The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  I dimly saw that a hatted man sat inside at a table, alone. The naked incandescent was immediately above his head, and he appeared to be moving something smoothly and regularly a few inches along the table, to and fro. The rest was a mere distorted blur, through which it was impossible that he should have seen me, and I turned away quietly enough; but suddenly I heard the moving of his chair and his voice that called:

  ‘Is that you, Karen?’

  The next moment the door was flung open and I stood full in the light.

  In the German I make shift with, I told him that I had missed my way and would be grateful if he would direct me to the Haarheim Palast. He stood aside to allow me to enter.

  ‘Come in,’ he said, and he closed the door behind me.

  It was a rough and neglected interior, and it gave the impression of having been shut up for some time. The walls were of yellow pine, and there was probably an air-space between them and the outer logs. The furniture consisted of the table I had seen, a couple of chairs, a sort of home-made settee with blankets and a great-coat on it, a rack of crockery, a stopped fretwork clock, and the stove. There was not so much as a print on the walls, but ranged along a narrow shelf were the usual trifles in carved wood – paper-knives, boxes, blotters, toy cattle, a bear, and the rest of the things people buy in the picture-postcard shops and bring home as mementoes. To make these things was evidently his way of passing the evenings, as indeed the litter on the table showed, for the light shone down on a handful of chisels and a small saw; and, mingled with chips and sawdust, on a newspaper he couldn’t read, stood a loaf of black bread and half a sausage. The oilstone was there too, for the smooth, regular move­ment I had seen through the icicled window had been the sharpening of his penknife.

  He showed no sign of recognising me as the passenger who had got out of the sleigh to watch him at work with the jack. He had taken off his wide hat, and its removal showed a broad brow beneath thick rumpled hair, the low growth of which made more emphatic still the handsomeness of his brows. His youthful face – he could not have been more than five- or six-and-twenty – was weathered to a clear even brown, and possibly he shaved twice a week or so, for his small moustache was continued downwards in a soft smudge, which seemed to give a richness to the fine line of his jaw. His eyes were very bright, and even his wide corduroys did not conceal his powerful grace of movement as he crossed to get the other chair for me.

  ‘You are from the Haarheim Palast, Herr Doktor?’ he said.

  I told him yes, but that there was a carnival that had not greatly amused me, and I had taken a walk instead. I also told him that I was neither Doktor nor Professor, but he continued to call me ‘Herr Doktor’ till the end.

  ‘There are many people there?’ he asked.

  ‘In the hotel? It is full. They are even sleeping in the bathrooms.’

  ‘So. So. I was told so. It all makes work.’

  ‘And brings money to Haarheim?’ I suggested.

  ‘People lived here before the Palast was built,’ he answered moodily.

  Then, as I looked again round the poor and brilliantly lighted interior, my eyes were attracted by something that apparently he had made a hasty effort to conceal. Although the table was strewn with fresh chippings, no trinket-box or paper-knife was to be seen; but half hidden behind the newspaper on which the bread and sausage stood was the object on which he had been at work. I saw the head and shoulders of a small wooden statuette.

  There was that about the glimpse that made me wish to see more, and in matters of that kind I permit myself a little curiosity. He did not appear to have seen my glance.

  ‘I interrupted you at work?’ I said.

  ‘No, Herr Doktor, my time is my own.’

  ‘You carve these animals and things?’

  ‘Everybody here carves them. They are made in every house.’

  ‘I am a kind of artist too. May I see that?’ And I nodded towards the figure.

  His bright eyes were mistrustfully on mine. Thinking it might help matters if I gave him my name, which is known here and there, I did so; but he only shook his head. He had never heard it. Nevertheless, the fact that apparently I had a name worth giving seemed to impress him, and his eyes dropped. He muttered something I didn’t catch. He took up the penknife, as if he would have resumed his sharpening. And then suddenly he yielded. He rose, pushed the newspaper aside, and placed the statuette in my hands.

  I suppose I am about the last man in the world to lose my head over a work of art. It has always seemed to me that the more claims a thing makes the higher must be the standard by which it is judged, and this is to reduce the number of the world’s masterpieces con­siderably. Masterpieces? Why do I mention the word? A master­piece has detach­­ment, and this statuette had none. Its merit was vehemently the other way. It banished the very word ‘classic’. It was as much his own as his own reluctant speech. If his fatalistic hand­ling of the jack had impressed me, all that I could now do was to stare at the piece of wood in my hands. And as I like to be tight about my facts, let me first give its dimensions.

  It was a woman’s figure, about ten inches high, in the attitude of dancing. Allowing a minimum for wastage, the block in which it had slept before it came to life was about 11 by 4 by 5 inches. Call it 12 by 6 by 6 inches, or a quarter of a cubic foot. Those, I say, were the dimensions of the original block. But the figure itself contained nothing like that. Perhaps 6 cubic inches for the trunk and head, 4 for the thighs and legs, and 2 for the arms – total, 12: out of 432 cubic inches all but 12 had had to be laboriously cut away before the figure emerged, and that at the risk of an oversawing or a fracture at any moment. ‘What on earth made you choose wood?’ one wanted to cry to him. ‘Why, you could have set up a wire armature in an hour. Is there no clay in Haarheim? Couldn’t you have bought a pound or two of wax on one of your timber-journeys to the towns? Why this immense toil? Are you truly of a nature so tormented by itself that if no difficulties exist you must create them?’

  For that was precisely what it looked like. He had gone wilfully out of his way to postpone the consummation of his work as long as possible. But now that the thing was finished, or almost so, I had to admit that it was neither wood nor wax, but flesh. The tendon of that supporting ankle would be hard between the fingers, a thumb run up that spine would feel the vertebrae. Feet, ankles, neck were exquisitely finished. But the face, the face only, was left. The cheeks remained rough and pitted by the tool. And in some obscure way this was a relief. For the figure was not merely a statuette of a woman. It was of one given woman, in all the idiom of her beauty, and to have given her a face would have been to shout her name as well.

  ‘Where,’ I asked slowly, ‘did you learn all this?’

  He did not seem to understand. ‘To carve wood? Everybody here carves wood. Our fathers carved wood, and their fathers.’

  ‘Yes, paper-knives and Noah’s Ark cows. But this? You have then studied?’

  He shook his head. At the schools? No.

  ‘But, man! I know what I am saying. One can get a resemblance, even of anatomy. Nine people out of ten are deceived. But not the tenth. It is not Nature, where you can trace the effect back to the cause. It is Art, where, if you do not understand the cause, the effect cannot possibly be right.’

  For the anatomy of that piece of wood left not a single anatomical question unanswered. The heads of the gastrocuemius would swell so, the soleus behave so, the thin, taut flank stretch precisely so.

  ‘I can set bones,’ he said, as if in apology. ‘Often there are accidents in the woods. Then they send for me.’

  ‘But are you not often away?’

  ‘Not now. That is finished. Josef Speck broke his leg. I set it and took his team till he was well. Now I am back. I help the second forester.’

  ‘I saw you on the road, when the sleigh could not pass
.’

  ‘I did not see you, Herr Doktor.’

  ‘I saw you bend the pole with the jack.’

  ‘So?’ he said indifferently. ‘Something had to be done.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said after a pause, ‘why you carved the figure in wood when there were easier ways, why make it so difficult for yourself?’

  He hesitated, at a loss for words. He muttered: ‘I don’t know. How should I know? I am not as the Herr Doktor. It was as it was. It is still as it is. It has always been so. And it is more difficult than you know. More difficult – more difficult . . . ’ His voice sank, and then his manner changed. He had questions to put to me too, quick little questions, so far as I could see without import.

  ‘Is it pleasant at the Palast?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Hotels are very much alike.’

  ‘You are staying there long?’

  ‘Most likely not. No. Not long.’

  ‘They are’ – the bright eyes were earnestly on mine as he used the German equivalent – ‘they are run off their feet there? I mean the service?’

  ‘I really don’t know. The hotel is full. I don’t suppose they employ more people than they have work for.’

  ‘No. I believe they work late,’ he said, frowning, his fingers drum­ming on the table again.

  Light began to dawn on me. His first words on hearing my foot on the snow outside had been, ‘Is that you, Karen?’ His questions about the hotel, the service, the degree of its busyness, could only mean that he had a wife at the hotel and was expecting her home. I was looking intently at the tool-marked space where the statuette’s face should have been.

  ‘Why don’t you finish it?’ I asked him.

  He fixed me with his stare, as if I had committed an impertinence, which quite possibly I had.

  ‘What?’ he demanded.

  ‘The hands, the feet, are wonderfully done. You have even put life into the braiding of the hair. Why leave the face like that?’

  I have seldom seen a man’s expression change so swiftly. A fire seemed to blaze up in him. Something looked for a moment out of his eyes that made me afraid, not, understand, for myself, but for the latent things so imperfectly safeguarded in himself. I have stood on a spot where they say the crust of the earth is only twelve feet thick, and the ground rings hollow to your tread. Sulphurous vapours trickle up from the crevices, and to run a torch along them is to wake the whole region into activity. I felt that I was experimenting with some such torch now. His voice, which had been a pleasant soft guttural, became strained and harsh.

  ‘Why?’ he said, with sudden loudness. ‘The Herr Doktor asks me why? Why, indeed! I will tell you. It is because she smiles! Always she smiles! Once she did not smile, not, at least, like that, and I was happy. Now she smiles, and it drives me mad . . . ’

  And with an abrupt movement he was on his feet and struggling into the greatcoat that lay on the settee.

  I protested that it was not necessary that he should accompany me. It would suffice if he indicated the way. But his voice fell to a mutter again.

  ‘No. I will come. There is a branch of the paths – I will come. I will come to the hotel. It is nothing. Often I have been later than this. We will leave the light. There is a branch of two paths – she knows it too; if the Herr Doktor will please . . . ’

  Together we passed out of the hut, leaving the light burning behind us.

  Yes, it seemed clear enough – all but one thing. He had been sitting up for this wife, who worked at the hotel, and was now going to fetch her, as a husband should. But the other thing remained. Most husbands are happy in the smiles of their wives, but he was not. Once she had not smiled, or not after that fashion, and he said he had been happy. Now she smiled, smiled always, and he left that portion of his carving blank and expressionless. What sort of a smile was that? I wondered deeply as we trudged together along the cart-track at the wood’s edge and began to descend by rounded, monotonous hummocks of snow.

  But he said not another word. At the junction of the tracks of which he had spoken he paused for a moment, looking along both portions. Then he took the right-hand one, which was obviously the more direct. A quarter of an hour later I fancied I had picked up my bearings again, and told him so, but still he tramped on at my side without replying. A little later still we came upon ski-tracks, and in one quarter the night seemed to have paled perceptibly. We rounded a shoulder of the mountain and gained its crest. Over the pines below was a mist of light, from which faint sounds reached us. They were still keeping up the carnival. We dropped down the track to the Palast Hotel.

  A plantation straggles upwards from the rear of the hotel premises, and as we approached this Walther Blum began to tread more carefully. His care increased as the lights of the servants’ quarters at the back began to appear through the trees. Most of the lower windows were in darkness, for the kitchens were hardly likely to be troubled again at that hour of the night, but the floors above shone out brightly enough, and through corridor windows a shadow could even be seen to pass from time to time. My own room was in the front of the hotel, where the long balconies are, and one can look down on the eisbahn. From this now came a confused babble of sound – music, a faint rattle of applause, the thin hum of skates. A swept path ran round the hotel in that direction. I was about to thank Walther Blum and to take this path when from the darkness there came the sound of a door being softly closed. Two low voices were heard, the one a woman’s, the other a man’s.

  ‘No, go in now,’ the woman’s voice was saying. ‘If he says he came to meet me I shall say I went the other way round.’

  ‘Dis bonsoir.’

  ‘No, not now – be careful – return to the bar –’

  ‘The colleague Otto is there; just ten minutes, in the wood –’

  ‘No, I say –’

  We had drawn into the shadow of the trees. For all her protests, there was the sound of a kiss. A door closed, and in the semi-darkness a shadow was seen to steal away. The shadow went, not in the direction by which Blum and I had come, but by the other path. I looked round for Blum.

  He was not there. He was a dozen yards away. And he was hurry­ing, not after the woman, but by the shorter way we had taken, as if he wished to reach home first.

  3

  Unless one has need of something and rings for it, one usually sees little of one’s chambermaid, and I had no idea who performed this office for me at the Haarheim Palast. Indeed, it was at my own risk if I concluded that Walther Blum’s wife was a chambermaid at all, and not employed in some other branch of the service. My data for her identification were, on the one hand, uniquely ample, and on the other, scanty to a degree. For all practical purposes they resolved themselves into one distinguishing feature – hair braided in a thick coronal round the head, as if two heavy plaits had been brought forward and woven together.

  I have already remarked how, before what later seems a hidden plan is unfolded and revealed, trifling events add themselves to one another with increasing swiftness, until the last trifling accident or two have almost the force of a foregone conclusion. I was not think­ing of Walther Blum when I rang my bell some two mornings later. Nor could I possibly know that, just as he had been doing an injured timber-driver’s job in an emergency, so she now was temporarily taking over somebody else’s duties. She knocked and entered in answer to my ring; and she was so indubitably the woman of the statuette that I could have called her by her name: Karen.

  To my astonishment she seemed to be hardly more than seven­teen. Young to be married, I thought, and to a husband in whom was something – I do not know if ‘timeless’ is the right word; I mean something that the years can neither add to nor take away from. She was blue-eyed, fair as Ceres, and had a mouth like a sealed rose. If, hastily summoning and dismissing a recollection, I found her on the small side, these things, a
fter all, are more a matter of proportion than of actual size. Her ample blue-print skirt filled the doorway like a bell, and her expression was one of petulant gravity, as if, young as she was, she must struggle with things beyond her years, while resenting and hating them. It was right too that she should be a chambermaid. She fitted in better with linen-closets and brush-cupboards than if she had worn a smart apron or sat behind a cash-desk. And I confess that it came over me with a shock that not only could she apparently hold her vows loosely, but was also capable of telling her husband that she had gone one way home when, in fact, she had taken another.

  I had no excuse for detaining her, and I told her what I wanted; but I missed not a single one of her movements as she stooped to the pile of linen on the floor and began to sort it. Then she looked up.

  ‘The gnädiger Herr has made a list?’ she asked in good German.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I will count it.’

  So at least she could read and write. I continued to watch her as she made her list. Once she turned her head, and it was the identical turn of the statuette; and the wreath of the honey-fair hair was the same; but her face was hidden. She gathered the linen together, placed it on a towel, and knotted the corners crosswise. She rose with the bundle.

  ‘The gnädiger Herr would wish them quickly?’ she said, the grave, resentful eyes on mine.

  ‘As quickly as possible.’

  ‘It is done in the hotel. It will be ready at half past eight o’clock on Thursday evening. I shall do it myself.’