The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  But as he was turning down the bronze lamps the door beyond the fireplace opened and Marsac stood in the entry. And James was already finding Marsac not at all a bad fellow. He had intelligence above the average, and also a stolid sort of courage. Therefore he paused in his going to bed to exchange a word with him.

  ‘It seems a pity to leave that fire,’ he said pleasantly, for its flames played richly on the tapestries and the high tinted ceiling. ‘I was just going upstairs.’

  ‘Until the workmen have finished it is not possible to put a fire upstairs for monsieur. Madame wrote suddenly, and there was little time to make ready,’ Marsac replied.

  ‘Did Madame then think I had married without telling her? There are two beds,’ James said, his single eye on the caretaker’s face to see how he took it.

  But Marsac made no sign. ‘It was as easy to put two as one, and she did not say how long monsieur might be staying.’

  ‘Because the place is not salubrious? It is what Monsieur le Curé said. For that reason he invited me to stay with him.’

  At that Marsac did go near to betraying himself. ‘Then no doubt monsieur will do so?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘I? Visit?’ said James, and Marsac became the restrained domestic again.

  ‘Monsieur is comfortable here? There is nothing else he requires tonight?’

  ‘Nothing. Good night,’ and as the caretaker finished the putting out of the lamps the ceiling and tapestries looked the friendlier because of all that James Hopley knew for certain awaited him in the bedchamber upstairs.

  That night he again threw his dressing-gown across the second bed and blew out his candle. But as he lay there awake he knew now what he was waiting for.

  On the following morning a young workman in a blouse and peaked cap mounted a ladder and chanced to put his head into a window-aperture that opened to the long corridor inside. Suddenly a door immediately across the corridor opened, and James Hopley stood there. The workman descended hastily to where a couple of carpen­ters were sawing at a trestle under a portion of the scaffolding. He took off the peaked cap and passed his sleeve across his brow.

  ‘Have you seen?’ he whispered, glancing involuntarily over his shoulder.

  ‘Has who seen what?’ an older man demanded, pausing in his sawing.

  ‘What has arrived. Mon Dieu! Jean the Smuggler will not have it all his own way in the château now!’

  ‘It is the English gueule cassée. Mathilde Marsac told me. You have seen him?’

  ‘If I have seen him! . . . ’ exclaimed the young man.

  ‘What is he like?’

  ‘Like! What is a nightmare like when it promenades itself by day? I will tell you what he is like . . . ’

  He did so. One of his listeners made a grimace, the other nodded.

  ‘It is what Mathilde Marsac said. She saw him arrive, looking over her husband’s shoulder. She saw him as he stood there in the salon, looking round. And that very same night, just as she was having her supper, the door of the back stairs opened and he stood there, his face like a cinder with a piece of glass in it . . . ’

  But the second carpenter was a more matter-of-fact sort of fellow. ‘Mathilde Marsac!’ he scoffed. ‘Mathilde’s knees knock together if she has to pass the churchyard in the daylight!’

  ‘And is it not in the daylight that I have seen him, not five minutes ago?’ the young workman demanded. ‘The night is the night. Such things belong to it. But at the beginning of the day . . . ’

  ‘Bah, poor devil! Marsac told me – Madame Blanche wrote it in the letter to say he was coming – that he will not go back to his own country because of those who might remember him there. Perhaps some woman – perhaps Madame herself – who knows? Va! Mathilde Marsac and our Francis here, now they have both seen Jean the Smuggler,’ and the speaker reached for his saw again.

  But Francis the mason had seen what he had seen, and moved off to find another audience.

  He had in fact seen, though without knowing anything about it, an exceedingly startling development. It was one that James Hopley himself, writing at that moment his ‘roofer’ to Blanche (and for what a roof!), had as yet no inkling of. For James was flushed with success. He had predicted an astonishing thing, and lo, it had straightway come true to the letter. But something else had come no less true with it. He had had no particular reason for looking at himself in the glass more attentively than usual that morning. All that he remem­bered of his getting up was that as he had stepped out of his room some young workman or other had hastily withdrawn his face from a window-opening. But James had in fact made his first serious mis­assumption. He had taken it for granted that the work of the doctors was now done once for all, past possibility of slipping back. An actual physical retro­gression had been the last thing he had fore­seen. Yet swift as a returned blow this had taken place within a few hours, and if it continued the inner ravage would but make the plastic superimpos­itions the more ghastly as time went on. It mattered little now what he wrote in or left out of his diary. The thing had already begun to write itself terribly on his face.

  He was in fact already planning the next steps of his adventure at that very moment. He must try to take this room-fellow of his by surprise. What for example would happen if he were to change the position of the beds? If, approaching carefully, he tried whether that harsh breathing would stir the flame of a candle? Dim a looking-glass? If he spoke suddenly and loudly, setting subtle traps in his questions? But now that all was well afoot there was plenty of time. He did not notice that his midday meal was brought in that day not by Madame Marsac, but by her husband. But he did remember the workman who had looked across the corridor at him and, looking up, asked the caretaker his name.

  ‘A brown-eyed, timid-looking young man in a blouse and a peaked cap,’ he said. ‘He was standing halfway up a ladder.’

  ‘That would be Francis, the mason,’ Marsac replied.

  ‘Francis the mason. I see. They are good fellows, the workmen here?’

  Marsac would not express an opinion. They were comme ci comme ça . . . all sorts.

  ‘It is doubtless a fine thing for the village that Madame Blanche has acquired this property.’

  ‘No doubt it brings money.’

  ‘And will bring more when she herself comes and begins to enter­tain.’

  ‘The château has had its lean years. It is but just it should have its prosperous ones,’ Marsac replied.

  ‘I sincerely hope it may have,’ said James, resuming his work, and the caretaker withdrew.

  His work for the moment was to address Francis the mason in a sort of written monologue. James in fact talked to him with his fountain-pen as if he had been actually there. You are young, Francis (he wrote), and for the young one makes allowances. When you are as old as our friend Marsac here you will not look at a man for a moment like that and then draw back as if you had seen a ghost. You have perhaps finished your service, but wait till you have seen a war. They will make you a hundred ghosts there quicker than you can put your head through an opening and take it away again. Ghosts may not be all you think, friend Francis. Much depends on how much you bring with you. Are you married? Have you children? Children grow up and women grow old, and if that’s all, death’s the end. But is it the end? That’s what I’m trying to find out. In a very few nights I’m hoping to know. Would you like to know too? You look the sort it might be easy to tell. You may not be the first to be told. Madame Marsac looks like being that. But would you like to be the second?

  And when a man sets out during his lifetime to find out what happens to him when he dies, a few days and nights are little enough for the task before him.

  5

  His first serious check awaited him on his fifth afternoon. It began with something that he afterwards called himself fool and dunder­head not to have thought of be
fore. Did he only breathe at night? Had he never lain down for a rest in the middle of the afternoon? Also up to then he had been content to write of this visitor of his that after a certain time he ‘went’. But where did he go? Even he couldn’t go simply nowhere. This is what happened.

  At about five o’clock that afternoon he needed something – it was nothing more than a clean handkerchief – that chanced to be in his bedroom, and went upstairs to get it. And this time he does not stint his description of what happened the moment he opened the bed­room door. He is, in fact, unpleasantly explicit, so we will simply say that the signs were at their maximum strength. And it was as he stood looking wonderingly down on that flat empty bed of suffering that he had his inspiration. Where did the fellow take himself off to when he was disturbed? Hitherto his manner towards his guest had varied. There had been all those stealthy experiments to try. But even at his most intent he had shown a measure of consideration. Now he twitched off the coverlet abruptly. This fellow went back to the battlefield of Arcques when he left the bed, did he? To the Quartier St Antoine or the Bastille? To a cave of the confederates of this smuggling gang? Well, wherever he went this time he would have to pass James Hopley at the door before he did so. James stood in the entry, waiting for the chill waft to pass before his face.

  For it was by the coldness and the overpowering smell that he followed. After a moment or two these became less strong, but in the corridor the scent was still breast-high. Along the passage he followed in the direction of the stairs that led to the mansard, up the stairs into the space beneath the roof. He followed in cold blood, not into bat-haunted shadows now, but in pallid dusty daylight that showed up every detail of every post and beam. He came to where the floorboards ended and the drop to the stage below could be seen. Then the odour left him as cleanly as if it had fallen in one dense body over the edge, and he stood looking stupidly at the rope that dangled from the beam overhead.

  Stupidly yet with eyes suddenly cleared, for he remembered now how that rope had been the first thing to greet him on his arrival at the house. With workmen about its presence had not struck him as sinister then, but now it beckoned to him like some dreadful lure. ‘Your life?’ the gently-swaying, sinuous thing seemed to whisper. ‘It cannot be that you value life? When you remember yourself as you were twenty years ago? Have you forgotten? The Past was the Best, the Present is Worse, the Worst is to Come! Twenty years ago you lived every minute, because you knew how few the minutes might be. If anything should happen at least a whole man would get it in head or stomach or groin. The feel of your body was like wine to you, you made friends of a sudden. Where are your friends now? Can you find one, where before every man had a wave of the hand for you, though you never saw him again? The best of them are dead. They would be glad to be dead if they could see today what they died for. It would at least be decent that all should be dead before men began to think of carnage again. But they are subtly at work, even those who saw it – security, rights, the glorious past, our immortal story, the heritage our fathers died for, our glory still to be. And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good? Have you seen it once and want to see it again? Do you want to live, James? In this world as it is? The Past was the Best, the Present is Worse, the Worst is to Come. Look at me, James, and ask yourself if you want to live.’ All this, and a thousand times more, the rope seemed to be saying to James Hopley as it hung there, gently swaying from the beam overhead.

  And suddenly James Hopley covered his face with his hands. Blasted and blackened as he was, he did want to live. And he was afraid of that waving, beckoning thing. He turned and ran. He ran from some inner vision of what would happen to him unless he packed his bags and left that château at once. He ran to the door of his own room and put his hand on the knob, but even then he drew it back again with a cry. The door had been opened at the same moment from inside.

  ‘Monsieur!’ he heard Marsac’s voice, hard and shaken.

  ‘What . . . what . . . are you doing here?’

  ‘Mon Dieu . . . if there is more of this I shall have to leave the service of monsieur . . . ’

  ‘I asked you . . . what are you . . . ’

  ‘I came to open the window of the room. It is not sanitary. The room needs air.’

  ‘Why do you do these things? Why do you now serve my meals? How is it that I do not see Madame?’

  ‘It is that Madame is not well. She has gone away for a few days.’

  ‘And why do you look at me like that?’

  ‘Like what, monsieur?’ But he dropped his eyes. As James Hop­ley’s face was then he had reason.

  ‘As you are looking. As that young workman looked. As M. le curé looked. As the doctors looked when I was ill.’

  ‘I, monsieur? If I am lacking in respect for monsieur –’

  ‘Do you mean that I am changed?’

  They were still face to face in the doorway, one inside the room, the other out. Suddenly Marsac stood aside for James to enter. He spoke soothingly.

  ‘As I was unpacking this morning I found a folding bed. I will put it into the room downstairs. The summer is getting late. At night there is a nip in the air.’

  ‘That is not answering my questions.’

  ‘As monsieur says, he has been ill. First I will get a clothes-brush to remove that dust. Then I will set out a glass of wine downstairs.’

  ‘Get the wine,’ said James Hopley, abruptly turning his back.

  But half an hour later, downstairs with the bottle of wine in front of him, and a glass of it already swallowed, he was able to take charge of his thoughts again. Marsac was fussing over him, making excuses to come in and out, and after the second glass James became as politic as he had recently been unnerved. Marsac was closing a placard. James spoke to him in conciliatory tones.

  ‘I did not know that Madame Marsac was not well.’

  Marsac replied that it was nothing, a slight crise de nerfs. He was used to it in Madame.

  ‘Is it that the château does not suit her?’

  ‘We cannot all pick and choose where we live. It may be so. She is from a town, from Rouen.’

  ‘Then after Rouen she finds this . . . ?’

  ‘What, monsieur?’

  ‘Come,’ said James Hopley with sudden friendliness. ‘This château is a very old place. Many people have lived and died here. When many people have lived and died in a place it is – it is as a place is when many people have lived and died there.’

  Marsac’s knotted hands were twisting his red baize apron. He looked up. ‘Monsieur is speaking of the health of Madame?’

  ‘Naturally. And of the château.’

  ‘Monsieur has then heard some rumour?’

  ‘It may be rumour. It is that that I am asking you. Come, Marsac, be frank. If this place was not agreeable to me I would tell you. Does a room need air? Then give it air. It is cold and not as other rooms? Then choose a different one. I am content with the room I am in. Sit down.’

  But the caretaker preferred to stand. He nodded assentingly, how­ever, at James’s words. He, too, had no time for des riens, he said. How many rooms were there, except those built yesterday, in which somebody had not died? Did it matter how they died? One can but die. It was not dying, but living that Marsac found difficult.

  ‘So this room I am sleeping in . . . ?’

  With that Marsac’s tongue was loosed and he told the story with­out further ado.

  ‘Since monsieur takes so rational a view of it, and as my grand­father told the story . . . yes,’ he said. ‘At one time this place was notorious for smuggling. Monsieur will not have noticed, but I can show him place
s where the floors have been cut through, to allow the pulley at the top of the house to be used for the well in the cellars below. There were trap-doors, and they stored the bales in the well. Rather than be taken one man – he is known still as Jean the Smuggler – tried to hang himself. The rope broke, the trap-door gave way under his weight, and he fell through into monsieur’s room. Nothing can be seen, however, as the ceiling has since been plastered many times.’

  James Hopley did not often smile, but his face gave one of its twitches now. Always ‘the ceiling had been plastered over’ – always there was the gap between the event and the first record of it. And what were the next record, and the next, and the next, but so many successive plasterings? Stones were never very long in place before the legends began to follow. So why begin with Arcques? According to the curé, portions of the foundations went back centuries before then. It amused James to make little trimmings of his own to the château’s history.

  ‘At least this poor fellow had a struggle for his life!’

  ‘One’s life is one’s life. Doubtless one struggles.’

  ‘No doubt after a flight across the fields, hiding under the hay­stacks and taking shelter in the ditches?’

  ‘It is probable that to get to the château he would cross fields. He is said to have swum the river. I myself remember one place that few would pass alone after dark.’