The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics)

by Edward Lucas White

  The brief silence Mr Palgrave broke.

  ‘If you will pardon my saying it, you don’t look at all like my idea of a clairvoyant.’

  Vargas smiled a wan smile. The tone of the words was totally disarming.

  ‘I don’t feel like my idea of a clairvoyant,’ he said, ‘I am usually clear-sighted in any matter I take up; usually so clear-sighted in respect to any personality that my advice, as it often is, seems to my clients a mere echo of their own thoughts, a mere confirmation of their own judgments, a mere additional reason for what they would have done anyhow. I am used to touching unerringly the strongest springs of action. So far I have utterly failed to gain that clue to Mrs Llewellyn’s character necessary to make my advice acceptable.’

  ‘In every other respect you seem to have been as clear-sighted as possible,’ Mr Palgrave told him. ‘No advice could have been better nor more judiciously urged, nor more entirely disinterested.’

  ‘Rather utterly interested,’ said Vargas.

  ‘In an altogether different sense,’ said the other. ‘She told me. Until I saw you I was astonished that she had not resented it.’

  ‘She did resent it, and of course,’ said the cripple.

  ‘Not as she would from any other man,’ said Mr Palgrave.

  ‘There are some things—’ Vargas began. His voice thinned out and he broke off.

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said her brother, ‘and I want to say that I feel under much obligation to you for the way you behaved and for the manliness and the straightforwardness of your whole attitude.’

  ‘I am greatly complimented,’ Vargas replied.

  ‘You deserve complimenting,’ said Mr Palgrave. ‘You acted admirably. Your consideration, I might say your gentleness shows that you really have her best interests at heart.’

  ‘I truly have,’ said Vargas fervently, ‘and I am more disturbed in mind than I can express.’

  ‘That must be a great deal,’ said the clubman, a momentary gleam of his usual self, fading instantly from his eyes. ‘I certainly cannot express how much I am upset. I hate worry or anxiety and always put such troubles away and forget them. I can’t forget this. I have idolized my sister since we were babies. I have hardly slept since she talked to me. She won’t hear of a doctor. She don’t admit that there could be any pretext for her consulting a doctor, and I can’t talk to any one about her. I can talk to you. You seem a very sensible man. I should like to hear your opinion of her condition. Do you think her mind is unsettled?’

  ‘Not as bad as that,’ Vargas told him.

  ‘This grave-opening idea seems to me out and out lunacy,’ said the other.

  ‘Not as bad as that,’ Vargas repeated. ‘It shows a trend of thought which may develop into something worse; but in itself it is only a foolish whim. The worst of it is that it produces a situation of great delicacy and high tension which may have almost any sort of bad result.’

  ‘I can’t imagine,’ said Palgrave, ‘any rational or half rational basis for her whim. I can’t conceive what she thinks she will accomplish by opening that coffin or why she wants it opened. I was at Marian’s funeral and the two coffins made a precious lot of talk, I can tell you. I assumed that Llewellyn had some wild, sentimental notion of the second coffin waiting there for him. Constance declares it was not empty, but she won’t say what she expects to find in it and I believe she don’t say because she has no idea at all.’

  ‘You are right,’ said the clairvoyant, ‘she hasn’t.’

  ‘Well,’ said the other, ‘what do you think she will find in it?’

  ‘I have no opinions whatever,’ said Vargas, ‘as to whether it is empty or not or as to what may be in it. I have no basis of conjecture. But whether empty or not or whatever may be in it, I dread the effect on her. She is sure to be baffled in her hopes. Her present state of mind is a sort of reawakening in a civilized, educated, cultured woman of the primitive, childish, savage faith in sorcery, almost in rudimentary fetishism. She would not acknowledge it, but her attitude is very like that of a fetish-worshipper. Her mind does not reason. She is possessed of a blind, vague feeling that her welfare is implicated with whatever is in that coffin, and a compelling hope in the efficiency of the mere act of opening it, as a sort of magic rite. She is buoyed up with uncertainty. Whether she finds something or nothing she will be brought face to face with final unmistakable disappointment. I dread the moment of that realization.’

  ‘I felt something like that,’ said her brother. ‘Anyhow I brought a doctor with me, but she must not suspect that as long as we don’t need him.’

  ‘That is why your carriage has the shades down,’ Vargas hazarded.

  ‘Is that the reason yours has its shades down?’ the other inquired.

  ‘That is it,’ Vargas confessed. ‘I brought a doctor too.’

  ‘Two doctors,’ commented Palgrave. ‘Like a French duel. Hope it will end as harmlessly as the average French duel.’

  ‘That is almost too much to hope for,’ said Vargas. ‘She may pass the critical instant safely. But even if she does she will be thrown back into brooding over her troubles.’

  ‘Her troubles seem to me largely imaginary,’ said the clubman.

  ‘All the more danger in that,’ said Vargas. ‘If merely subjective.’

  ‘In this case they ought to evaporate,’ said her brother, ‘if she acted sensibly, and yet they are not wholly imaginary. I don’t wonder that she is troubled. David Llewellyn is not himself at all. His dead-and-alive demeanor is enough to prey on anybody’s mind. Moping about here with him makes it worse. But going for a cruise might cure both of them and would be likely to wake him up and certain to clear her head. She ought to take your advice.’

  ‘She will not,’ said Vargas dejectedly, ‘and I scarcely wonder at her determination. Her dreams were enough to affect anybody. And the message on that slate was enough to influence anyone. Believing it addressed directly to her she is irresistibly urged to act upon it. I myself, merely a spectator, have been thrown by it into a terrible confusion of my whole mentality. I have believed in no real mystery in the universe. I am confronted by an unblinkable, an insoluble puzzle. My reliance upon the laws of space and time, as we think we know them, is, for the time being, wrenched from its foundations. My faith in the indestructibility of matter, in the continuity of force, in the fundamental laws of motion, is shaken and tottering. My belief in the necessary sequence of cause and effect, in causation and causality in general, is totally shattered. I could credit any marvel, could accept any monstrous portent as altogether to be expected. The universe no longer seems to me a scene, at least in front of the great, blank curtain of the unknowable, filled by an orderly progress of more or less cognizable and predictable occurrences, depending upon interrelated causes, it seems the playground of the irresponsible, prankish, malevolent somethings, productive of incalculabilities. I am in a delirium of dread, in a daze of panic.’

  ‘I hardly follow your meaning,’ said the other, ‘but I feel we can do nothing.’

  ‘No,’ said Vargas, ‘we can only hope for the best and fear the worst.’

  ‘And what will be the worst?’ her brother demanded.

  ‘I conceive,’ said Vargas, ‘that upon the opening of the coffin she will suffer some sort of shock, whether it be from disappointment, surprise, or whatever else. At the worst she might scream and drop dead before our eyes or shriek and hopelessly lose her reason.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Palgrave, ‘that would be the worst, I suppose.’

  ‘And yet,’ said Vargas, ‘I cannot escape from the feeling that the worst, in some incalculable, unpredictable, inconceivable way, will be something a great deal worse than that; something unimaginably, unutterably, ineffably worse than anything I can definitely put into words or even vaguely think.’

  ‘I cannot express myself as fluently as you can,’ her brother responded, ‘but I have had much the same sort of feeling. I have it now. I feel as if I were not now in a cemetery
for the purpose of being present at the opening of a grave; but far away, or long ago, about to participate in some uncanny occurrence fit to make Saul’s experience at Endor or Macbeth’s with the witches seem humdrum and commonplace.’

  ‘I feel all that,’ said Vargas, ‘and more; as if we were not ourselves at all, but the actors in some vast drama of wretchedness, apocalyptically ignorant of an enormous shadow of unescapable doom steadily darkening over our impotence. We cannot modify, we cannot alter, we cannot change, we cannot ward off, we cannot even postpone what is about to happen.’

  ‘What is about to happen,’ said his companion, is going to happen now. Here they come.’

  The two men rose and watched the Llewellyn carriage draw up where theirs had stopped. Its door opened and a large man stepped down.

  Vargas had previously seen David Llewellyn only momentarily at a distance, and now scrutinized him with much attention. He was a tall man, taller than his brother-in-law and was solidly and very compactly made. His manner, as he turned to the carriage, was solicitous, and deferential as he helped his wife out. As they approached, walking side by side, Vargas eyed the man. He was powerfully built and showed an immense girth of chest. His close-cut beard did not disguise the type of his countenance, the face belonged to an athletic college-bred man, firm chin, set lips, straight nose and clear gray eyes. He was very handsome and reminders of what had been downright beauty in his boyhood were manifest not only in the face but in the general effect of his presence.

  Without any word, barely nodding to the two men, he halted some steps away, leaving his wife to advance alone. She greeted Vargas and, slipping her hand through the bend of her brother’s arm, passed on along the path with him. Vargas remained where he was, waiting for Mr Llewellyn to go first. He seemed, by a subtle and intangible something in his look and attitude, to signify that he disclaimed any participation in what was to take place. By an almost imperceptible nod of negation and a barely discernible gesture of affirmation he indicated that the clairvoyant was to precede him. Vargas complied and hobbled after the brother and sister. The superintendent came forward to meet them, and walked beside Mrs Llewellyn, listening to her instructions, and then going toward his assistants.

  The space around their monument which was occupled by the Llewellyn graves was encircled by a low hedge, not more than knee-high. It had an opening facing the monument and through this Mrs Llewellyn and her brother passed, Vargas some steps behind them. They stopped a pace or two from the foot of the grave, and turned about. Vargas, keeping his distance, stopped likewise and likewise turned. Mr Llewellyn, treading noiselessly, had stepped aside from the path and took his stand just inside the hedge. The workmen straggled past him, the superintendent convoying them. When they had begun to dig, Vargas, like the rest, watched them. Presently he began to look about him and survey the cemetery, of which the knoll afforded an extensive view. The weather gave the prospect an unusual quality, the late spring or early summer warmth was unrelieved by any positive breeze, the light air stirred aimlessly, the cloudiness which completely overcast the sky was too thin to cut off the heat of the sun-rays, the foliage was dusty and the landscape a sickly yellowish green in the weak tepid sunshine. This eery quality of the scene Vargas felt rather than saw. While the time taken up with digging postponed the all-important moment, his attention was divided between the monument and Mr Llewellyn. He stood with his weight nearly all on one foot, leaning on the cane his left hand held, the other gloved hand, holding his hat, hanging at his side. Gazing straight in front of him toward the monument, rather than at it, there was about him the look of something inanimate, of something made, not grown, of an object immovably planted in carven, expressionless impassivity. The monument, which Vargas saw for the first time, gave from the perfectly coordinated harmonies of its architectural design, its delicate reliefs, and its exquisite statuary, an impression of individuality striking enough to any one at any time and all the more now by contrast. Any one of its figures seemed instinct with more life than the man facing it. That member of the little gathering who should have been most moved, showed no emotion and Vargas himself felt much. As the digging proceeded, he mostly gazed into the deepening pit, or watched Mrs Llewellyn’s back as she stood clinging to her brother’s arm, leaning against him. When the workmen. began to raise the coffin, he found the emotions of his strained forebodings overmastering him. His breath quickened and came hard, his heart thumped at his ribs, his eyes were unexpectedly, inexplicably moist. Glancing back at the immobile man behind him, through the iridescent film upon his lashes, he saw but a blurred, vague shape. He strove to regain his composure, conning the outline of his own barely discernible shadow.

  The outer box containing the raised coffin was now supported upon two pieces of wood thrust under it across the grave. The men unscrewed the lid and laid it aside. The coffin was of ebony and as fresh as if just made.

  The men, at the superintendent’s bidding, shambled away round the monument and through the opening in the hedge behind it to the tree they had left.

  The superintendent began to take out the silver screws which held down the lid over the glass front of the coffin-head. As they were removed one by one, Vargas again glanced behind him. He saw worse than ever. The outline of the big figure was almost indefinite, its bulk almost hazy.

  As he turned his gaze again to the coffin his sight seemed to clear entirely. He saw even the silver rims round the screw-holes and the head of the last screw. As the superintendent lifted the lid, Mrs Llewellyn, now at the foot of the coffin, leaned forward, and her brother and Vargas, now just behind her, leaned even more. Through the glass they saw a face, David Llewellyn’s face. Mrs Llewellyn screamed. All three turned round. Save themselves and the superintendent and the distant workmen there was no human shape in sight anywhere. The big, solid presence had vanished.

  Again screaming Mrs Llewellyn threw herself on the coffin, the two men, scarcely less frantic than she, close by her. Through the glass they could see the face working, the eyelids fluttering. The superintendent toiled furiously at the catches of the glass front. When he lifted it away the eyes opened, gazing straight into Mrs Llewellyn’s. Almost at once they glazed, and a moment later the jaw dropped.

  Lukundoo

  ‘IT STANDS to reason,’ said Twombly, ‘that a man must accept the evidence of his own eyes, and when eyes and ears agree, there can be no doubt. He has to believe what he has both seen and heard.’

  ‘Not always,’ put in Singleton, softly.

  Every man turned toward Singleton. Twombly was standing on the hearth-rug, his back to the grate, his legs spread out, with his habitual air of dominating the room. Singleton, as usual, was as much as possible effaced in a corner. But when Singleton spoke he said something. We faced him in that flattering spontaneity of expectant silence which invites utterance.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said, after an interval, ‘of something I both saw and heard in Africa.’

  Now, if there was one thing we had found impossible it had been to elicit from Singleton anything definite about his African experiences. As with the Alpinist in the story, who could tell only that he went up and came down, the sum of Singleton’s revelations had been that he went there and came away. His words now riveted our attention at once. Twombly faded from the hearth-rug, but not one of us could ever recall having seen him go. The room readjusted itself, focused on Singleton, and there was some hasty and furtive lighting of fresh cigars. Singleton lit one also, but it went out immediately, and he never relit it.

  I

  We were in the Great Forest, exploring for pigmies. Van Rieten had a theory that the dwarfs found by Stanley and others were a mere cross-breed between ordinary negroes and the real pigmies. He hoped to discover a race of men three feet tall at most, or shorter. We had found no trace of any such beings.

  Natives were few; game scarce; food, except game, there was none; and the deepest, dankest, drippingest forest all about. We were the only novelty in th
e country, no native we met had even seen a white man before, most had never heard of white men. All of a sudden, late one afternoon, there came into our camp an Englishman, and pretty well used up he was, too. We had heard no rumour of him; he had not only heard of us but had made an amazing five-day march to reach us. His guide and two bearers were nearly as done up as he. Even though he was in tatters and had five days’ beard on, you could see he was naturally dapper and neat and the sort of man to shave daily. He was small, but wiry. His face was the sort of British face from which emotion has been so carefully banished that a foreigner is apt to think the wearer of the face incapable of any sort of feeling; the kind of face which, if it has any expression at all, expresses principally the resolution to go through the world decorously, without intruding upon or annoying anyone.

  His name was Etcham. He introduced himself modestly, and ate with us so deliberately that we should never have suspected, if our bearers had not had it from his bearers, that he had had but three meals in the five days, and those small. After we had lit up he told us why he had come.

  ‘My chief is ve’y seedy,’ he said between puffs. ‘He is bound to go out if he keeps this way. I thought perhaps . . .’

  He spoke quietly in a soft, even tone, but I could see little beads of sweat oozing out on his upper lip under his stubby moustache, and there was a tingle of repressed emotion in his tone, a veiled eagerness in his eye, a palpitating inward solicitude in his demeanour that moved me at once. Van Rieten had no sentiment in him; if he was moved he did not show it. But he listened. I was surprised at that. He was just the man to refuse at once. But he listened to Etcham’s halting, diffident hints. He even asked questions.