. From under its edge James saw a long terrace frontage with tall windows and more tall windows above them. In an inner lobby a second door stood half open. The man in the apron had returned to fetch his belongings.

  Then happened something that seemed little short of a miracle. Stepping forward James suddenly found himself in a lofty room with panelled and tapestried walls, vast armoires, and a wide stone hearth on which, behind massive firedogs, a great wood fire burned. Near it a small period table was laid for one, with cutlery, a napkin and a large jar of montbretia. By a glass stood a tall bottle of wine with the cork invitingly half drawn. Outside the mud and the rain and inside – this! He stood looking round the surprising room and then turned to the woman, who with eyes averted was waiting for her orders.

  ‘You seem to have been busy, Madame Marsac,’ he said.

  The woman had a voice as harshly shrill as that of a parrot. But busy! Only the day before yesterday nothing, not a chair, and then, mon Dieu, everything arriving by road from Paris at once! Busy!

  And if Madame Marsac had been busy here his friend Blanche had been no less busy at the auction-rooms of the Hôtel Drouot in Paris. Chez Drouot one can buy for a song ancient and elephantine pieces of furniture that no modern room will take, and here they were, the tapestries and leather-backed chairs, tall oil-lamps of bronze and onyx, a battle-piece big enough for a wall at Versailles, porcelain vases as large as those of the Forty Thieves. But James Hopley had put out his hand to the bottle with the half-drawn cork. Even a gueule cassée, blown up by high explosive in the war and not dug out of the earth again for a week, may still like the inner warmth of a glass of wine. So here was to Blanche. Her white-elephant of a château was not turning out so badly after all.

  2

  That afternoon, the rain still continuing, he took a walk round this place that had been so generously put at his disposal. Strictly speak­ing it was not so much a château as a hunting-box, of two tall storeys and a hipped and dormered roof above that, with one row of win­dows facing the terrace and the other looking across the neglected park to the river that joined the sea some dozen miles away. But it was the topmost floor of all that instantly seized James Hopley’s imagination. What a place for a couple of boys to have played hide-and-seek in! Except for the roof itself this upper portion had never in fact been completed. Floorboards ended suddenly, leaving bare the joists and the drop to the storey below. The dormers were infrequent and the light already falling, and when presently he began to strike matches as likely as not a sigh of wandering air blew them out again. He would in fact be wise to get to the safety of the lower levels before it became quite dark.

  And suddenly he was checked. Something had struck him lightly in the face.

  A bat? There might well be bats up there. And his matches were getting few, but he shielded one carefully in his hands. The object that had struck him was a rope, that swung from a beam overhead and disappeared in the shadows below. Still, with workmen about a place a rope was no unusual thing to find, and he turned away.

  But by this time he had got confused about the building’s plan. He descended to the mansard level again and found a door that opened on stairs similar to those he had come up by. He groped his way down these and in the darkness pushed at another door at the bottom. And the next moment he was in a high, lamplighted, kitchen sort of room, stacked half way to the ceiling with packing-cases and crates from which the paper and straw protruded. The lamp shone full on the bald head of the man in the red baize apron, who with the meagre woman his wife was sitting at a bare table having a frugal meal. He had stumbled into the caretaker’s quarters.

  He was about to apologise when suddenly he stopped. The woman, catching sight of him, had let out a harsh, ringing cry, and had clapped her hands before her eyes. The man’s hand, too, had closed swiftly on the lighted lamp as if he would have hurled it. But he picked it up shakily instead, rising to his feet as he did so. His voice was strongly under control.

  ‘Monsieur has no doubt missed his way; it is here,’ he said, and lamp in hand advanced to a door in a corner. He led the way across a draughty apartment empty except for sacks of cement, and opened another door. James was back in the large room that had first wel­comed him, but this time from the fireplace end.

  Mortified, dispirited, the slow recovery of weeks undone again at a single stroke, he sank into one of the leather-backed chairs. Always, always his face, and so he supposed it must be to the end. For in Paris, when the yearly performances were given, and the cap was passed round for the benefit of those afflicted as he was, be sure you would not find James Hopley standing next to the kiosk where his own picture-postcard was for sale, showing off his grafts and his paraffin-wax and his seared cheek, with the glass eye glittering as hard as a doll’s in the middle of it all. Much more then, meeting people for the first time and in a place like this, he ought not to have shown himself without warning, appearing from nowhere at the foot of a flight of private stairs. But he made no mention of the incident when presently the woman came in to lay the period table for his supper. By that time he was busily writing. He was still writing when she came in to clear away. And as it is on this writing of James Hopley’s that this tale of him is largely based, a word had better be said about it.

  The shiny, black-backed exercise-book before him was the fifth of the series. They contained his own account of his case apart from anything the doctors might have to say about it, and as they were written for his own eye only, they leave out much more than they put in. Naturally he did not tell himself things he already knew. But once in a while some unexpected result cropped up, and at present he was noting down this unfortunate beginning with the Marsacs. He passed his hand over his brow as he finished it, then closed his book, took his candle, and at a little after nine o’clock slowly mounted the echoing stairs to bed.

  His bedroom, too, was Hôtel Drouot, with much ormolu and alabaster and cracked and faded gilding. It had two beds, a yard or so apart, as if Blanche had made ready either for married guests or for a single person like himself, and on a small commode between them stood the second candlestick. James Hopley had had a long journey and was tired. He threw his dressing-gown across the second bed and got into the first one. There, having blown out his candle, he lay awake listening to the hundred noises of the gaunt place.

  Outside the rain beat down without ceasing. Somewhere a door must have been left open, for he found himself waiting for a re­current banging. Outside in the corridor vague gusts entered by the window-piercings, and somewhere on the scaffolding something flapped. Slowly that mortifying picture faded, of a woman who hid her face and screamed while a man’s hand went to a lighted lamp. He yawned, drew up his knees, and slipped over the edge of sleep.

  He was a wakened by a sound different from any he had been listening to. It seemed to come from immediately overhead and so heavy was the thud of it that it brought him upright on his pillow, startled and listening.

  But when a sound wakes you from sleep, and is not repeated, it is not difficult to persuade yourself that you have dreamed it after all. James sank slowly back to his pillow again. But he was next conscious of a sudden alteration in the air; a strong odour seemed to have found its way into the room, and at the same time he was aware of a new sound, that came from somewhere in the room itself. It came from the direction of the other bed, and it was the sound of deep and painful breathing.

  But it was on the sharp, pervading smell that his attention was first of all concentrated. Two of its components he could have accounted f
or readily enough. They were wet earth and freshly-bruised grass, and there was plenty of both outside. But to these was added some­thing else. It was the smell of the chest and arms of a man. Then he gave his attention to the breathing again.

  Matches stood on the commode beside him, but he did not im­med­iately put out his hand to them. Even the striking of a match would have been an interruption. Sometimes the sounds of the breathing died down, and then suddenly they fought, as if for life, filling the room with their noise. And James Hopley had never been in this château in his life before, but either that was the breathing of somebody he had known or else in some other way it broke suddenly through out of the dark tomb of the past. For it is the first time only that we forget. Set the chord vibrating again and thenceforward it continues to vibrate as long as we have a memory at all. In the darkness James lay listening to the breathing for a while longer; then he put out his hand for the matches.

  But he instantly drew it back again, so many degrees colder was the air. It was in fact a minute or more before he managed to light one of the candles. The other bed was unchanged in appearance, with his dressing-gown still across it just as he had thrown it down. But brr, it was cold! The cold, that pungent smell of sweat, the breathing.

  He had put one foot out of bed and advanced his ear. He advanced it so close that he almost expected to feel the breath on his cheek. Then he placed his hand on the coverlet.

  But that apparently he ought not to have done. There was the sigh of one who wakes from temporary forgetfulness to the intol­er­able burden of life again. The chilliness drew away. The breathing became fainter and died. The air cleared. The candle burned on as if nothing had happened.

  3

  Most of us like our bedrooms to ourselves. If we must share them we would rather do so with somebody who does not smell quite so strongly nor bring quite such a coldness into the air. But com­par­atively few of us have been through the ordeal James Hopley had been through. The main structure of our frame has not been so shattered that as a frame it can suffer no more, but only in its remaining separate fragments. Account for it as you will, James Hopley did not shrink from something that would have sent most of us back to Paris by the very next train. It was in fact a slight dis­appointment to him that for the remainder of the night he was undisturbed. And he was busily writing it all down in his cahier before he had well swallowed his coffee the next morning.

  Towards the middle of the morning, however, he was interrupted by the announcement of a visitor. The curé of the place had lost no time in coming to enquire after the health of Madame Blanche in Paris and to hope that M. Hopley himself had recovered from the fatigue of his journey. At least these were the reasons he gave for his call. James had no doubt he had others. One was probably curiosity, and James, who noticed such things, marked him creditably highly for his composure in the presence of skin-grafting and paraffin-wax. But for all that the curé had not talked for ten minutes before he was hinting that the château was perhaps not the best place for a con­val­escent to be staying in at that particular moment.

  ‘When this rain stops the men will be at work again,’ he said, fingering his little silver cross. ‘And I see that one of your occup­ations is writing, which requires quiet. I cannot think you will be comfortable here. Come to me at my little house if you feel inclined. I should even be happy if you would spend some considerable time with me. My garden is pleasant and my apples are ripe. Also it would be society for me. Here – so near the river – the air is not salubrious.’

  This was generous, and James thanked the curé; but at the same time it looked a little like letting the cat out of the bag, and presently he was asking about the château itself, its history, legends, assoc­iations. It seemed a natural thing to do.

  But he did not find the curé communicative. No place like that was without its hundred legends, some with a basis of truth, others the merest gossip, he said. Three houses had stood on those found­ations before the present one. One story was that the wounded were brought to this château after the battle of Arcques. There were rumours concerning it during the Terror. Later, if vulgar report was to be believed, it had a history of smuggling. Its skeletons were best left in its cupboards. And that was about as much as the curé would commit himself to. Again he recommended his own vicarage. He accepted a glass of wine, but declined to stop and share James’s midday meal, and James accompanied him as far as the rusty gates.

  He found it interesting that the battle of Arcques had been fought in the neighbourhood. He did not know what weather that battle had taken place in, but a battle can be an earthy affair, with much trampled grass, and they who take part in it are exceedingly likely to sweat. But James could not believe that a battle fought nearly three hundred years ago had very much to do with himself. Had nothing happened in this country of France since then? The Terror was not exactly yesterday either. As for smuggling . . . well, these people ought to know best, but he gave a shrug. The incident had made far too deep an impression on him to be dismissed like that. If it were merely that some desperado had been pistolled or knocked on the head while running a bale or two of wool from England, Blanche would have been proud of her ghost and would have told him in her letters. Walking slowly with head down and hands behind his back he fell into a deep musing.

  Nevertheless he discovered the château’s possibilities with regard to contraband that very afternoon. He found them in the cellars. These were a series of vaults on ancient foundations of flint, with great bays branching off them, a bakehouse, a laundry, wine-cellars with the old wooden bins still mouldering in them, and in the very middle of the house he nearly walked into an unrailed and unguarded well. A rope in the rafters to hang him and a well down here to drown him? But no. On examination he found the well to be a dry one. Then, making a swift calculation, he shone his electric torch up into the vaulting. There were signs that at some time or other, it had been cut through, and a tour of the other floors a little later in the day showed the remains of other trap-doors, boarded up and long disused, but all in a vertical line between the rope and the well. With a river across the park and the sea only a few miles away here was a depot for contraband ready made. But still he shook his head. Some­where not far away there was a truer explanation than that. The rain was beginning to stop. Perhaps a turn outside would clear his thoughts and give some inner James Hopley a chance to say what he had to say. He descended the worn and grey and lichened steps at the end of the terrace. He walked along the edge of the shrub-grown moat, past the gnarled old orchard, and through knee-deep thistles down the slope of the park to the river. There, by the muddy, sliding water, that ought to provide good fishing when it cleared, he cast about as it were for a rise in his own mind.

  His habit of avoiding all company but his own had made of this mind a sparsely-furnished but a severely-ordered one. Accordingly he began at the right end, namely, with the people he knew some­thing about. First there was the curé. He was kind, hospitable and well-mannered. James was as touched by the offer of his house and orchard as if he had thought of availing himself of it. But the curé after all had to steer a middle course between two worlds, and vague talk about Arcques, the Terror and smuggling was all James was likely to get out of him. Next there was Marsac. Marsac was getting on in years. He lived rent-free, the produce of the gardens was enough for him and his wife, and if he lost this job he would not find it easy to get another at his time of life. He would therefore put up with midnight bumps and alterations of temperature in a part of the house he was not called upon to occupy. Then there was Blanche herself. She was spending a lot of money on her purchase and would be coming to live there in the spring. As for the workmen, he hadn’t seen them yet, but, like Marsac, they would not be likely to quarrel with their bread-and-butter.

  But must every place affect everybody in precisely the same way and degree? Was there nothing in what a man brought to it? It was no light experienc
e that James Hopley was bringing to this chateau of his friend’s. A smell at which anybody else would simply have opened a window was for him charged with dreadful memories. Coldness to him was not a mere momentary discomfort but the cold-ness of all mortality, disturbed breathing the suffering of a human frame that could bear no more. Was it then to be wondered at that after that first night he was ready to appropriate to himself anything unusual there might be about that château, its past, its present, or anything else it might have in store? He continued his walk under the alders of the swollen river, sometimes wondering whether the air was really as insalubrious as the curé has said, but always returning to his thought . . . that if a man brought more to a place than he found there he already knew a good deal more about it than anybody else could tell him.

  4

  There is only one sure way of being present at the birth of a legend. That is to be oneself its origin. James Hopley left the river that afternoon with a highly remarkable idea in his head.

  It had to do with this queer business of revived memory. Show a man for example a drawing of a person he has seen perhaps once; the chances are that he will have forgotten the person; but he will remember the drawing. So with the happenings of last night. Should they happen a second time then that would be a momentous and ineradicable event. It was not impossible that out of the sheer force of the stirring-up a third would follow, and a fourth. This was the idea James Hopley left the river with that afternoon.

  But it was only the beginning of it. Something far more pregnant followed. It had been in 1916 that he had been blown up and had disappeared from the world for exactly seven days and seven nights. Then had come his recent and unaccountable relapse in Paris. There­fore he was now a man who experiments upon the string of an instrument. Touch it never so lightly in the right place and you were answered by its harmonic. It might be a harmonic of a jangled and horrible discord, scraped rawly out on that open string of 1916, but it would be identical in its notes and duration, faithful in its other correspondences. Seven nights of actually-lived-through hell then, seven nights of its etherealised repetition now. What was to happen after that does not seem to have troubled him very much. What would come would come, and it could hardly be worse than what had been. And oh, what a lot about this twilit edge of things he would know by that seventh night! As he took his candle to go to bed it seemed already strange to him that he had only been in that château of his own reawakened memories a little more than twenty-four hours.