The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  For how can one more surely pierce a mother’s heart than by means of the last son she will bear?

  If these things were true – but only if they were true – then neither Plague nor Fire was the remarkablest thing that happened in Eng­land in those years.

  5

  Mr Ruddle came back on the 27th day of July, five weeks within a day after the funeral of young Elliott of Treberse. And whatever those ‘studies’ of his in the meantime had been, his mind was now made up. He had had enough of these people who first called him in and then kept things back from him. He had had enough of the second parson too, supposing (as is likely) that he also had known this Mistress Dingley and so was in the plot. This time he was going to the Quartils alone. In fact the very next morning found him there.

  But the enterprise was in part a failure. It proved one thing, how­ever, namely, that the thing could show itself in the boy’s absence. Says the parson:

  The spectre appeared much about the same place as before, about ten feet distant on my right hand. But this time it moved more quickly, inasmuch as I had no time to speak to it, as I had determined with myself beforehand.

  And then at last the parson decided to take the parents into con­sult­ation. He did so that very night, proposing that they should all visit the unclean field together on the morrow. He did so as they sat by candlelight round the board – or it may have been as they took the evening air in the porch – or perhaps it was as they paced the flagged paths, with the hush of the violet evening about them and the large moon (for it was late in the month) beginning to look over the hill. If the other parson (who somehow strikes one as a bit of a shuffler) was there he was not included in the invitation, or else was unable to accept it, for he did not make one of the party. They talked far into the night – or maybe for a short time only. They went to bed to sleep – or perhaps to toss restlessly until the first signs of dawn. All was thus, or thus, or after some other fashion. And it is noticeable that from this point on Mr Ruddle becomes increasingly reticent about the whole affair.

  And yet so charged with import are the few things he does allow to pass him, and so actinically do they project themselves down to our own day, that they kindle as it were glimmers for a little way about them in the surrounding darkness, so that we feel sure of just a little more than we have actual warrant for. And as presently we shall have to refrain altogether from guessing, we will make the most of our time.

  First, then, Mr Ruddle, who had twice seen this Mistress Dingley’s shape, does not mention whether she had or had not beauty. This is understandable. Seeing the action he was about to take, earthly considerations such as these would be far from his mind. Indeed beauty would be a positive discommendation in his eyes, as one snare the more to tangle the wayward foot and the erring eye. So he would be silent about it.

  Next, neither does the boy say that she was hideous, which he would certainly have done had she had the appearance of a bogey. In the beginning at any rate he was not afraid of her good-morning. So may not a measure of good looks, whether of a malignant cast or otherwise, be taken as not impossible?

  Again, supposing that prodigal in London had been the mere slave of a petticoat: were there not dairymaids and village wenches enough for the lifting up of such a young squire’s finger? And if the beauty be not denied, would it not be a somewhat different beauty from that of these rustic rivals who milked and churned and scoured the pans? A paler, more harmonious beauty, menacing or benign, with the slender hand going bail for the whole lovely arm, and the foot for the hidden rest? Or deny the beauty altogether: does not one daily see unbeautiful women who do not lack other gifts – the parleying eye, the displayed breast, the gait that bids follow? Dare we give these attributes to this being who, though dead, was not at rest? Singular in that, what other dreadful unique­ness might she not possess? Dead and yet not dead – dead as it were with one eye open, vigilant and baleful – lurking where two worlds met, rejected in some part of her body by the one and unaccepted in her spirit by the other –

  So what awful ambiguity have we here? When have we heard of these pestilent creatures before? What ancient unhallowed legends break in upon us that we had supposed to belong to the limbo of things blessedly lost? Who was this Lilith, pale predecessor of Eve – of sweetest Eve, man’s proper mate, who interposed between Adam and this wickedness, thrusting it out into the voids of the upper air? Who and what were those others, those Lamiae, so inimical to the race of man that to destroy it in its innocent begin­nings was their delight? Who and what were those other lean and hungry shapes, of devil-women and succubi, of vampires and sirens and draggers-down of the bodies and souls of men? Was the year 1665 not then a Year of Grace? Had redemption suddenly failed? Did these horrible concepts come into their own again as part of the dark inheritance of man?

  Now it is that we realise how much better it would be to let the whole matter rest.

  But will it let us rest? Why, if not for the glory of his Maker, did Parson Ruddle write down his narrative at all? He must have intended something, or why should we now look on the world with changed eyes?

  For the shreds and remnants of just such things are still hauntingly about us. We do occasionally see, flesh in our midst, these women from whose eyes something underived looks out, something out of line, carried over as it were from Chaos, omitted from the inventory of Creation, never since wholly absorbed into the Divine Order. It flickers like half-quenched wildfire at intervals through the world, throwing its murky beam into the forgotten recesses of our nature. It mocks our love and compassion; and men have been known to swear that they have seen that woman-shape, dark and pallid, and with beautiful baleful brows huddled close like the black ‘berry’ of a swan, that has been able to make its way to their bedside in the dead of night, though the door of the chamber was bolted and barred. ‘It was a dream,’ they still their fears afterwards; but it was no dream while it stood there, offering the key of the Nadir between its cruel lips, the discarnate kiss of sin.

  And if in Babylon or Sidon, why not in Launceston when Plague walked the earth and death was let loose? Was Mr Ruddle a liar that he should write these things down? Or was he beguiled or bemused? If you think so, read his words. Come with him to the Quartils once more. For this was the manner of his going there:

  The morning being come, lest we should alarm the family of servants, they [the parents] went under the pretence of seeing a field of wheat, and I took my horse, and fetched a compass another way, and so met at the stile we had appointed. Thence we all four walked leisurely into the Quartils, and had passed above half the field before the ghost made its appearance. It then came over the stile just before us, and moved with that swiftness that by the time we had gone six or seven steps it passed. I immediately turned my head and ran after it, with the young man by my side; we saw it pass over the stile at which we entered, but no farther. I stept upon the hedge at one place and he at another, but could discern nothing; whereas I dare aver that the swiftest horse in England could not have conveyed himself out of sight in that short space of time. Two things I did note in this day’s appearance (1) That a spaniel dog that followed the company unregarded did bark and run away as the spectrum passed by. (2) That the motion of the spectre was not gradatim, or by steps and moving of the feet, but a kind of gliding, as children upon ice or a boat down a swift river.

  That stricken field at six o’clock of a July morning, the spaniel barking, and a clergyman and a youth making a dash for different parts of a hedge to see what had become of something that appar­ently had the power of omnipresence –

  The spectre’s own haste to be gone, as if itself now saw reason for fear –

  No. It is enough. Criticism has nothing further to say. Visibility, gliding, the dog – we accept them all. It comes in the end to this, that Parson Ruddle saw what he says he saw. And we ourselves are as near to that field as ever we wish to be.
r />   And we have finished with our prying too. We are content that thereafter Parson Ruddle should hold the stage, alone and to the end. The parents [we read] were strangely affrighted, who had known this Dorothy Dingley in her lifetime and now plainly saw her features. After that they went no more. We can well believe it. We do not want to know what kind of a look that was that passed between the mother and this persecutor of her sons. It must have been livid with recognition, hate and farewell.

  6

  If only we possessed a picture of the parson, in his broad hat and starched bands and high-heeled shoes! If only we had the description of somebody who knew him in the flesh as he lived! But there remains nothing of him but his plain honest English style and the directness and truth-speaking and simplicity of heart that shine through it. With these and ‘such lawful means as God hath discovered, and learned men have successfully practised in these uncommon cases’, he was prepared to undertake his inconceivable task. And he lost no time about it.

  The next morning, being Thursday, I went out very early by myself and walked about an hour’s space in meditation and prayer in the field next adjoining the Quartils. Soon after five I stepped over the stile into the disturbed field.

  And there is no need for him to point that commanding finger, bidding us leave him. If we dared we would not stay. Already we have ‘listened in’ on this ancient story too presumptuously, and must down on our knees for the violation we have done. Terror, like Apollyon, straddled across the breadth of that Way, and it was for Parson Ruddle to beware lest his own soul should be spilt. And we know as we turn away that he was facing the powers of darkness, not for the succour of a tormented boy, not for the quiet of a Cornish field, but in some sort for the safety and peace of heart of all mankind alive or to be.

  ‘O Lord make speed to save us.’

  ‘O Lord make haste to help us.’

  ‘Let us pray.’

  The rest is set down without comment.

  I had not gone above thirty or forty paces before the ghost appeared at the farther stile. I spake to it with a loud voice, in some such sentences as the way of these dealings directed me; whereupon it approached but slowly, and when I came near it moved not. I spake again, and it answered in a voice neither very audible nor intelligible. I was not in the least terrified, and therefore persisted, until it spake again and gave me satisfaction. The discourse lasted about a quarter of an hour. But the work could not be finished at this time; wherefore the same evening, an hour after sunset, it met me again in the same place. After a few words on each side, it quietly vanished, and neither doth appear since, nor ever will more, to any man’s disturbance.

  The sparrow hath found her an house,

  And the turtle a nest where she may lay her young.

  It may be that, in the Year of Grace 1935, we take down an old book from a shelf, and read, in the Form ‘Quae ordo dicitur Domum a Daemone perturbatum liberandi’, how, not by Christ only, nor by His apostles, but by all holy men and women, the upright become to the evil spirits a new hell and a burning furnace of eternal horror, so that they flee from every corner, and God is ever glorified. But this adds nothing to the relation of Parson Ruddle, who ends:

  These things are true; and I know them to be so with as much certainty as eyes and ears can give me; and until I can be persuaded that my senses do deceive me about their proper object, and by that persuasion deprive myself of the strongest inducement to believe the Christian religion, I must and will assert that these things in this paper are true.

  EXPLICIT

  The Smile of Karen

  (to June)

  1

  Although the sleigh had come to a standstill, I do not think that half the people in it had any idea of what was happening. All that they seemed to hear, besides their own cheerful voices, was the dull rush of the torrent below and a little clamour of bells whenever a horse moved his head. But another sound, a leisurely ‘Cric-crac, cric-cric’, had seemed to me to grow more formidable every moment, and I had climbed out of the sleigh and was watching the man who was the cause of it.

  We could hardly have come upon the timber-cart at a more peril­ous spot. The road at that point, besides being deep in snow, was not more than ten feet wide, and the timber-cart had the right to the inside berth, the one with the sheer face of precipitous rock that seemed to rise to the skies. Only a low parapet separated the sleigh from the abyss of tree-tops below. The problem was how to pass.

  The largest tree was sixty feet if it were an inch, and if that could be cleared all would be well. It was against the tree that the young man in the velvet jacket and voluminous corduroys had set the jack. Without haste, a pound or so at a time, he was slowly pumping power into it, with the wall of rock to take the resistance. I learned soon enough that he could neither read nor write. This that he was doing was his revelation of himself, his signature upon the world. A slip of the jack, a fragment of ice, a faltering of the man’s nerve, and there was no second chance. He knew it, and he, his task, and the way he set himself to it, made on me an impression of fatalistic beauty that has never left me.

  Imperceptibly, relentlessly, the tree became bowed like a cata­pult. At every grind it gave on the rock’s face my heart leaped into my mouth. But he only stepped back once or twice to see how much more there was to do, and then bent to the ratchet again. The handsome black brows under the black wideawake were hardly knitted.

  ‘Cric-cric, cric-cric, cric-cric . . . ’ Still he went on, though the tree could have whisked us into the abyss as easily as a finger flicks a pea.

  ‘Cric-cric, cric-cric, cric-cric . . . ’

  And even did he bend the tree sufficiently to allow the sleigh to pass, he still had the task of rendering the dreadful engine harmless again.

  We did pass, or I should not be writing about Walther Blum. The passengers did not resume their chatter, because they had barely interrupted it. An hour later we had arrived at our destination, but I confess that my dreams that night were of elemental things – of masses and weights and forces and how man tames the devils that abide in them. I was haunted by thoughts of the precarious margins of safety by which we live, and by the still more precarious assumption that a man will never fail of having himself in control. And, above all, there seemed to hang between me and the night a slightish figure in a black velvet jacket and baggy corduroys, with handsome dark brows over dark fatalistic eyes, who himself seemed to possess something of that very inimicality of the Nature against which he wrought. As long as things went well he held, as a dam holds; but if they went ill he was himself a tree to break, with a dreadful sound, a rock to come thundering down.

  2

  It has more than once happened to me that a powerfully received impression has been followed almost immediately by another one, as if in some way I myself were specially attuned and open to it. I am of a restless disposition, and did not propose to make any long stay in Haarheim; and if Walther Blum (as I presently learned his name to be) had made such an impression on me, and was indeed a timber-carrier, well, these fellows spend three-quarters of their lives on the road, and the chances were that I should never see him again. But I did see him again, and, as it happened, within a couple of nights of that perilous exploit of his with the jack.

  I am permitted a moderate amount of walking, though not ‘winter sports’; and as hotel life has long since lost its attraction for me, I like to turn my back on the ringing eisbahn and to seek the higher slopes, where the clearings and the sawmills are, and the hydraulic mains lean on the mountains like rods against a wall, and, higher still, where the kites circle, and a thousand trees can be cut and the face of the landscape is hardly changed. With the close of the season the hotels shut down, direction and staff and clientèle move elsewhere; but the timbermen and the men of the power-stations and the cattlemen and sawyers remain. In the meantime their wives sweep the floors and carry
the pails and make the beds at the hotels.

  It was in these high regions that I saw Walther Blum again. And I say that I saw him at night, though in that electricity-flooded country of snowy tops and wooded scarps, ‘artificial day’ would serve as well, since they hold midnight carnivals on the eisbahn under the great sputtering arcs, while frequently lights burn unheeded at noon. There was, in fact, a carnival that night, and I relied on its illumination to guide me home again, for to tell the truth I had no very clear idea where I was. It was in order to ascertain this that I was making towards another light, along a rough, snowy track that skirted a clearing.

  The light was a sort of blurred square, as if the window were draped with some curtain-stuff, and as I drew nearer I saw that it came from the window of a house or hut of logs, apparently of two rooms that communicated. The communicating door must have been open, for a remnant of light was visible in the second window also. And then I saw what it was that veiled the first window. They were icicles. They made another bloated pane outside the inner one, some of them three fingers thick, others mere films, as if it had thawed and blown a gale and frozen again simultaneously, and one liquefying finger had passed its drops on to the next. This shutter of ice gave the place an uncared-for look, for it could have been cleared away in a couple of minutes, and even the light within was no certain indication that there was anybody there. I therefore approached the window before knocking at the door.