Thirteen Further Stories
Date: 1888-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Weird Fiction; Supernatural Fiction; Fantasy
Description: Blackwood’s tales inhabit a shadowy region between reality and fantasy, life and death, light and shadow. While occasionally dated in their depiction of females and masculinity, his tales of the supernatural and strange are both haunting and transcendent. (—Kevin Lucia, cemetarydance.com) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ A Mysterious House: Blackwood’s earliest known published fiction. A straight-forward ghost story, with an unfortunately flat ending. ~ ~ ~ ~ The Story of Karl Ott: Karl is stunned when the love of his life, the English girl who has lived in Niederwald for several years, tells him she is return
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

THIRTEEN
FURTHER STORIES

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

MobileRead Edition
2022

Blackwood’s tales inhabit a shadowy region between reality and fantasy, life and death, light and shadow. While occasionally dated in their depiction of females and masculinity, his tales of the supernatural and strange are both haunting and transcendent.
(—Kevin Lucia, cemetarydance.com)

TABLE OF CONTENTS
(AND STORY SUMMARIES)

- A Mysterious House
Blackwood’s earliest known published fiction.
A straight-forward ghost story, with an unfortunately flat ending.
— Belgravia magazine, Jul 1889

- The Story of Karl Ott
Karl is stunned when the love of his life, the English girl who has lived in Niederwald for several years, tells him she is returning to England, and that she is married.
— The Pall Mall Magazine, Oct 1896

- Testing His Courage
(non-genre) A fun, if slight, romance about a rich girl and her suitor.
— Pearson’s Magazine, Sep 1904

- The Kit Bag
A young law clerk gets more than he bargained for when he borrows a bag from his employer.
— The Pall Mall Magazine, Dec 1908

- The Laying of a Red-haired Ghost
Jim’s sister insists her husband’s ghost has returned, and is giving her strict financial instructions.
— The Lady’s Realm, Sep 1909

- The Singular Death of Morton
Two men abroad in Switzerland are pursued by a vampire. Blackwood’s only traditional vampire tale.
— The Tramp magazine, Dec 1910

- The Strange Experience
of the Rev. Phillip Ambleside
While climbing in the Alps, the reverend is guided by uncanny forces to a particular spot.
— The Pall Mall Magazine, Mar 1910

- Night Wind
A charming fable-like encounter with the night wind by three children and their uncle Henry the author.
This became a chapter in The Extra Day (1915).
— Country Life, 09 May, 1914

- The Memory of Beauty
A convalescent solder suffers from amnesia.
Land & Water, 03 Jan 1918

- The Garden of Survival
Short novella of the sentimental variety concerning reincarnation and mysticism, touching again on the “thrill of beauty” as a catalyst.
One of Blackwood’s most personal tales.
— book publ. Macmillan (1918)

- Onanonanon
A man who had created an alter ego for his wartime espionage is being haunted by his other self.
— The English Review, Mar 1921

- The Fire Body
A woman is convinced she has met the protagonist before on an astral plane in his “Fire Body”.
— The North American Review, Sep 1931

- Roman Remains
Queer things were said to go on in the little glen called Goat Valley. Anthony is about to find out.
— Weird Tales magazine, Mar 1948

One of the foremost British writers of supernatural tales in the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) wrote stories in which the slow accumulation of telling details produced a foreboding atmosphere of almost unendurable tension. Though he wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, “His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s.”

Blackwood’s literary renown began in 1908 with the publication of a highly successful collection of stories, John Silence — Physician Extraordinary, featuring a “psychic doctor.” His two best known stories are probably “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”.

These works, by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), were first published 1889 ~ 1948. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

A MYSTERIOUS HOUSE

Explanations are usually very tedious, and so without any introduction or preambulation I will plunge right into the midst of this uncanny story I am about to tell…. When, some fifteen years before the time of which I write, I was a schoolboy at Eton I made close friends with a fellow above me in the school, named Pellham. We were very great chums, and later on we went to Cambridge together, where my friend spent money and time in wasting both, while I read for holy orders, though I never actually entered the Church. Since that time I had completely lost sight of him and he of me, and, with the exception of seeing his marriage in the papers, had no news at all of his whereabouts. One morning, however, towards the close of September 1857, I received a letter from him, short, precise, and evidently written in a great hurry, asking me to go down and see him at his family seat just outside Norwich. I packed my bag and went that very same evening. He met me himself at the station and drove me home. We hardly recognised each other at first sight, so much had we changed in appearance, both being on the dark side of thirty-five, but our individual characters had remained much the same and we were still to all appearances the best of friends. My friend was not very talkatively disposed, and I kept up a fire of questions until we drew up at the park gates. Going up the drive to the house he brightened up considerably, and gave me plenty of information about himself and family. He was quite alone, I was surprised to hear, his wife and two daughters with an uncle of his having left for the Continent two days previous. After dinner he seemed quite the old “Cambridge Undergrad” again, and once settled round the old-fashioned hearth, with cheroots and coffee, we talked on over the days spent at Eton and Cambridge. We were just discussing our third edition of tobacco, when Pellham suddenly changed the subject, and said he would tell me now why he had written so shortly to me to pay him this unexpected visit. His face grew grave as he began by asking me if I was still a sceptic as regards ghostly manifestations.

“Indeed I am,” was my answer; “I have had no reason to change my views on the subject, and think exactly as I used to at Cambridge, when we so strongly differed; but I remember you then saying that, if ever in after years you should come across an opportunity of proving to me your ideas on the subject, you would write to me at once, and I also recollect giving my word that, if possible, I would come. But during the fifteen years that have since passed by I have bestowed little, if any, thought on the subject.”

“Exactly,” answered Pellham, with a grave smile that did not please me; “but now I have at last heard of a case which will satisfy us both, I think, so I wrote to you to come down and fulfil your old promise by investigating it.”

“Well! let me hear all about it first,” I said cautiously. I certainly was not overjoyed to hear this news, for, though a sceptic to all intents and purposes, still “ghosts” was a subject for which I had a certain fear, and the highest ambition of my life was not to investigate haunted houses and the like just because I had years ago promised I would should a chance occur. But I repressed my feelings and tried to look interested, which I was, and delighted, which I certainly was not.

Pellham then gave me a long account — thrilling enough too it was — of the case, which I have somewhat condensed in the following form.

Some three or four years before, my friend had bought up a house which stood on the moorland about eight miles off. One morning before breakfast the tenant of the house, a Mr. Sherleigh (who was there with his family), suddenly burst into my friend’s study without any ceremony, and, in great heat and excitement, shouted out the following words:

“You shall suffer for it, Lord Pellham, my wife mad, and the little boy killed with fright, because you didn’t choose to warn us of the room next the drawing-room, but you shall—”

Here the footman entered, and at a sign from his master led the excited and evidently cracked old man from the room, but not before he had crashed down some gold pieces on the table, with: “That’s the last rent you’ll get for that house, as sure as I am the last tenant.”

“Well,” continued my friend, “that very day, now two years ago, I rode over there myself and the house was empty. The Sherleighs had left it, and since that day I have never been able to let it to anyone. Mr. Sherleigh, who was quite mad, poor fellow, threw himself before a train, and was cut to pieces, and Mrs. Sherleigh spread a report that it was haunted, and now no one will take it or even go near it, though it stands high and is in a very healthy position. Two nights ago,” he went on gravely, “I was riding past the road which leads up to it, and through the trees I could see light in one of the upper rooms, and figures, or rather shadows, of a woman’s figure, with something in her arms, kept crossing to and fro before the window-blind. I determined to go in and see what on earth it was, and tying my horse just outside I went in. In a minute or two I was close underneath the window where the light was still visible, and the shadow still moving to and fro with a horrible regularity. As I stood there, undecided, a feeling within warned me not to enter the house, so vivid, it was almost a soft voice that whispered in my ear. I heard no noise inside, the night air was moaning gently through the fir trees which surrounded the house on one side and nearly obscured the upper part of the window from view. I stooped down and picked up a large stone — it was a sharp-edged flint — and without any hesitation hurled it with all my might at the windowpane, some eight or ten feet from the ground. The stone went straight and struck the window on one of the wooden partitions, smashing the whole framework, glass and all, into a thousand splinters, many of which struck me where I stood. The result was awful and unexpected. The moment the stone touched the glass the lights quite disappeared, and in the blackness in which I was shrouded, the next minute, I could see hiding behind the broken corners of glass a dark face and form for a short instant, and then it went and all was pitch dark again. There I was among those gloomy pine trees hardly knowing which way to turn. The face I had caught a momentary glimpse of was the face of Mr. Sherleigh, whom I knew to be dead! My knees trembled. I tried to grope my way out of the wood, and stumbled from tree to tree, often striking my head against the low branches. In vain. With the weird light in the window as a guide, I had taken but a few minutes to come, but now all was dark and I could not find my way back again. I felt as if the dismal tree trunks were living things, which seemed to move. Suddenly I heard a noise on my left. I stopped and listened. Horror! I was still close to the window, and what I heard was a cracking and splintering of broken glass, as if someone from inside were slowly forcing their way out through the hole made by my stone! Was it he? The fir tree next me suddenly shook violently, as if agitated by a powerful gust of wind, and then in a gleam of weird light I saw a long dark body hanging half-way out of the window, with black hair streaming down the shoulders. It raised one arm and slammed down something at my feet which fell with a rattle, and then hissed out: ‘There’s the last rent you’ll ever have for this house.’ I stood literally stupefied with horror, then a cold numb sensation came over me and I fell fainting on my face, but not until I had heard my horse give a prolonged neigh and then his footsteps dying away in the distance on the hard moorland road…. When I recovered consciousness it was broad daylight. I was cold and damp; all night I had lain where I fell. I rose and limped, stiff and tired, to the place where I had tied my horse the night before, but no horse was there. And the horrible sound of his hoofs echoing away in the distance came back to me, and I shuddered as I thought of what I had seen. After a terrible trudge of three hours I reached home. A tremendous search had been made for me, of course, but no one dreamt of looking for me where I really was. The horse had found his way home, and I have never found out what frightened him so.”

My friend’s account was over. He lit his cigar, which had gone out during the narrative, and settling himself comfortably in his chair, said, “Well, old boy, that’s a case I don’t feel at all inclined to investigate by myself, but I’ll do it with your aid. You know, a genuine sceptic is a great addition in such things, so we’ll get to the bottom of it somehow.”

My feelings at that moment were not difficult to describe. I disliked the whole affair, and wanted heartily to get out of it; and yet something urged me to go through with it and show my friend that the house was all right, that imagination did it all, that the horse may have taken fright at anything, and that very possibly there really was someone in the house all the time, and imagination had done the rest. Such were the somewhat mixed thoughts in my mind at the time. However, in a few moments all was settled and we had agreed to go the following night, search the house first, and then sit up all night in the room next the drawing-room. Then we both went to our separate bedrooms to think the matter over and get a long sleep, as we neither expected to get any the following might.

Next morning at breakfast we both talked cheerfully about the coming night and how best to meet its requirements as regards food, etc. We agreed to take pistols for weapons, horses as a means of conveyance, and abundant food wherewith to fortify ourselves against a possible attack of ghosts.

The day drew on towards its close. It was very hot and sultry weather, and not a breath of wind stirred the murky atmosphere, as at 4.30 p.m. we bestrode our horses and made off in the direction of the “White House.” A long gravel road, lonely in the extreme, led us across the wild uncultivated moorland for six or seven miles, then we saw a copse of fir trees which, my friend informed me, were the trees which sheltered one side of the house. In a few minutes we had passed through the front garden gate and were among the dark fir trees, and then as we turned a sharp corner the house burst full upon us. It was square and ugly. Great staring windows in regular rows met our eyes and conveyed an unpleasant impression to the brain — at least, they did to mine. From the very moment we had passed the front gate till I left the house next morning, I felt a nasty sick sensation creep over me, a feeling of numbness and torpor which seemed to make the blood run thick and sluggish in my veins. The events of that night have remained engraven on my brain as with fire, and, though they happened years ago, I can see them now as vividly as then. Only an eyewitness can possibly describe them, should he wish to do justice to them, and so my feeble pen shall make the attempt.

It was about 6.30, and we had settled our horses in a barn outside for the night. There were only two walls to keep the barn in position, and these were simply a row of rotten posts, half-decayed in places, so we securely tied the horses and, with a good supply of hay, left them for the night. We then approached the door and, after fumbling in the lock for some time, Pellham succeeded in opening it. A sickly, musty odour pervaded the hall, and the first thing we did after a thorough search, which revealed nothing, was to open all the doors and windows all over the house, so as to let in what little air there was. Then we went upstairs into the little room next the drawing-room, where, according to Sherleigh, strange things had occurred. But the window was in pieces, and hardly an entire pane of glass was left, and we were forced to select another room on the same floor (i.e. the second) and looking out on the same copse of pine trees, whose branches almost touched the glass, so close were they. It was a very ordinary room; a fireplace, no furniture but a rickety table and three chairs, one of which was broken. The only disagreeable feature we noticed about the room was its gloominess; it was so very dark. The trees outside, as I have already said, were so close that the slightest breath of wind rustled their twigs against the window. We soon had six candles fixed and burning in different parts of the little room, and the blaze of light was still further increased by a roaring fire, on which a kettle was singing for tea, and eggs boiling in a saucepan, and at half-past seven we were in the middle of our first tea in a haunted house. It was, indeed, less luxurious than the dinners I had been used to lately, but otherwise there was nothing to find fault with, and a little later the tea things were cleared away in a heap in a corner (where, by-the-by, they are to this day), and we were sitting round an empty table, smoking in silence. The door out into the passage was fast shut, but the window was wide open. The sun had sunk out of sight in a beautiful sky of wonderful colouring. Small fleecy clouds floating about caught the soft after-glow and looked unearthly as seen through the thick fir branches. The faint red hue of the western sky looked like the reflection of some huge and distant conflagration, growing dimmer and fainter as the dark engines of the night played upon it, extinguishing the leaping flames and suffusing the sky with a red reflected glow. Not a breath of air stirred the trees.

My friend had left the window and was poking and arranging the fire, with his back turned towards me. I was standing close to the window, looking at the fast-fading colours, when it seemed to me that the window sash was moving. I looked closer. Yes! I was not mistaken. The lower half was gradually sinking; gradually and very quietly it went down. At first I thought the weight had slipped and gone wrong, and the window was slipping down of its own accord; but when I saw the bolt pulled across and fastened as by an invisible hand, I thought differently. My first impulse was to immediately undo the bolt again and open the window, but on trying to move — good heavens! I found I had lost all power of motion and could not move a muscle of my body. I was literally rooted to the ground. Neither could I move the muscles of my tongue or mouth; I could not speak or utter a sound. Pellham was still doing something to the fire, and I could hear him muttering to himself, though I could not distinguish any words. Suddenly, then, I felt the power of motion returning to me; my muscles were relaxing, and turning, though not without a considerable effort, I walked to the fireplace. Pellham, then, for the first time noticed that the window was shut, and he made a remark about the closeness of the night, asking me why I had closed it.

“Hulloa,” he went on, before I had time to answer, “by the gods above what is happening to that window? Look — why it’s moving!”

I turned. The window was slowly being opened again.

Yes, sure enough it was. Slowly and steadily it moved or was pushed up.

We could but believe our eyes; in half a minute the window was wide open again. I turned and looked at Pellham and he looked at me, and in dead silence we stared at one another, neither knowing what to say or wishing to break the silence. But at length my friend spoke.

“I wish I were a sceptic, old man, like you are; sceptics are always safer in a place like this.”

“Yes,” I said, as cheerfully as I could, “I feel safe enough, and what’s more, I am convinced that the window was opened by human agency from outside.”

Pellham smiled, he knew as well as I that no human fingers could have fastened the bolt from outside. “Well,” he said briskly, “perhaps you are right; come, let’s examine the window.”

We rose and approached it, and my friend put his head and shoulders out into the air. It was very dark, and a strange oppressive stillness reigned outside, only broken by the gentle moaning sound of the might wind as it rustled through the trees and swept their branches like the strings of a lyre. I followed my friend’s example, and together we peered out into the night. Soon my eyes rested on the ground below us, and at the base of one of the nearer pines I thought I could distinguish a black form, clinging, as it seemed, to the tree. I pointed it out to Pellham, who failed to see anything, or at least said so; anyhow, I was glad to believe that my excited imagination was the real cause. We were still leaning out of the window in silence, when several of the trees, especially the one where I imagined I had seen the shape, were most violently agitated, as though by a mighty wind; but we felt not the slightest breath on our faces. At the same instant we heard a subdued shuffling sound in the room behind us, which seemed to come from the direction of the chimney. But neither of us referred to it as we slowly walked back to the fire and took up our places on either side on the two chairs, which were at the best very rickety.

“It isn’t wise to leave the window open,” said my friend, suddenly, “for if there really is anyone outside, they can see all and everything we do; while we, for our part, can see absolutely nothing of what goes on outside.”

I agreed, and walked up to the window, shutting it with a bang and firmly drawing the bolt.

“I’ve brought a book,” he went on, “which I thought we might read out aloud in turn to relieve the dullness and the silence.”

He stopped speaking and looked at me, and at the same moment I raised my eyes to his face. To my intense horror and surprise I noticed for the first time a long smear of blood, wet and crimson, across his forehead. My horror was so great that for some seconds I could not find my tongue, and sat stupidly staring at him. At last I gasped out:

“My dear fellow, what has happened to you, have you cut yourself?”

“Where? what do you mean?” he replied, looking round him with surprise.

For answer I took out my handkerchief, and wiping his brow, showed him the red stains. But as I stood there showing him this proof and as he was expressing his utter astonishment, I distinctly saw something that for the moment made the blood rush from the extremities and crowd into my head. Something seemed to tighten round my heart. I saw a large, gleaming knife and hand disappear into the air in the direction of the window. It was too much; my nerves failed me, and I dropped fainting to the floor.

•   •   •

When I came to myself I was lying where I fell by the fireplace. Pellham was sitting beside me.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, “you’ve been unconscious for over an hour.” He said this in such a queer manner and laughed so fiendishly that I wondered what had happened to him during the interval. Had he seen something awful and gone mad? There was a strange light in his dark eyes and a leer on his lip. Just then he took up his book quite naturally and began to read aloud, every now and then he made a comment on what he was reading, quite sensibly too, and soon I began to think, as I sipped my brandy out of our flask, that I must have had a frightful dream. But there at my feet lay the blood-stained handkerchief, and I could not get over that. I glanced at his face; the smear had disappeared, and no scratch or wound was visible.

Pellham had not been reading long, perhaps some five or ten minutes, when we heard a strange noise outside among the trees, just audible above the deathlike stillness of the autumn night. It was a confused voice like the low whispering of several persons, and as I listened, still weak from the last shock, the blood stood still in my veins. Pellham went on reading as usual. This struck me as very curious, for he must have heard the noise plainly; but I said nothing, and glancing at him I saw the same light in his eyes and the evil leer on his mouth, looking ugly in the flickering glare of the candles and firelight.

Suddenly we heard a tremendous noise outside, altogether drowning the first. The horses had broken loose and were tearing wildly past the house. Long and wild neighs rang out and died away, and we knew our horses were gone. Pellham was still reading, and as I looked at him a sudden and horrid thought flashed through my brain. It was this: Had he anything to do with this? Was it possible? Before I had time to answer my question Pellham threw down the book and made for the door, locked it, drew out the key, and opening the window threw it far away among the trees. I then recognised the awful fact that I was alone with a madman. I glanced at my watch, it was a quarter to one. Instead of one hour I must have been unconscious two at least. This was terrible in the extreme. He was a man of far more powerful physique than I. What was to be done? Pellham strode grinning up to the fire, went down on both knees and commenced blowing between the bars with all his might. I saw my chance, and quietly walking to the window, without a word I climbed out, and letting myself as far down as my arms would allow I then let go and dropped. It was a distance of four or five feet, but in the darkness I tumbled forward on my face. As I rose, uninjured, I distinctly heard the sound of running feet close to me, but in my bewilderment I could not make out clearly in which direction they were going; they only lasted a moment or two. But what a terrific sight met my gaze as I turned the corner of the house, and saw volumes of smoke pouring steadily out of the windows and roof of the back portion of the house. Now and again a long flame, too, shot up to heaven.

“Good God!” I cried, “the house is on fire.”

No wonder the horses had taken flight. But my poor friend, what could I do for him? The window was too high for me to climb in again, and the doors were locked. In a few minutes the flames would spread to this side of the house and the poor fellow would be burnt to death unless he had enough sense left to jump out of the window. I hurried back to the spot where I had let myself down from the window, just in time to see the last scene of the most ghastly experience I have ever witnessed. Pellham was standing at the window. In his hand was a red-hot poker, and it was pointed at his throat, but the strain was too great for my nervous system and with a violent start I woke up!

After our heavy tea we had both fallen asleep, just as we were in our chairs. Pellham was still snoring opposite me, and the light was stealing in through the window. It was morning, about half-past six. All the candles had burnt themselves out, and it was a wonder they had not set fire to the dry wood near them.

Twenty minutes later we had re-lit the fire and were discussing the remnant of eggs and coffee. Half an hour later we were riding home in the bright, crisp, morning air, and an hour and a half later we were in the middle of a second and far superior breakfast, during which I did not tell my dream, but during which we did agree that it had been the dullest and most uncomfortable night we had ever spent away from home.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE STORY OF KARL OTT

Niederwald was a little village situated in a deep valley among the Alps, and it was generally conceded by the inhabitants that Karl Ott was the most obstinate man in it.

He was not only held to be such because his motto in life was “Never give in even if you are wrong,” but also because he had for three years proposed to the daughter of the English lady with amazing perseverance, and, in the face of equally persevering refusals, still persisted in renewing his offer.

Karl Ott, eldest and only son of the village pastor, called upon the daughter of the English lady just as regularly as the churchgoers went to receive from his father’s hands the communion on the first Sunday in every month. Their walk through the village and up the winding path into the dark pine forest was as regularly expected by the simple villagers as was their return an hour or two later; Karl Ott with a set look on his face, and on the lips of the daughter of the English lady an amused and peculiarly sweet smile.

Leaving her at her mother’s house — the little wooden one opposite the Gasthaus with the creeping vines and the dark-stained pillars — Karl Ott strode down the village street to his father’s house, and the following conversation took place regularly.

“Karl, my son, had you a pleasant walk?”

“Yes, father.”

“And what did she say, my son?”

“She treated it as a grand joke, father.”

“She laughed at you, Karl?”

“Yes, father.”

“And did she give you no encouragement, my son?”

“No; that is — Vielletcht etwas.”

“Only a very little — perhaps,” repeated the pastor, who knew every answer in advance.

There was a little pause here, and then:

“You will try again, my son,” more as a statement of fact than a question.

“If she did not love me, father, she could not go with me so freely and often.”

“She is not playing with you, Karl?” with his eyes on his son’s face.

Karl never answered this last question. He only laughed, and asked a question, himself.

“With me? Aber was für eine Idee!”

Karl Ott may have been original, unsophisticated, but he was a dangerous man to be trifled with. He knew it, and thought of course everyone else knew it. For was he not acknowledged to be the most obstinate and difficult man in the whole village?

The English lady and her daughter, with an English servant, had lived in the little house with the dark-stained pillars for three years. They were generally known to the village folk as the “English Lady” and the “Beautiful daughter of the English Lady,” because the villagers found themselves wholly unable to pronounce their double-barrelled name.

They were in reality very poor, though compared to Herr Stosch, the richest man in the village, they seemed rich, very rich. A small income goes a long way in Niederwald, and the English lady and her daughter had sought the secluded life it afforded because of reverses at home when the husband and father died. At least so they said, and no one questioned the truth of it. Niederwald was a quiet, curious little out-of-the-world spot, and the people who had been bred and born there were equally quiet and far more curious.

It was a lovely place. A stream tumbled from the big mountains behind, and flowed peacefully through the village, till the spring thaws and the winter storms converted it into a raging, racing torrent. Vineyards sloped away, below the village, to a lake, while above it dense pine forests stretched away till they joined the region of rocks and cliffs, and, finally, of everlasting snows. Above all, three lofty white peaks peered over from the clouds into the little village, and reflected the sunset glory long after the village was wrapped in darkness and shadow.

Karl Ott owned a large vineyard, and made money by it. His Wienese were always successful, and his grapes sweeter and juicier even, than those that grew in sunny Italy, on the other side of the great white peaks.

He had seen the English lady and her daughter when they first came to Niederwald, and his father, as pastor, went with him to call upon them. While his father stumbled along in his broken English with the mother, Karl conversed with the beautiful daughter in German. He welcomed her to Niederwald. She had travelled with her father before he died, and had seen much. She had even been in the fair country that lay beyond the three white peaks. She was older than he was, and knew more of the world, he thought. He found that she loved the mountains and the forests, and that she listened eagerly to his descriptions of the gorges, ravines and vastnesses of the Alps around them. She longed to see them and climb to the great white peaks. And Karl, who knew every boulder and every tree, and had grown up in company with toppling seracs and dizzy crevasses, promised to show them to her.

He was not slow to believe what his father told him afterwards: that the proud English lady had sacrificed her daughter’s best years to her own pride in coming to live in Niederwald, and bury her poverty where none could see it and sneer.

It was thus their walks began; and the English lady, apparently wrapped up in her pride and disappointments, let them go together.

Karl Ott had been fortunate enough to earn the gratitude of the daughter of the English lady, and it was then he first made up his mind to fall in love with her.

He did everything so deliberately, and his obstinate will held his feelings so under control, that he was not able to fall in love without first thinking the matter over, and then coming to a decision. Such decision was, however, absolutely final, and from it there could be no recall.

The Devil’s Rocks formed a steep slope of loose rocks that had crumbled down from the cliffs above, and accumulated. They were not twenty yards long, and terminated abruptly at the edge of a precipice over two thousand feet. The rocks had to be crossed on the way to Wannsee. They were very dangerous, because the slightest disturbance set them all rolling over each other towards the brink. Several persons from the neighbouring villages had been killed in this way by losing their balance when the rocks began to move under their weight, and being swept down over the short distance that lay between the narrow path and the dizzy abyss. They were called the Devil’s Rocks — Teufelsfelsen — because the devil was said to be concealed beneath them, and to move them with his fingers whenever anyone approached.

Karl and the girl were climbing slowly, and the little dog had run on ahead. His weight was more than sufficient to start the treacherous stones in motion. In spite of his struggles, and with much piteous barking, the little fellow was carried to the edge. Karl saved it by going after it, while the girl, speechless with horror, watched them from the path. She was powerless to help, and she knew they must both be carried over, and — and she did so love the dog.

She could hear the rocks that had already leaped over the edge crashing down the face of the cliff, striking here and there its buttresses and projecting ledges. How brave of Karl! He had her darling by the scruff of his neck. Oh! the splendid fellow that he was. Ah! but — horrors! he had slipped again! Her heart stopped beating for a moment, and she hid her eyes in her hand. She heard a rush of wind, and she knew that Karl Ott and the dog had disappeared into the gulf.

The next minute he was standing by her side with the dog in his arms. It was licking his hand, and evidently had no idea of the cruel death it had escaped. How it was done Karl could not tell. Only the rush of loose rocks suddenly ceased, and the one his weight rested on, six inches from the edge, came to a standstill, and he scrambled up again to the path with the doggie panting and frightened in his hands. That was all he could say about it. He watched the girl kiss her dog, and saw her tears drop on to his little brown ears. He heard her thank him; and as her large eyes, with the long, moistened eyelashes, looked so gratefully into his, he experienced a strange sensation in his heart.

He thought the tears were those of gratitude.

He thought of the girl, of her eyes and hair. He thought of the tears that fell on the dog’s ears, and he thought of the slender brown hands that held him. A feeling more tender than any he had yet known crept into his heart. He thought of his father, the pastor; of the proud English lady; and then he thought again of her beautiful daughter.

He remembered, too, that he owned a vineyard, which made him rich. And he made up his mind.

The rocks were dropping past him, and plunging downwards over the precipice. He stooped, and picked one up.

“As surely as I have plucked this one from the fingers of the Devil who is moving them from beneath,” he said aloud, slowly, “and as surely as it will drop through the air and rest on the ground below,” — here he peered over the edge, — “so surely will I make the daughter of the English lady my wife.” He threw the stone upwards and forwards, saw it for a moment against the sky, and then heard it rushing downwards through the air.

A few seconds afterwards it crashed upon the rocks below, and Karl Ott, as soon as the echoes had died away, climbed down again, and went home to bed.

Next day he told his father of his resolve, and the pastor had said, “My son, you have my benediction.”

Karl waited a few weeks before he thought it well to speak his mind.

It was winter time, and one day Herr Miller, proprietor of the Gasthof, his son Fritz, Pastor Ott, Karl Ott, young Stosch, Frau Müller and the English girl took their skates and a luncheon basket, and drove six miles in a sleigh to the end of the frozen lake.

Karl slowly and deliberately fastened the shining skates on to the pretty little feet of the daughter of the English lady. They were soon flying together before the wind over the black ice, with the fox terrier racing after them as best he could on the slippery surface. He was barking his little heart out for happiness.

But in Karl Ott’s heart there was no sign of fluttering. His big muscular frame, with its mountain-trained sinews, never carried a more confident heart than then. The fact that he was going to ask the English girl to marry him did not make his pulse beat any more quickly than usual; and “usual” was by no means fast.

He felt, as he flew over the ice with the English girl beside him, as if the little gloved hands lying warmly in his own were already his; as if the hair, that escaped from under her fur cap and sometimes blew across his cheeks, was even then his to caress.

His purpose being so single, he had no recourse to beating about the bush, and saw no reason for hesitancy or difficulty in giving expression to so straight- forward a proposition.

Karl simply waited for a pause in their talk, turned to the English girl as they were skating out in the middle of the lake, and said in his deep voice, in which was no tremor, nor trace of nervousness:

“Ich liebe Dich. Ich anbiete Dir mein Leben, mein Herz, meine Weinbergen, und meines Vater’s Segnung.”

As he spoke he looked her steadily in the face. He could not meet her eyes, because, in her desire to choose the best ice, she was looking downwards. But the girl made no answer, and no change came over her face. The wind roared in their ears as it swept past them, and the ring of their skates sounded musically over the lake.

Karl waited some time for an answer, and then came to the conclusion that the girl had not heard him. It was the fault of the wind. He took his eyes from her face, and glanced down at the little feet that shot forward so swiftly and gracefully. He was sure she had not heard him.

There was nothing for him to do but repeat the proposition; and this Karl Ott at once did, in a louder voice, and with an amount of calm deliberation that would have been the envy of all lovers in all lands, could they have seen him.

This time she certainly heard him, for she turned her face up and looked at him. Her eyes were wide open, but on her face, aglow with the wind, there was no evidence of surprise or embarrassment. Her lips were parted in the effort of breathing; her fur cap sat jauntily on her hair, and her hands nestled cosily and warm in his own. Karl kept his eyes on hers, and waited for her to speak. But she did not speak, and Karl began to feel decidedly uncomfortable. He did not know what to make of it.

Then the daughter of the English lady nestled in a little closer to his side, and, with a laugh that showed two rows of gleaming teeth, shouted against the wind, — “What was that you said just now about your father’s benediction? If you don’t look where you are taking me, it will be given over our drowned and frozen bodies.”

Then Karl knew that she could not have heard all that he said. She was shouting her loudest, and he heard her none too distinctly. Dropping his eyes from her face, he looked ahead. They were within fifty yards of the lake proper. The shallow water of the great marsh lay behind them, and they were already skating over the thin, green ice that a little farther on came to an abrupt end in the deep waters. Karl saw their danger at a glance. With a swing he altered his course, pulling the girl round with him, so that she came close up against his side and her hair blew again across his cheek. She laughed merrily, and tucked it under her fur cap.

Talking was an easy matter now. The wind was behind them.

“What was that remark you made about your father’s benediction?” she laughed again: “did you mean us to be drowned, or what? It would be a pity, to end our friendship in iced water!”

Something in her voice made Karl feel for a moment that there was between them an immeasurable distance. The thought fled as suddenly as it came, and Karl’s phenomenal obstinacy began to assert itself.

He was on the point of repeating, word for word, his twice-made proposition, when there was a sound of skaters behind them, and the next moment Müller and young Stosch raced up and joined them.

Their presence put an end, for the time, to any further avowals of love or proposals of marriage.

They formed a line of skaters hand in hand, the girl between Müller and himself, and sped along to join the rest of the party round a log fire and a luncheon basket.

Karl did not find himself again alone with the daughter of the English lady, until the horse was being harnessed into the sleigh, and the remnants of the luncheon were being packed up. And then it was only for a brief moment, when he had nothing prepared in the way of words. The fact was, he felt nonplussed. Had she vouchsafed some sort of an answer, he would have known what to do and say. But her silence completely outwitted him. He could not understand it, and, for the time being, his obstinacy was met and conquered by the subtler force of silence.

Now that they were alone again for a moment, she asked him to tighten the strap that fastened her skates together.

“Make a neat little bundle of it, Mr. Ott,” she said, “so that they won’t clash together, and get scratched.”

While he was doing her request, the muscles of his great fingers slow from the cold, the girl stood facing him. “And please,” she added ever so gently, and looking up into his eyes, “please, Karl, never ask me those sort of questions again, because, if you do, we cannot go together on the mountains. And you know there’s nobody else here who can climb like you, and — and I may not go alone. Now, please don’t, Karl, for it is quite impossible.”

The smile she gave him was gentle enough to melt his obstinacy into slavery. But it only made Karl Ott angry. It was his turn to be silent now, for he knew enough, cold, strange lover that he was, to understand that she looked upon him only as a companion.

The first time she met him after the skating party, she greeted him with an amused smile that, so far as he was concerned, seemed to increase the distance he felt lay between them. It also increased his obstinacy. And this same amused smile was all the answer he got to his many subsequent proposals.

She called him Karl now, and when he had concluded his awkward sentence about offering her his love and his life and his vineyards, there was only this little smile for answer.

If he dared, as he often did, to repeat his words, the little smile broadened out into a laugh, that effectually closed his lips for the moment, because he utterly failed to comprehend the feelings that caused it.

They never got any further than this, and the state of affairs might well have continued for a dozen years.

Meanwhile Karl’s love for the daughter of the English lady changed in character. It was beginning to come from his heart instead of from his will. He now and again caught himself wondering what in the world he would do if she died, or — the thought was horrible — if she married someone else!

One day in the early spring, when Karl Ott went to the little post office, he met the English girl there. The snow was still lying low down on the mountain sides. In the air was that indescribable sweetness that is only known in the neighbourhood of pine forests at a certain elevation.

She held some letters in her hand and was stamping them for England. Karl suggested a ramble on the heights of the Kronenberg, and the girl was pleased.

“Yes,” she said; “and if you think the snow is sufficiently melted, we will go by way of the Devil’s Rocks. I should like to see them once more.”

“Once more!” repeated Karl with surprise. “Why! what do you mean?”

“Oh! we are going away,” she said simply. “Mother is going back to live in England again. We leave in two days.”

Karl fairly gasped. His heart sank within him.

“Wait here a moment,” she added: “I will go and put on my nailed boots and climbing skirts. Then I’ll tell you all about it!” She had seen the blank look of dismay that had come into his face, and, for the first time, she felt in her heart a feeling of sorrow for him.

“Poor Karl Ott!” she thought; “but he is such a simple boy, and has so much to learn. He surely could not have imagined that I might care for him!”

So they climbed up the lower slopes of the great Kronenberg, these two, who had together explored every foot of the mountains, and knew their most inaccessible parts, who had seen the sun rise from the top of the three white peaks, and watched the last sunset lights linger on the far away snow slopes that seemed to hang in the sky over the village. For nearly five years they had been companions in many a ramble through the deep forests, and had followed the torrents to their sources under the ice of the dangerous, slow-creeping glaciers. And as they followed the winding path, so familiar to them, the English girl told her companion of the impending change in their life.

“We are going back to our old home in Kent,” she told him. “Mother’s sister is dead, and we shall be better off now. We go to Paris on Saturday, and you must come to the station, Karl, and see us off.”

Come to the station and see us off!

Karl listened in silence. He asked no questions, and made no comments. The shock had been so sudden and so unexpected, it had stirred his feelings as they never had been stirred before. He could not define them, much less reduce them to words. Surprise, disappointment, rage, struggled for the mastery with sorrow, pride and outraged confidence. They rose up in him in such a strength of turmoil, that he felt as if his heart was being torn out and destroyed. He walked as in a dream, not knowing what he would do next. But the feeling that was uppermost was the bitterness that he had been trifled with. Karl Ott was obstinate, and, whatever he felt, there was no indication of it on his face or in his manner. His feelings nevertheless increased in strength the more he tried to repress them. So he just walked on by her side, and listened to her voice, as they climbed up through the fragrant pine woods and then through the belt of stunted mountain oaks that led to the rocks beyond. When she had finished he made an effort to say something.

“I am sorry you are going. I did not expect it,” was what he said in a quiet voice.

The girl said she was sorry too, she was so fond of the mountains and forests; but he surely did not think she was going to live in Niederwald for the rest of her life!

Karl had no answer ready; or rather had a thousand ready, but they were all so strong, and he did not know which to choose.

Then the climbing over the rough boulders that formed the long slope at the foot of Kronenberg’s great shoulder began, and rendered talking, except in short exclamations, impossible.

They climbed on together, till they reached the final slope, at the top of which began the little path leading to the Devil’s Rocks.

“Karl,” she laughed, showing her white teeth, “I’m exhausted. You’ll have to bury me here, or carry me to the top.”

Karl turned his head away and looked for a moment at the view of lake and forest far beneath them, and an expression came into his eyes that the girl did not see. Then he took her in his arms, swung her little body on to his great shoulders, and carried her steadily over the remainder of the trying, soft snow-slope. He did not tremble. He could have carried her, for that matter, over a tight-rope stretched from the peak of the Matterhorn to the Eggischorn. His feet never took false hold, his balance always was true; and, when she laughed aloud and clutched his head with her two arms for safety, he felt his muscles respond to this call on their reserve force, and carry their precious burden with the ease of steel springs.

When they reached the top he let her down gently from his shoulders. She looked up at him shyly, and told him he was the strongest pack-horse she had ever ridden upon in the Alps, and Karl felt that he wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her.

“And when did you — your mother, I mean — first decide to leave?” he asked, in a voice so quiet that a stranger would have thought him indifferent to whatever answer he got.

“Oh!” she said, with an almost imperceptible start, which did not escape his notice. “Oh! we have known it all along. We — we only came here for five years, you know.”

But Karl didn’t know; and her matter-of-fact way of announcing this important fact, which he felt should have been told him years ago, when he first proposed to her, came to him as a revelation. It acted as a stimulant too. “Then she does not care for me even as much as she does for one of the little snowdrops that are just coming up with the spring,” was the thought that passed through his brain.

“You intended from the beginning to leave Niederwald this spring?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him sweetly, and nodded her head. Karl met her eyes for a moment without a sign of expression on his face, and then turned to look at the view again. It was ever changing, and a great grey cloud was rolling up the opposite rock-walls of Chasseront — gloomy Chasseront, as it was called.

Karl again broke the silence.

“Yet you never told me that,” he said, almost gently. “I thought you would always live in Niederwald.”

Karl was so simple, so innocent, so honest!

“Live here always!” she cried. “Oh, Karl!” And there came over her face that same smile of amusement that he knew so well. But there was in it something of pity as well, now, and Karl was stung more deeply than ever by it. Poor Karl!

“You allowed me to be always with you on the mountains,” he continued, with something like anger in his voice, “and you allowed no one else. You have made and permitted me to grow very fond of you. You have always—”

“Now, Karl,” she remonstrated. The smile of amused pity had died out of her eyes, for she felt that her companion was growing unpleasantly earnest. He spoke slowly, but in his voice was an inflection she had never heard there before. The idea of his getting really angry rather frightened her. Slow, deep natures, she knew, were never really angry unless when moved to their very bottom, and Karl Ott’s nature was a very slow and a very deep one.

“You have always laughed at my proposals,” he went on, in his deep voice, totally ignoring her interruption, “but you never forbade them. You knew I meant what I said, and that, in God’s name in heaven, I loved you seriously and forever!”

“Silly boy!” she laughed with spirit, and looking him full in the face: “how could you possibly imagine anything so impossible?”

Karl did not move a muscle, or take his eyes off hers. He felt his blood leave his heart suddenly in a body, and then rush tumultuously back again. It made his cheeks blaze, and moistened his skin.

“You ought to have known,” she went on, emboldened by his silence, which she interpreted as an acknowledgement of defeat. “Our positions are so different; our ages, too; and we belong to different races. Besides, oh, Karl! I told you long ago, when first you spoke, that I could never love anyone!”

Never love anyone! Suddenly the truth began to dawn on his mind. She loved someone else, then!

The girl suddenly put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his face, moving closer to him, as if about to speak. She kept her hand there, although she was aware that he shrank from her touch as if she had been a leper. She had opened her lips when he interrupted her with raging vehemence.

“And you, damned girl,” he cried, “have allowed me all this time to remain in ignorance that you loved someone else; allowed me to pay court to you, and to love you until all my heart and life and future are all yours; to — to love so deeply, that to lose you must mean to die! And you might so easily have told me the truth: a word years ago would have prevented all, instead of letting month after month go by, playing with my life as only women can, who have — who are—”

“Karl, stop!” she cried. “I am married already!”

He stood and looked into the eyes and face he loved so hopelessly. Then he turned, and looked down, and out on to the panorama of distant woods and blue mountains. There was no word between them for a minute or more. Then the girl, who was sobbing now, sought his hand, and in a broken whisper, which could hardly have reached his ear, she moaned—

“But, Karl, my husband was a criminal — and for five years he has been — has been away. That is, we are going home to meet him when he is released — next week.”

He felt the girl draw closer to him, until her heaving breast was against his heart, and he could feel her quick sobs. He felt her arms round his neck; her head, with the golden hair, was on his shoulder.

“Can you never forgive me, Karl?” she whispered, her tears falling fast and hot on his neck.

Karl made no answer. Perhaps he had not heard her. Perhaps his thoughts were still in the cloudy distance where the little patch of blue heaven had disappeared. Perhaps, ah! perhaps, he was wondering, and thinking, and asking himself if, after all, the girl had loved him all along and loved him still.

•   •   •

So they stood together on that lonely mountain path, and the girl’s head, radiant in the soft sunshine, sank lower on his shoulder, and the wind played with her beautiful hair.

But Karl Ott moved his feet, and set the Devil’s Rocks in motion. Then he seized the girl in his arms and, raising her face to his, covered the tear-stained cheeks and the red mouth and the hair with a thousand kisses.

The stones moved forward, with a hoarse, grinding sound, towards the brink.

She heard the sound; she felt them moving beneath her feet, and she tried to free herself.

But Karl pressed her struggling little body closer to him. He held her to his heart. She was his own at last, and — he loved her. Pressed thus to his heart, the beautiful daughter of the English lady was carried by the shifting rocks to the brink of the abyss.

Her cry of terror was half smothered by his hot lips laid on her own, as they fell backwards into the air.

And the wind heard her cry, and the far white peaks saw them fall.

And the Devil’s Rocks, that dropped over the edge for several minutes afterwards, covered their bodies and formed their tombstone.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

TESTING HIS COURAGE

Julia Mansfield went disconsolately to her ball that night. She was learning, bit by bit, to pay the price that inevitably must be paid by a great heiress, and in the process she was coming to the conclusion that a little money — enough — is better than a lot.

Already, though she was barely twenty three, cynical lines had traced their bitter story round the corners of her mouth, and in her eyes there occasionally shone a shrewd light which was certainly not there when she first came out. The fact was she was passing through that most swiftly disillusioning of all life’s processes — finding out the opposite sex.

Julia was not, strictly speaking, pretty. She possessed that intelligent sort of face which earnest men adore, but which bores the majority and alarms most of the rest. Hence, as we have said, she was going to the ball without the enthusiasm of the illusioned young girl. There was, however, one man she hoped to see there. Mark Lister had never paid her a compliment or shown the least desire to make love. She had always liked and respected him and, though he made no sign, her intuition persuaded her that it was a mutual liking, and that it was her money that made him keep aloof.

The ball commenced at ten, but it was considerably after midnight when Mark Lister entered the room.

He was an engineer; good-looking, big, strong, but with only his pay to live on. He was just leaving to take up a rather good appointment in India and he had come to this ball solely to see Miss Mansfield and to confess his love.

He did not intend to ask her to marry him, but yet he wished her at the last to know his secret. It could not possibly hurt her, he argued, and in after life it would always be a source of pleasure to him to think that she knew.

Mark Lister’s mind was simple, direct, and without subtlety or guile, and the possible result of his rather selfish expedient did not cross his mind.

It did not take him long to find the girl he sought, and when, later, the time arrived to claim his dance he came at once to the point without hesitation.

“I have come to this ball simply and solely to see you,” he said. “I have something to say to you. No, do not be alarmed, there’s no question at the end of it. It’s a mere statement of fact. If you will sit out this dance, I’ll tell you.”

He led her to a secluded corner and began at once.

“I’m going to India in three days, but before I go I wanted to tell you — if I may — that I’ve been in love with you ever since I saw you first at your coming-out ball in this very house three years ago. I tell you this because — I don’t quite know why — I fear my reason’s very selfish — because it will always be such a pleasure to me to feel that you know. It can do you no harm. I wanted you to know it. There, that’s all — and well, that’s the longest speech I ever made in my life!”

He half rose to go, as the music was beginning again, but she held out a hand and stopped him.

“Wait,” she said peremptorily, “I’ll give you this dance too. I am interested in your declaration. It is unusual. You put no question at the end of it — that customary question I’m so tired of hearing.”

“No; I think you are fitted for a better — a bigger career than I could hope to give you. Besides, I love my profession, and could not allow myself to dream of giving it up, even if I dared to think you cared for me. Therefore. I have never permitted myself to think further than this: that I love you, and I want you to know it.”

“Evidently, we are both unusual people.” she laughed, but in a tone that made his heart leap. “Now, suppose I put a question to you, will you answer it truly?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Would you have asked me if I were poor?”

“Yes.”

There was a long pause. He felt the girl drawing him with terrific force, but he made no sign. The fragrance of her hair and breath rose to his brain. Again he made a move, and again she stopped him with her hand.

“Mr. Lister,” she said — and the personality of the girl robbed the words of any reproach and unmaidenliness — “you have told me the truth without humiliating me. Now, I’ll tell you something, too. You have won my love. I love you, and have loved you for a long time.”

“You really mean that!” he cried.

“You want to marry me — I want to marry you,” she continued quietly. “There’s only one thing I want you first to prove to me — your courage. No, not your physical courage; that’s a mere matter of nerves and imagination. I mean your moral courage, which is a matter of character.”

“How?”

“Go and ask my aunt for my hand in marriage. You know, she has the disposal of me. I am her ward.”

She watched his face, but he did not flinch. Her aunt had the reputation of being a veritable dragon, a woman to dread, a woman with a bitter and merciless tongue, a sayer of brutal things usually true!

“All right, I’ll go,” he said without hesitation. “Only, she’s never seen me, or heard of me.”

“That makes no difference. This is my test. Do you accept it?”

He bowed his head.

“Then go tomorrow at four o’clock. I shall tell her another suitor is coming to ask for me. She hates the very name of ‘suitor’ It’s like a red rag to a bull.”

This was her parting shot. Mark Lister handed her over to Lord de Pennylesse to go down to supper, and left the ball room. Next day at the appointed hour he presented himself at the door of the great mansion in Grosvenor Square, but before going up to the dragon’s den he asked to see Miss Mansfield alone.

“Miss Mansfield is out, sir, and will not return till evening,” was the footman’s reply to his question, and with rather a sinking heart he then sent up his card to the aunt, Lady Hester. In due course he was shown into a severe little upstairs drawing-room where, at once as he entered the room, he saw the figure of the much dreaded old lady seated in an armchair by the fire. She looked very prim and severe, and the high fashion of wearing her hair, and the dark spectacles, certainly did not tend to soften the general aspect of severity with which she acidly welcomed him. Her attitude at once seemed to put him in the wrong. She motioned him to a chair, and without delay, in a thin, bored voice, plunged into her subject. Evidently her intention was to conclude the interview as soon as possible and get back to her novel. She sat up stiffly, facing him, yet never once actually taking the trouble to look at him; her back was to the light.

“I believe you wish to marry my niece, Mr — er—”

“Lister,” he supplied. Her voice was like the cracking of an icicle just before it drops.

“Mr. Lister,” she went on. “Well, sir, as she is also my ward, it is, of course, my duty to ask you if you are in a position to support her—”

“I am an engineer, with a salary of £400 and excellent prospects.”

“Please don’t interrupt,” she went on testily. “I was about to say, if you can support her in the way she has been accustomed to?”

“No; I certainly cannot at present give her the luxury she has been accustomed to,” he answered frankly, “but she can supply all that unnecessary sort of thing with her own money.”

“Her own money, my dear sir! Are you aware that she has no money, practically speaking, of her own? Her fortune is entirely at my disposal, and if she marries a man of whom I disapprove she won’t have a penny.”

“This is news to me, and very good news,” he answered quite calmly, “for if she loves me really she will not mind what—”

“Fiddlesticks, fiddlesticks!” ejaculated the old lady, kicking her footstool viciously. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, young man. Are you selfish enough to tempt the girl to lose her fortune? Don’t you know that money is one’s only real friend in this world and that—”

Mark Lister had a good deal of self control, but he interrupted here.

“Lady Hester,” he said, quietly but firmly. “I have come here to make a formal demand for your ward’s hand. If you disapprove of me as her husband, and will kindly tell me so plainly, I shall then feel free to ask her if she will have me without your consent. If she prefers her fortune I shall know how to value her love_ But not for one minute do I believe that she loves her wretched money better than me.”

“That’s delightfully plain talk, Mr. Lister,” snapped the old lady. “and I’ll meet you on equal terms. I refuse my consent. There! Now you can write and tell her so. If she marries you she shan’t have a penny except the £too a year she has in her own right.”

“I’m delighted with your decision,” he said with some heat. “If she won’t marry me on what I’ve got, I don’t want her.”

“You’ll find a table with writing paper behind you,” wheezed the old lady, burying herself in her book without even looking up to see what he was doing. Mark Lister turned to the table and began a letter. He did not hesitate for a minute. He believed the girl loved him. The decision was for her to make.

It was not that he valued himself so highly, but that he felt the right thing for him to do was to give her the chance. He would play the game. At least it would prove that he wanted herself, not her money.

He was half-way through his epistle when he suddenly felt a hand clapped over both his eyes. Good heavens! What was the old eat up to now? He struggled an instant to free himself, but the fingers only tightened their grasp. Then he seized the wrist to force it away, and half rose in his chair as he did so. Surely that tender little hand he felt so soft and yielding beneath his own was not that of the severe, prim, bony old maid he had been just arguing with! It seemed incredible. He wrenched himself free, and turned upon his blindfolder.

Julia Mansfield stood before him, her face crimson with blushes, her eyes sparkling with happiness. Upon the floor at her feet lay a bundle of false hair, a pair of blue spectacles, a shawl, and other paraphernalia. Lady Hester’s armchair was empty; her book lay upon the floor. The disguise had been perfect and complete.

“Mark!” she cried. “Then you do love me for myself. Oh, if you knew the number of men that have failed to pass that test! I never really doubted you, but it was sweet to hear it from your own lips — and in such a temper, too! Of course, my fortune is my own, and, what’s more to the point, you are, too!”

“You — little — minx — you!” he cried, kissing her between each word. “You don’t deserve to have a husband at all.”

“Am I forgiven?”

For reply he kissed her again.

“What about your aunt?” he asked presently.

“I am my aunt,” replied Julia, “and a very convenient relative I have always found myself. But this is the last of her. I must at once announce that Lady Hester is travelling on the Continent for an indefinite period.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE KIT BAG

When the words “Not Guilty” sounded through the crowded courtroom that dark December afternoon, Arthur Wilbraham, the great criminal KC, and leader for the triumphant defence, was represented by his junior; but Johnson, his private secretary, carried the verdict across to his chambers like lightning.

“It’s what we expected, I think,” said the barrister, without emotion; “and, personally, I am glad the case is over.” There was no particular sign of pleasure that his defence of John Turk, the murderer, on a plea of insanity, had been successful, for no doubt he felt, as everybody who had watched the case felt, that no man had ever better deserved the gallows.

“I’m glad too,” said Johnson. He had sat in the court for ten days watching the face of the man who had carried out with callous detail one of the most brutal and cold-blooded murders of recent years.

The counsel glanced up at his secretary. They were more than employer and employed; for family and other reasons, they were friends. “Ah, I remember; yes,” he said with a kind smile, “and you want to get away for Christmas? You’re going to skate and ski in the Alps, aren’t you? If I was your age I’d come with you.”

Johnson laughed shortly. He was a young man of twenty-six, with a delicate face like a girl’s. “I can catch the morning boat now,” he said; “but that’s not the reason I’m glad the trial is over. I’m glad it’s over because I’ve seen the last of that man’s dreadful face. It positively haunted me. Bat white skin, with the black hair brushed low over the forehead, is a thing I shall never forget, and the description of the way the dismembered body was crammed and packed with lime into that—”

“Don’t dwell on it, my dear fellow,” interrupted the other, looking at him curiously out of his keen eyes, “don’t think about it. Such pictures have a trick of coming back when one least wants them.” He paused a moment. “Now go,” he added presently, “and enjoy your holiday. I shall want all your energy for my Parliamentary work when you get back. And don’t break your neck skiing.”

Johnson shook hands and took his leave. At the door he turned suddenly.

“I knew there was something I wanted to ask you,” he said. “Would you mind lending me one of your kit-bags? It’s too late to get one tonight, and I leave in the morning before the shops are open.”

“Of course; I’ll send Henry over with it to your rooms. You shall have it the moment I get home.”

“I promise to take great care of it,” said Johnson gratefully, delighted to think that within thirty hours he would be nearing the brilliant sunshine of the high Alps in winter. Be thought of that criminal court was like an evil dream in his mind.

He dined at his club and went on to Bloomsbury, where he occupied the top floor in one of those old, gaunt houses in which the rooms are large and lofty. The floor below his own was vacant and unfurnished, and below that were other lodgers whom he did not know. It was cheerless, and he looked forward heartily to a change. The night was even more cheerless: it was miserable, and few people were about. A cold, sleety rain was driving down the streets before the keenest east wind he had ever felt. It howled dismally among the big, gloomy houses of the great squares, and when he reached his rooms he heard it whistling and shouting over the world of black roofs beyond his windows.

In the hall he met his landlady, shading a candle from the draughts with her thin hand. “This come by a man from Mr Wilbr’im’s, sir.”

She pointed to what was evidently the kit-bag, and Johnson thanked her and took it upstairs with him. “I shall be going abroad in the morning for ten days, Mrs Monks,” he said. “I’ll leave an address for letters.”

“And I hope you’ll ’ave a merry Christmas, sir,” she said, in a raucous, wheezy voice that suggested spirits, “and better weather than this.”

“I hope so too,” replied her lodger, shuddering a little as the wind went roaring down the street outside.

When he got upstairs he heard the sleet volleying against the window panes. He put his kettle on to make a cup of hot coffee, and then set about putting a few things in order for his absence. “And now I must pack — such as my packing is,” he laughed to himself, and set to work at once.

He liked the packing, for it brought the snow mountains so vividly before him, and made him forget the unpleasant scenes of the past ten days. Besides, it was not elaborate in nature. His friend had lent him the very thing — a stout canvas kit-bag, sack-shaped, with holes round the neck for the brass bar and padlock. It was a bit shapeless, true, and not much to look at, but its capacity was unlimited, and there was no need to pack carefully. He shoved in his waterproof coat, his fur cap and gloves, his skates and climbing boots, his sweaters, snow-boots, and ear-caps; and then on the top of these he piled his woollen shirts and underwear, his thick socks, puttees, and knickerbockers. The dress suit came next, in case the hotel people dressed for dinner, and then, thinking of the best way to pack his white shirts, he paused a moment to reflect. “Bat’s the worst of these kit-bags,” he mused vaguely, standing in the centre of the sitting-room, where he had come to fetch some string.

It was after ten o’clock. A furious gust of wind rattled the windows as though to hurry him up, and he thought with pity of the poor Londoners whose Christmas would be spent in such a climate, whilst he was skimming over snowy slopes in bright sunshine, and dancing in the evening with rosy-cheeked girls — Ah! that reminded him; he must put in his dancing-pumps and evening socks. He crossed over from his sitting-room to the cupboard on the landing where he kept his linen.

And as he did so he heard someone coming softly up the stairs.

He stood still a moment on the landing to listen. It was Mrs Monks’s step, he thought; she must he coming up with the last post. But then the steps ceased suddenly, and he heard no more. They were at least two flights down, and he came to the conclusion they were too heavy to be those of his bibulous landlady. No doubt they belonged to a late lodger who had mistaken his floor. He went into his bedroom and packed his pumps and dress-shirts as best he could.

Be kit-bag by this time was two-thirds full, and stood upright on its own base like a sack of flour. For the first time he noticed that it was old and dirty, the canvas faded and worn, and that it had obviously been subjected to rather rough treatment. It was not a very nice bag to have sent him — certainly not a new one, or one that his chief valued. He gave the matter a passing thought, and went on with his packing. Once or twice, however, he caught himself wondering who it could have been wandering down below, for Mrs Monks had not come up with letters, and the floor was empty and unfurnished. From time to time, moreover, he was almost certain he heard a soft tread of someone padding about over the bare boards — cautiously, stealthily, as silently as possible — and, further, that the sounds had been lately coming distinctly nearer.

For the first time in his life he began to feel a little creepy. Then, as though to emphasize this feeling, an odd thing happened: as he left the bedroom, having, just packed his recalcitrant white shirts, he noticed that the top of the kit-bag lopped over towards him with an extraordinary resemblance to a human face. The canvas fell into a fold like a nose and forehead, and the brass rings for the padlock just filled the position of the eyes. A shadow — or was it a travel stain? for he could not tell exactly — looked like hair. It gave him rather a turn, for it was so absurdly, so outrageously, like the face of John Turk the murderer.

He laughed, and went into the front room, where the light was stronger.

“That horrid case has got on my mind,” he thought; “I shall be glad of a change of scene and air.” In the sitting-room, however, he was not pleased to hear again that stealthy tread upon the stairs, and to realize that it was much closer than before, as well as unmistakably real. And this time he got up and went out to see who it could be creeping about on the upper staircase at so late an hour.

But the sound ceased; there was no one visible on the stairs. He went to the floor below, not without trepidation, and turned on the electric light to make sure that no one was hiding in the empty rooms of the unoccupied suite. There was not a stick of furniture large enough to hide a dog. Then he called over the banisters to Mrs Monks, but there was no answer, and his voice echoed down into the dark vault of the house, and was lost in the roar of the gale that howled outside. Everyone was in bed and asleep — everyone except himself and the owner of this soft and stealthy tread.

“My absurd imagination, I suppose,” he thought. “It must have been the wind after all, although — it seemed so very real and close, I thought.” He went back to his packing. It was by this time getting on towards midnight. He drank his coffee up and lit another pipe — the last before turning in.

It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes. Impressions gather on the surface of the mind, film by film, as ice gathers upon the surface of still water, but often so lightly that they claim no definite recognition from the consciousness. Then a point is reached where the accumulated impressions become a definite emotion, and the mind realizes that something has happened. With something of a start, Johnson suddenly recognized that he felt nervous — oddly nervous; also, that for some time past the causes of this feeling had been gathering slowly in has mind, but that he had only just reached the point where he was forced to acknowledge them.

It was a singular and curious malaise that had come over him, and he hardly knew what to make of it. He felt as though he were doing something that was strongly objected to by another person, another person, moreover, who had some right to object. It was a most disturbing and disagreeable feeling, not unlike the persistent promptings of conscience: almost, in fact, as if he were doing something he knew to be wrong. Yet, though he searched vigorously and honestly in his mind, he could nowhere lay his finger upon the secret of this growing uneasiness, and it perplexed him. More, it distressed and frightened him.

“Pure nerves, I suppose,” he said aloud with a forced laugh. “Mountain air will cure all that! Ah,” he added, still speaking to himself, “and that reminds me — my snow-glasses.”

He was standing by the door of the bedroom during this brief soliloquy, and as he passed quickly towards the sitting-room to fetch them from the cupboard he saw out of the corner of his eye the indistinct outline of a figure standing on the stairs, a few feet from the top. It was someone in a stooping position, with one hand on the banisters, and the face peering up towards the landing. And at the same moment he heard a shuffling footstep. The person who had been creeping about below all this time had at last come up to his own floor. Who in the world could it be? And what in the name of Heaven did he want?

Johnson caught his breath sharply and stood stock still. Then, after a few seconds’ hesitation, he found his courage, and turned to investigate. Be stairs, he saw to his utter amazement, were empty; there was no one. He felt a series of cold shivers run over him, and something about the muscles of his legs gave a little and grew weak. For the space of several minutes he peered steadily into the shadows that congregated about the top of the staircase where he had seen the figure, and then he walked fast — almost ran, in fact — into the light of the front room; but hardly had he passed inside the doorway when he heard someone come up the stairs behind him with a quick bound and go swiftly into his bedroom. It was a heavy, but at the same time a stealthy footstep — the tread of somebody who did not wish to be seen. And it was at this precise moment that the nervousness he had hitherto experienced leaped the boundary line, and entered the state of fear, almost of acute, unreasoning fear. Before it turned into terror there was a further boundary to cross, and beyond that again lay the region of pure horror. Johnson’s position was an unenviable one.

“By Jove! That was someone on the stairs, then,” he muttered, his flesh crawling all over; “and whoever it was has now gone into my bedroom.” His delicate, pale face turned absolutely white, and for some minutes he hardly knew what to think or do. Then he realized intuitively that delay only set a premium upon fear; and he crossed the landing boldly and went straight into the other room, where, a few seconds before, the steps had disappeared.

“Who’s there? Is that you, Mrs Monks?” he called aloud, as he went, and heard the first half of his words echo down the empty stairs, while the second half fell dead against the curtains in a room that apparently held no other human figure than his own.

“Who’s there?” he called again, in a voice unnecessarily loud and that only just held firm. “What do you want here?”

The curtains swayed very slightly, and, as he saw it, his heart felt as if it almost missed a beat; yet he dashed forward and drew them aside with a rush. A window, streaming with rain, was all that met his gaze. He continued his search, but in vain; the cupboards held nothing but rows of clothes, hanging motionless; and under the bed there was no sign of anyone hiding. He stepped backwards into the middle of the room, and, as he did so, something all but tripped him up. Turning with a sudden spring of alarm he saw — the kit-bag.

“Odd!” he thought. “That’s not where I left it!” A few moments before it had surely been on his right, between the bed and the bath; he did not remember having moved it. It was very curious. What in the world was the matter with everything? Were all his senses gone queer? A terrific gust of wind tore at the windows, dashing the sleet against the glass with the force of small gunshot, and then fled away howling dismally over the waste of Bloomsbury roofs. A sudden vision of the Channel next day rose in his mind and recalled him sharply to realities.

“There’s no one here at any rate; that’s quite clear!” he exclaimed aloud. Yet at the time he uttered them he knew perfectly well that his words were not true and that he did not believe them himself. He felt exactly as though someone was hiding close about him, watching all his movements, trying to hinder his packing in some way. “And two of my senses,” he added, keeping up the pretence, “have played me the most absurd tricks: the steps I heard and the figure I saw were both entirely imaginary.”

He went hack to the front room, poked the fire into a blaze, and sat down before it to think. What impressed him more than anything else was the fact that the kit-bag was no longer where he had left at. It had been dragged nearer to the door.

What happened afterwards that night happened, of course, to a man already excited by fear, and was perceived by a mind that had not the full and proper control, therefore, of the senses. Outwardly, Johnson remained calm and master of himself to the end, pretending to the very last that everything he witnessed had a natural explanation, or was merely delusions of his tired nerves. But inwardly, in his very heart, he knew all along that someone had been hiding downstairs in the empty suite when he came in, that this person had watched his opportunity and then stealthily made his way up to the bedroom, and that all he saw and heard afterwards, from the moving of the kit-bag to — well, to the other things this story has to tell — were caused directly by the presence of this invisible person.

And it was here, just when he most desired to keep his mind and thoughts controlled, that the vivid pictures received day after day upon the mental plates exposed in the courtroom of the Old Bailey, came strongly to light and developed themselves in the dark room of his inner vision. Unpleasant, haunting memories have a way of coming to life again just when the mind least desires them — in the silent watches of the night, on sleepless pillows, during the lonely hours spent by sick and dying beds. And so now, in the same way, Johnson saw nothing but the dreadful face of John Turk, the murderer, lowering at him from every corner of his mental field of vision; the white skin, the evil eyes, and the fringe of black hair low over the forehead. All the pictures of those ten days in court crowded back into his mind unbidden, and very vivid.

“This is all rubbish and nerves,” he exclaimed at length, springing with sudden energy from his chair. “I shall finish my packing and go to bed. I’m overwrought, overtired. No doubt, at this rate I shall hear steps and things all night!”

But his face was deadly white all the same. He snatched up his field-glasses and walked across to the bedroom, humming a music-hall song as he went — a trifle too loud to be natural; and the instant he crossed the threshold and stood within the room something turned cold about his heart, and he felt that every hair on his head stood up.

The kit-bag lay close in front of him, several feet nearer to the door than he had left it, and just over its crumpled top he saw a head and face slowly sinking down out of sight as though someone were crouching behind it to hide, and at the same moment a sound like a long-drawn sigh was distinctly audible in the still air about him between the gusts of the storm outside.

Johnson had more courage and willpower than the girlish indecision of his face indicated; but at first such a wave of terror came over him that for some seconds he could do nothing but stand and stare. A violent trembling ran down his back and legs, and he was conscious of a foolish, almost a hysterical, impulse to scream aloud. That sigh seemed in his very ear, and the air still quivered with it. It was unmistakably a human sigh.

“Who’s there?” he said at length, finding his voice; but thought he meant to speak with loud decision, the tones came out instead in a faint whisper, for he had partly lost the control of his tongue and lips.

He stepped forward, so that he could see all round and over the kit-bag. Of course there was nothing there, nothing but the faded carpet and the bulging canvas sides. He put out his hands and threw open the mouth of the sack where it had fallen over, being only three parts full, and then he saw for the first time that round the inside, some six inches from the top, there ran a broad smear of dull crimson. It was an old and faded blood stain. He uttered a scream, and drew hack his hands as if they had been burnt. At the same moment the kit-bag gave a faint, but unmistakable, lurch forward towards the door.

Johnson collapsed backwards, searching with his hands for the support of something solid, and the door, being further behind him than he realized, received his weight just in time to prevent his falling, and shut to with a resounding bang. At the same moment the swinging of his left arm accidentally touched the electric switch, and the light in the room went out.

It was an awkward and disagreeable predicament, and if Johnson had not been possessed of real pluck he might have done all manner of foolish things. As it was, however, he pulled himself together, and groped furiously for the little brass knob to turn the light on again. But the rapid closing of the door had set the coats hanging on it a-swinging, and his fingers became entangled in a confusion of sleeves and pockets, so that it was some moments before he found the switch. And in those few moments of bewilderment and terror two things happened that sent him beyond recall over the boundary into the region of genuine horror — he distinctly heard the kit-bag shuffling heavily across the floor in jerks, and close in front of his face sounded once again the sigh of a human being.

In his anguished efforts to find the brass button on the wall he nearly scraped the nails from his fingers, but even then, in those frenzied moments of alarm — so swift and alert are the impressions of a mind keyed-up by a vivid emotion — he had time to realize that he dreaded the return of the light, and that it might be better for him to stay hidden in the merciful screen of darkness. It was but the impulse of a moment, however, and before he had time to act upon it he had yielded automatically to the original desire, and the room was flooded again with light.

But the second instinct had been right. It would have been better for him to have stayed in the shelter of the kind darkness. For there, close before him, bending over the half-packed kit-bag, clear as life in the merciless glare of the electric light, stood the figure of John Turk, the murderer. Not three feet from him the man stood, the fringe of black hair marked plainly against the pallor of the forehead, the whole horrible presentment of the scoundrel, as vivid as he had seen him day after day in the Old Bailey, when he stood there in the dock, cynical and callous, under the very shadow of the gallows.

In a flash Johnson realized what it all meant: the dirty and much-used bag; the smear of crimson within the top; the dreadful stretched condition of the bulging sides. He remembered how the victim’s body had been stuffed into a canvas bag for burial, the ghastly, dismembered fragments forced with lime into this very bag; and the bag itself produced as evidence — it all came back to him as clear as day…

Very softly and stealthily his hand groped behind him for the handle of the door, but before he could actually turn it the very thing that he most of all dreaded came about, and John Turk lifted his devil’s face and looked at him. At the same moment that heavy sigh passed through the air of the room, formulated somehow into words: “It’s my bag. And I want it.”

Johnson just remembered clawing the door open, and then falling in a heap upon the floor of the landing, as he tried frantically to make his way into the front room.

He remained unconscious for a long time, and it was still dark when he opened his eyes and realized that he was lying, stiff and bruised, on the cold boards. Then the memory of what he had seen rushed back into his mind, and he promptly fainted again. When he woke the second time the wintry dawn was just beginning to peep in at the windows, painting the stairs a cheerless, dismal grey, and he managed to crawl into the front room, and cover himself with an overcoat in the armchair, where at length he fell asleep.

A great clamour woke him. He recognized Mrs Monks’s voice, loud and voluble.

“What! You ain’t been to bed, sir! Are you ill, or has anything ’appened? And there’s an urgent gentleman to see you, though it ain’t seven o’clock yet, and—”

“Who is it?” he stammered. “I’m all right, thanks. Fell asleep in my chair, I suppose.”

“Someone from Mr Wilb’rim’s, and he says he ought to see you quick before you go abroad, and I told him—”

“Show him up, please, at once,” said Johnson, whose head was whirling, and his mind was still full of dreadful visions.

Mr Wilbraham’s man came in with many apologies, and explained briefly and quickly that an absurd mistake had been made, and that the wrong kit-bag had been sent over the night before.

“Henry somehow got hold of the one that came over from the courtroom, and Mr Wilbraham only discovered it when he saw his own lying in his room, and asked why it had not gone to you,” the man said.

“Oh!” said Johnson stupidly.

“And he must have brought you the one from the murder case instead, sir, I’m afraid,” the man continued, without the ghost of an expression on his face. “The one John Turk packed the dead both in. Mr Wilbraham’s awful upset about it, sir, and told me to come over first thing this morning with the right one, as you were leaving by the boat.”

He pointed to a clean-looking kit-bag on the floor, which he had just brought. “And I was to bring the other one back, sir,” he added casually.

For some minutes Johnson could not find his voice. At last he pointed in the direction of his bedroom. “Perhaps you would kindly unpack it for me. Just empty the things out on the floor.”

The man disappeared into the other room, and was gone for five minutes. Johnson heard the shifting to and fro of the bag, and the rattle of the skates and boots being unpacked.

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, returning with the bag folded over his arm. “And can I do anything more to help you, sir?”

“What is it?” asked Johnson, seeing that he still had something he wished to say.

The man shuffled and looked mysterious. “Beg pardon, sir, but knowing your interest in the Turk case, I thought you’d maybe like to know what’s happened—”

“Yes.”

“John Turk killed hisself last night with poison immediately on getting his release, and he left a note for Mr Wilbraham saying as he’d be much obliged if they’d have him put away, same as the woman he murdered, in the old kit-bag.”

“What time — did he do it?” asked Johnson.

“Ten o’clock last night, sir, the warder says.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE LAYING OF A RED-HAIRED GHOST

It was a strange and incredible story, Jim thought, as he sat opposite his sister in the firelight, and listened to her nervous and disjointed telling of it. They held little in common, these two, and had not met for some years ; she was greatly his senior, and when she had married Captain Blundell, who combined a love of spirits with a credulous belief in spiritualism, Jim sheered off altogether. He could not stand a man who came drunk to his own table, and who, in his sober moments, could talk of nothing but the vulgar claptrap of séances and spirit rapping.

But now, six months after the funeral, Jim found himself summoned down by a pathetic little letter; and there he was after tea, in a corner of the big drawing room, watching his sister’s pale, emotional face in the firelight, and wondering how any woman could possibly believe all she was telling him.

In spite of this “wonder,” however, he was beginning to feel conscious of a certain “creepiness” down the back, and several times he caught himself wishing that the footmen would bring the lamps, and be quick about it.

“As you know, Jim, Harry was a tremendous spiritualist,” she went on, with a little show of natural embarrassment. “He was always having séances and what he called ‘experiments’ in the house, up to the day of his seizure.”

“Mediums?” asked Jim, feeling the old contempt stir in him.

She nodded, with a gesture imploring his patience.

“Every professional medium in the United Kingdom has slept in this house,” she answered. “They came down, male and female, in endless succession for weekend visits, and for two years I kept a diary of all their phenomena.”

Jim shuffled nervously, fearing a detailed account.

“But a few months before his death,” she went on, “all this came to a sudden stop. He gave up having paid mediums—”

“You must have been glad,” said Jim, with genuine sympathy.

“Because he said he had found something better. You see, our circles were made up of people staying in the house — always devout believers — and when there were not enough of these he brought in recruits from among the servants. First the upper servants, then anybody. Gardeners, grooms, upper housemaids, and even cooks have all sat at various times with us round the table or cabinet, watching hands, faces, and sometimes full-form figures flit about the room. Oh, it was very wonderful !”

Jim poked the fire, and lit another cigarette hastily. He believed nothing; but it was foolish, he considered, for nervous persons like his sister to talk of such things after dark, especially in a lonely country house with ill-lighted corridors and ghostly staircases. Moreover, she was always peering over her shoulder as though she saw something in the great darkened room behind her.

“It was on one of these occasions,” she continued, lowering her voice, “he discovered that one of the servants was a medium of exceptional powers. After that no professional ever entered the house again.”

“And this medium — servant—?” asked her brother impatiently.

“Was Masters.”

“What?” he cried: “Masters, the old housekeeper?”

“Yes ; she began by going into a trance at one of the séances, and my husband said she possessed most unusual powers and must sit for development.”

“And you got the same results with that old woman?”

“Even better. Oh, Masters was extraordinary !” replied his sister with enthusiasm. “Simply extraordinary ! But it’s not that I want to tell you about. It’s something very different.”

Jim noticed her hesitation and embarrassment, and wondered what he was going to hear next. He suggested ringing for the lights, but his sister objected that she did not want the servants to overhear a single word. Her manner became more mysterious. She drew her chair closer, and began to speak in a hushed voice, but with great earnestness.

“It’s what has gone on since — that I want to tell you,” she whispered. “Since my husband’s death, I mean — what goes on now—”

“Now !” repeated Jim, feeling more and more uncomfortable.

“And I sent for you because you are the only one of the family left. I could never speak to a stranger of this.”

“Of course not,” he said hurriedly. “You say things go on now, do you?” He glanced quickly at her face, and noted its sudden pallor and the unmistakable signs of fear in her manner. “Do you mean in this house?”

He got up to ring the bell for the lamps, but she drew him back into the chair.

“Wait till I’ve finished, please, Jim. You know, this is a very large house,” she went on disconnectedly, still under her breath for fear of listeners. “And a very lonely one ; and I’ve been living here since my husband died.”

“Yes,” he said emphatically.

“I only use a small part of it. — his part — is shut up.”

“Naturally.”

“I have fewer servants too.”

“Of course.”

“And the greatest difficulty in keeping them. They won’t stay. They are always hearing noises in the unused part of the house — his part. And some of them swear they have met IT on the stairs.”

Jim looked up quickly ; he was alarmed at her tone of voice.

“Met what?” he asked aloud.

“Him,” she whispered back across the firelight. “He’s been about all the time. He’s always about now. He’s not far from you and me at this very moment, probably.”

Her brother sprang up, and faced the darkening room’ with his back to the fire. Her serious manner dismayed him a good deal.

“You mean—” he began.

“Harry still lives here — still comes here.”

“Helen!” he said severely — “your nerves are unstrung. What in the world do you mean by talking in this way?”

“Exactly what I say, Jim. Harry is still in this house,” she answered quietly, in a tone that sent the shivers down his back.

“The house is h — h — aunted, you mean !”

“I mean that Harry is still about in it,” she whispered.

“But have you seen him?”

“Often,” she went on, her excitement growing as she saw her brother’s interest. “And he’s always telling me to do things. He says his happiness depends on my doing them. He says this all the time. He comes at night to my room ; and even when I don’t see him, I hear his voice in the dark whispering at me.”

Jim straightened himself up, and drew a long, deep breath. He was slowly forming his own conclusions. He knew a splendid nerve specialist in town, who would soon know how to put the matter right. He was not subtle-minded himself, and hardly knew how to deal with such a case, but the doctor would manage all that. So, for the moment, he said nothing, and schooled himself to listen with sympathy and patience. In spite of his conclusions, however, he regretted that his sister looked to him for protection in such a matter, and almost wished he had not come.

“Then, only a month ago,” she went “Masters herself came to give warning. She cried a lot, and declared she really could not stand it any longer.”

“Masters sees him too?”

“As often as I do nearly. The very night she gave notice he came into my room and said I must not let her go on any account, for she was such a wonderful medium, and he could not manifest at all without a medium. If Masters left he would be unable to come back, and he would suffer — and be very unhappy.”

“So the wretched woman is still here?”

“I was obliged to double her wages before she’d consent to stay, and even now I’m always afraid she’ll go out of her mind or do something dreadful like that.”

The entrance of the footman with the much longed-for lamps put an end to their conversation for the moment, and the dressing-gong postponed it still further; but after a depressing tête-à-tête dinner, Jim asked to see Masters alone in the smoking — room. His sister was not there, for he did not wish her nerves to be further excited before going to bed.

He talked to Masters about family matters that interested them both, before approaching the topic of main interest. She volunteered little, but answered all his questions frankly, and he soon saw that she believed in it all even more implicitly than did his sister. She was less intelligent, and of course more credulous, and she told him some amazing bits of information about her late master which only confirmed Jim in his theory that these two hysterically-inclined women were completely hypnotised into the belief that Captain Blundell had returned to the scene of his orgies and “experiments,” and still walked the rooms and passages of the old family mansion. She mentioned that even with her higher wages she did not think she could stand it much longer.

Jim asked her particularly about the first seance at which she went into a trance.

“I simply felt kind of faint,” she told him, “and then turned of a sudden all unconscious. That’s all I knew till I woke up and they told me all what had ’appened while I was asleep. ‘In a trance’ the poor Captain called it. And after that I used to sit twice a week regular for him.”

Jim felt sure she believed every word she uttered. Her descriptions of her meeting with the Captain since his death were very vivid, and she turned pale and trembled all over while she spoke of seeing his red head and bloated face bending over her bed in the night time. And when she told how she saw him moving silently down the corridors, sometimes overtaking and passing her without a word, and vanishing in the doorway of his old room, Jim was distinctly sorry that he had not waited for her recital until the morning.

But it did not in the least shake his belief that both women were entirely deluded, and his mind was already at work on a plan to send the foolish old housekeeper off on a holiday, while he got his sister up to London, and induced her to see a specialist.

He avoided further conversation on the subject that night — for his own sake as much as for theirs, and he felt quite angry with himself to note that his nerves gave an involuntary start when his sister led him to his lofty panelled bedroom, and informed him that this was the very room her husband had died in six months previously.

“There is far more chance of your seeing him if you sleep here,” she explained, “and then you can judge for yourself. Masters, who sleeps just across the passage so as to be near me, tried hard to prevent me putting you here; but I knew you wouldn’t feel the least afraid. But, do please remember, Jim,” she added pleadingly, “if he comes, not to speak roughly or unkindly to him.”

She was gone and the door closed behind her.

Jim’s reflections for the next few minutes were very far from pleasant. He believed none of it, but he had nerves for all that; and to be put to sleep in the death-room, with a medium servant opposite and a hysterical sister a little farther up the passage — this was more than he had bargained for. His mind and imagination were alive with all the stories of the evil apparition he had heard; and even his bedroom, he noticed, was littered with spiritualist journals and cheap occult magazines, dealing with the marvellous and terrifying side of this class of things.

No wonder, he reflected, that these women, living alone in the country, their minds still dominated by the bluster and superstition of the bibulous Blundell — no wonder they still saw him walking the floors and whispering at them in the darkness of the night. It was matter for surprise they did not see and hear a great deal more.

And, although Jim possessed a strong will, and had soon reduced his imagination to order, it required considerable effort on his part to crawl between the sheets of old Blundell’s bed and blow the candles out on the table beside him. And the last picture in his mind as he finally fell asleep took the form of this man as he had seen him at his sister’s wedding years ago — with his flaming red hair, his bloated cheeks, and his small, pig-like eyes.

For all that, however, he slept undisturbed, and during the following day he tried to divert his sister’s thoughts as much as possible to other things than spirits. He also contrived that Masters should never once see her alone.

For three days the household moved along normal and unexciting channels of ordinary country life, but the fourth morning Helen came down to breakfast pale and trembling, and declared her husband had appeared to her in the night, and had whispered that he could not come as before so long as Jim was in the house, and that he was suffering and very unhappy. Her brother’s sceptical attitude, he said, destroyed the conditions, and made it almost impossible for him to materialise.

“That explains, you see, why he has not appeared to you,” she said weepingly.

Jim did not care what the explanation might be, so long as the apparition did not actually come; and this only made him feel more than ever that his theory was correct, and that the whole story was a tissue of moonshine and hysteria.

But that very night something happened that compelled him to reconsider his theories, and, if possible, to readjust them.

It was after midnight when he came up from the smoking-room, where an interesting novel had detained him far beyond his usual hour. In order not to disturb his sister, whose room he had to pass, he took off his shoes and walked on tiptoe up the stairs. The house was dark and silent, and the great hall he had to pass through seemed unusually large. Its proportions seemed almost to have altered. To find his way he was obliged to keep his hand on the rail; but half way up he became so confused as to his exact whereabouts that he decided to return to the smoking-room and get a candle.

It was at this very moment that his nerves signalled a warning to him. His heart suddenly began to beat very fast, and as he turned to grope his way downstairs he became aware that “something” had moved up directly in front of him out of the darkness.

Something, he felt positive,was standing within two feet, or less, of his person. In another second he would touch it. Everything was pitch-black; and at once his mind was flooded with the details of what his sister and Masters had seen. With terrible vividness the horrible stories came before him. The hair rose on his head, and he felt his knees shake. The theory about hypnotised and hysterical women, so convincing in the daylight, seemed in a second to have become inadequate and absurd. The frightened face of the housekeeper and his sister’s pallor occurred to him with new meaning.

He tried hard to pull himself together, and began to fumble in his pocket for a match; but he only just had time to move a little to one side and get his back up against the wall, when the darkness before him grew faintly luminous, and he plainly saw a figure moving slowly past him down the stairs.

Jim felt the sweat trickling down his neck as he stared. Something with human shape passed him slowly, silently, with a sort of dim light of its own just sufficient to make it visible. It made absolutely no sound, but he felt the air stir on his cheek; and, just at the second when it was closest to him, it turned slowly round and showed him its face.

Jim almost screamed aloud. It was a man with bloated cheeks, small shining eyes, and red hair!

He thought every instant the figure would spring at him out of the darkness, and he almost fell forward on to it, and feared he would collapse on the floor from sheer fright. But, in the same second, it passed him and was gone; moving by with soundless feet as though his own presence had been quite unobserved.

His first thought was to rush to his sister or to Masters, and tell them what he had seen. But cooler thoughts followed quickly, when he reflected how mortified he would be to confess that he was too frightened to follow the figure and speak to it. Instead, his trembling fingers found a match, and he at once struck a light and peered about him.

The shadows ran away on all sides, and he saw a long empty corridor, lined with pictures, but devoid of all doors or furniture, and certainly destitute of any other human figure than his own. But it was not the passage he knew! Evidently he had taken the wrong turning in the dark. He ought to have gone up another flight of stairs before turning, and he forthwith began to retrace his steps by the light of the match, and happily reached his own door before its last flicker left him in the darkness again.

And, once within his own room, he locked the door, poked the fire into a blaze, lit every candle he could find — and then sat down to think it all over.

After thinking it over for half an hour, safe from the paralysing effects of fear, Jim realised honestly enough that his theories needed readjusting. He, therefore, readjusted them to the best of his ability — and then got into bed and slept peacefully till morning.

Next day he told his sister what he had seen, but assured her at the same time that he had a plan for making the unhappy spirit return to its grave and rest quietly.

“It was Harry, you see, as I told you.”

“It gave me an awful turn,” said Jim. “Eyes, face, hair and all. It was exactly like him.”

“And you really think you can stop it without making him unhappy?” she asked plaintively.

“I’ll try. It won’t make him unhappy, I promise that. Don’t let Masters know I’ve seen him, or she’ll have hysterics.”

Jim arranged with his sister that he should slip into her room late that night, unobserved, and sleep on the sofa behind the curtains. She was to wake him when the apparition came, in case he was asleep. For the rest she must have confidence in him — and wait results.

At a few minutes past eleven Jim took up his position on the sofa behind the curtains, making himself comfortable with rugs and pillows. His sister was soon asleep. But he himself lay there with every sense alert, waiting for the first signs of the apparition. The room was in complete darkness, the house silent as the grave.

It was well after one o’clock when the sound of a doorhandle being turned roused him out of a light doze and made his hand seek the dark lantern ready for use. Very cautiously and quietly the door was opened — and someone moved stealthily into the room.

The darkness was too great to allow him to see a vestige of anything, but from the sound of drapery brushing against the wardrobe he knew that the intruder was standing somewhere between him and the front of the bed.

An instant later he knew that this was correct, for the faint, pale, luminous glow he had seen three nights before on the stairs made itself visible just where the bed ended, and Jim was able to make out by its aid the indistinct outline of a human head and shoulders.

At the same moment his sister moved uneasily in her sleep. The bed was being gently shaken; and almost immediately afterwards the jolting awakened her, and he heard her terrified voice from the bedclothes:

“Harry, is that you, dear?”

A sepulchral whisper replied from the shape at the foot of the bed:

“It is. But I cannot come again while your brother is in the house.”

The light shifted a little, and Jim plainly saw the mass of red hair on the figure’s head.

“I will tell him,” answered Helen, in a terrified whisper. “Please do not be angry with me.”

“I am angry only because you do not obey me,” continued the hoarse whisper. “You do not carry out what I say.”

“But what have I not done P”

“The money I want left to my faithful old housekeeper is still not arranged for. You have not altered the will as I directed.”

“But I will do so tomorrow, Harry dear — at once,” said the other with a gulp of terror.

Meanwhile Jim had stealthily left his hiding-place on tiptoe and come close up to the apparition of Captain Blundell. He was almost touching it, and as his sister uttered these last words, he encircled the figure with his arms, and clapped his hand kerchief over its mouth. There was a smothered cry, and a wild rush across the room in the darkness. Helen uttered a piercing scream, and when the door slammed behind him, Jim found himself out in the passage, with a very solid apparition struggling in his arms most violently.

“If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll stun you, d’ye hear?” he whispered.

The figure made no reply, and he dragged and carried the still struggling “Captain Blundell” down the passage into his own room. Once in, he produced the rope he had already provided in view of this very climax, and tied up the apparition so that it could not possibly move. Then he ran back to his sister’s room as fast as his legs could carry him, first locking his door on the outside.

He found her with every candle alight, sobbing with terror, and in a condition certainly bordering on hysteria.

“Oh, Jim, did you see him that time? But what happened, and did he try to injure you? It was all so terrible….”

“Come quickly,” cried her brother. “Come to my room. I’ve laid the ghost. You never need be afraid again.”

He dragged her by the hand, clad in a dressing-gown and shaking like a leaf, down the passage to his own room. He unlocked the door and they went in together. Silence and darkness met them.

“Now, Helen,” he said, “I’ll give you a light and you shall see the spirit better than you’ve ever seen it before.”

There was a sound of heavy shuffling in the darkness. He turned his dark lantern on the scene at the same moment.

Helen gave a long scream and caught his arm for support. There, in front of them, leaning in a half-faint against the bedpost, just as Jim had left her, stood Masters, the old housekeeper! She had a villainous red wig on her head; her cheeks were rouged violently, and her eyes painted. And at her feet lay a faintly luminous slate, and the sheet she had used to wrap round her neck and shoulders.

Before releasing her, Jim insisted on Helen taking him at once to the woman’s bedroom, where, as he suspected, they found further paraphernalia, consisting of a second red wig, grease paint, rubber hands, a couple of slates, and white sheets with loose arms carefully sewed on to them. She had learned all the tricks from the “professionals,” and had played them at their own game and beaten them clean out of the market.

But Helen Blundell was never troubled again by the apparition of her late husband, and Masters, the faithful old housekeeper, had to seek another place without a character.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE SINGULAR DEATH OF MORTON

Dusk was melting into darkness as the two men slowly made their way through the dense forest of spruce and fir that clothed the flanks of the mountain. They were weary with the long climb, for neither was in his first youth, and the July day had been a hot one. Their little inn lay further in the valley among the orchards that separated the forest from the vineyards.

Neither of them talked much. The big man led the way, carrying the knapsack, and his companion, older, shorter, evidently the more fatigued of the two, followed with small footsteps.

From time to time he stumbled among the loose rocks. An exceptionally observant mind would possibly have divined that his stumbling was not entirely due to fatigue, but to an absorption of spirit that made him careless how he walked.

“All right behind?” the big man would call from time to time, half glancing back.

“Eh? What?” the other would reply, startled out of a reverie.

“Pace too fast?”

“Not a bit. I’m coming.” And once he added: “You might hurry on and see to supper, if you feel like it. I shan’t be long behind you.”

But his big friend did not adopt the suggestion. He kept the same distance between them. He called out the same question at intervals, Once or twice he stopped and looked back too.

In this way they came at length to the skirts of the wood. A deep hush covered all the valley; the limestone ridges they had climbed gleamed down white and ghostly upon them from the fading sky. Midway in its journeys, the evening wind dropped suddenly to watch the beauty of the moonlight — to hold the branches still so that the light might slip between and weave its silver pattern on the moss below.

And, as they stood a moment to take it in, a step sounded behind them on the soft pine-needles, and the older man, still a little in the rear, turned with a start as though he had been suddenly called by name.

“There’s that girl — again!” he said, and his voice expressed a curious mingling of pleasure, surprise and — apprehension.

Into a patch of moonlight passed the figure of a young girl, looked at them as though about to stop yet thinking better of it, smiled softly, and moved on out of sight into the surrounding darkness. The moon just caught her eyes and teeth, so that they shone; the rest of her body stood in shadow; the effect was striking — almost as though head and shoulders hung alone in mid air, watching them with this shining smile, then fading away.

“Come on, for heaven’s sake,” the big man cried. There was impatience in his manner, not unkindness. The other lingered a moment, peering closely into the gloom where the girl had vanished. His friend repeated his injunction, and a moment later the two had emerged upon the high road with the village lights in sight beyond, and the forest left behind them like a vast mantle that held the night within its folds.

For some minutes neither of them spoke; then the big man waited for his friend to draw up alongside.

“About all this valley of the Jura,” he said presently, “there seems to me something — rather weird.” He shifted the knapsack vigorously on his back. It was a gesture of unconscious protest.

“Something uncanny,” he added, as he set a good pace.

“But extraordinarily beautiful—”

“It attracts you more than it does me, I think,” was the short reply.

“The picturesque superstitions still survive here,” observed the older man. “They touch the imagination in spite of oneself.”

A pause followed during which the other tried to increase the pace. The subject evidently made him impatient for some reason.

“Perhaps,” he said presently. “Though I think myself it’s due to the curious loneliness of the place. I mean, we’re in the middle of tourist-Europe here, yet so utterly remote. It’s such a neglected little corner of the world. The contradiction bewilders. Then, being so near the frontier, too, with the clock changing an hour a mile from the village, makes one think of time as unreal and imaginary.” He laughed. He produced several other reasons as well. His friend admitted their value, and agreed half-heartedly. He still turned occasionally to look back. The mountain ridge where they had climbed was clearly visible in the moonlight.

“Odd,” he said, “but I don’t see that farmhouse where we got the milk anywhere. It ought to be easily visible from here.”

“Hardly — in this light. It was a queer place rather, I thought,” he added. He did not deny the curiously suggestive atmosphere of the region, he merely wanted to find satisfactory explanations. “A case in point, I mean. I didn’t like it quite — that farmhouse — yet I’m hanged if I know why. It made me feel uncomfortable. That girl appeared so suddenly, although the place seemed deserted. And her silence was so odd. Why in the world couldn’t she answer a single question? I’m glad I didn’t take the milk. I spat it out. I’d like to know where she got it from, for there was no sign of a cow or a goat to be seen anywhere!”

“I swallowed mine — in spite of the taste,” said the other, half smiling at his companion’s sudden volubility.

Very abruptly, then, the big man turned and faced his friend. Was it merely an effect of the moonlight, or had his skin really turned pale beneath the sunburn?

“I say, old man,” he said, his face grave and serious, “What do you think she was? What made her seem like that, and why the devil do you think she followed us?”

“I think,” was the slow reply, “it was me she was following.”

The words, and particularly the tone of conviction in which they were spoken, clearly were displeasing to the big man, who already regretted having spoken so frankly what was in his mind. With a companion so imaginative, so impressionable, so nervous, it had been foolish and unwise. He led the way home at a pace that made the other arrive five minutes in his rear, panting, limping and perspiring as if he had been running.

“I’m rather for going on into Switzerland tomorrow, or the next day,” he ventured that night in the darkness of their two-bedded room. “I think we ye had enough of this place. Eh? What do you think?”

But there was no answer from the bed across the room, for its occupant was sound asleep and snoring.

“Dead tired, I suppose!” he muttered to himself, and then turned over to follow his friend’s example. But for a long time sleep refused him. Queer, unwelcome thoughts and feelings kept him awake — of a kind he rarely knew, and thoroughly disliked. It was rubbish, yet it made him uncomfortable so that his nerves tingled. He tossed about in the bed. “I’m overtired,” he persuaded himself, “that’s all.”

The strange feelings that kept him thus awake were not easy to analyse, perhaps, but their origin was beyond all question: they grouped themselves about the picture of that deserted,.tumble-down châlet on the mountain ridge where they had stopped for refreshment a few hours before. It was a farmhouse, dilapidated and dirty, and the name stood in big black letters against a blue background on the wall above the door: “La Chenille.” Yet not a living soul was to be seen anywhere about it; the doors were fastened, windows shuttered; chimneys smokeless; dirt, neglect and decay everywhere in evidence.

Then, suddenly, as they had turned to go, after much vain shouting and knocking at the door, a face appeared for an instant at a window, the shutter of which was half open. His friend saw it first, and called aloud. The face nodded in reply, and presently a young girl came round the corner of the house, apparently by a back door, and stood staring at them both from a little distance.

And from that very instant, so far as he could remember, these queer feelings had entered his heart — fear, distrust, misgiving. The thought of it now, as he lay in bed in the darkness, made his hair rise. There was something about that girl that struck cold into the soul. Yet she was a mere slip of a thing, very pretty, seductive even, with a certain serpent-like fascination about her eyes and movements; and although she only replied to their questions as to refreshment with a smile, uttering no single word, she managed to convey the impression that she was a managing little person who might make herself very disagreeable if she chose. In spite of her undeniable charm there was about her an atmosphere of something sinister. He himself did most of the questioning, but it was his older friend who had the benefit of her smile. Her eyes hardly ever left his face, and once she had slipped quite close to him and touched his arm.

The strange part of it now seemed to him that he could not remember in the least how she was dressed, or what was the colouring of her eyes and hair. It was almost as though he had felt, rather than seen, her presence.

The milk — she produced a jug and two wooden bowls after a brief disappearance round the corner of the house — was — well, it tasted so odd that he had been unable to swallow it, and had spat it out. His friend, on the other hand, savage with thirst, had drunk his bowl to the last drop too quickly to taste it even, and, while he drank, had kept his eyes fixed on those of the girl, who stood close in front of him.

And from that moment his friend had somehow changed. On the way down he said things that were unusual, talking chiefly about the “Chenille”, and the girl, and the delicious, delicate flavour of the milk, yet all phrased in such a way that it sounded singular, unfamiliar, unpleasant even.

Now that he tried to recall the sentences the actual words evaded him; but the memory of the uneasiness and apprehension they caused him to feel remained. And night ever italicizes such memories!

Then, to cap it all, the girl had followed them. It was wholly foolish and absurd to feel the things he did feel; yet there the feelings were, and what was the good of arguing? That girl frightened him; the change in his friend was in some way or other a danger signal. More than this he could not tell. An explanation might come later, but for the present his chief desire was to get away from the place and to get his friend away, too.

And on this thought sleep overtook him — heavily.

The windows were wide open; outside was a garden with a rather high enclosing wall, and at the far end a gate that was kept locked because it led into private fields and so, by a back way, to the cemetery and the little church. When it was open the guests of the inn made use of it and got lost in the network of fields and vines, for there was no proper route that way to the road or the mountains. They usually ended up prematurely in the cemetery, and got back to the village bypassing through the church, which was always open; or by knocking at the kitchen doors of the other houses and explaining their position. Hence the gate was locked now to save trouble.

After several hours of hot, unrefreshing sleep the big man turned in his bed and woke. He tried to stretch, but couldn’t; then sat up panting with a sense of suffocation. And by the faint starlight of the summer night, he saw next that his friend was up and moving about the room.

Remembering that sometimes he walked in his sleep, he called to him gently:

“Morton, old chap,” he said in a low voice, with a touch of authority in it, “go back to bed!

You’ve walked enough for one day!”

And the figure, obeying as sleep-walkers often will, passed across the room and disappeared among the shadows over his bed. The other plunged and burrowed himself into a comfortable position again for sleep, but the heat of the room, the shortness of the bed, and this tiresome interruption of his slumbers made it difficult to lose consciousness. He forced his eyes to keep shut, and his body to cease from fidgeting, but there was something nibbling at his mind like a spirit mouse that never permitted him to cross the frontier into actual oblivion. He slept with one eye open, as the saying is. Odours of hay and flowers and baked ground stole in through the open window; with them, too, came from time to time sounds — little sounds that disturbed him without being ever loud enough to claim definite attention.

Perhaps, after all, he did lose consciousness for a moment — when, suddenly, a thought came with a sharp rush into his mind and galvanized him once more into utter wakefulness. It amazed him that he had not grasped it before. It was this: the figure he had seen was not the figure of his friend.

Alarm gripped him at once before he could think or argue, and a cold perspiration broke out all over his body. He fumbled for matches, couldn’t find them; then, remembering there was electric light, he scraped the wall with his fingers — and turned on the little white switch. In the sudden glare that filled the room he saw instantly that his friend’s bed was no longer occupied. And his mind, then acting instinctively, without process of conscious reasoning, flew like a flash to their walk of the day — to the tumble-down. “Chenille,” the glass of milk, the odd behaviour of his friend, and — to the girl.

At the same second he noticed that the odour in the room which hitherto he had taken to be the composite odour of fields, flowers and night, was really something else: it was the odour of freshly turned earth. Immediately on the top of this discovery came another. Those slight sounds he had heard outside the window were not ordinary night-sounds, the murmur of wind and insects: they were footsteps moving softly, stealthily down the little paths of crushed granite.

He was dressed in wonderful short order, noticing as he did so that his friend’s night-garments lay upon the bed, and that he, too, had therefore dressed; further — that the door had been unlocked and stood half an inch ajar. There was now no question that he had slept again:

between the present and the moment when he had seen the figure there had been a considerable interval. A couple of minutes later he had made his way cautiously downstairs and was standing on the garden path in the moonlight. And as he stood there, his mind filled with the stories the proprietor had told a few days before of the superstitions that still lived in the popular imagination and haunted this little, remote pine-clad valley. The thought of that girl sickened him. The odour of newly-turned earth remained in his nostrils and made his gorge rise. Utterly and vigorously he rejected the monstrous fictions he had heard, yet for all that, could not prevent their touching his imagination as he stood there in the early hours of the morning, alone with night and silence. The spell was undeniable; only a mind without sensibility could have ignored it.

He searched the little garden from end to end. Empty! Opposite the high gate he stopped, peering through the iron bars, wet with dew to his hands. Far across the intervening fields he fancied something moved. A second later he was sure of it. Something down there to the right beyond the trees was astir. It was in the cemetery.

And this definite discovery sent a shudder of terror and disgust through him from head to foot.

He framed the name of his friend with his lips, yet the sound did not come forth. Some deeper instinct warned him to hold it back. Instead, after incredible efforts, he climbed that iron gate and dropped down into the soaking grass upon the other side. Then, taking advantage of all the cover he could find, he ran, swiftly and stealthily, towards the cemetery. On the way, without quite knowing why he did so, he picked up a heavy stick; and a moment later he stood beside the low wall that separated the fields from the churchyard — stood and stared.

There, beside the tombstones, with their hideous metal wreaths and crowns of faded flowers, he made out the figure of his friend; he was stooping, crouched down upon the ground; behind him rose a couple of bushy yew trees, against the dark of which his form was easily visible. He was not alone; in front of him, bending close over him it seemed, was another figure — a slight, shadowy, slim figure.

This time the big man found his voice and called aloud:

“Morton, Morton!” he cried. “What, in the name of heaven, are you doing? What’s the matter?”

And the instant his deep voice broke the stillness of the night with its clamour, the little figure, half hiding his friend, turned about and faced him. He saw a white face with shining eyes and teeth as the form rose; the moonlight painted it with its own strange pallor; it was weird, unreal, horrible; and across the mouth, downwards from the lips to the chin, ran a deep stain of crimson.

The next moment the figure slid with a queer, gliding motion towards the trees, and disappeared among the yews and tombstones in the direction of the church. The heavy stick, hurled whirling after it, fell harmlessly halfway, knocking a metal cross from its perch upon an upright grave; and the man who had thrown it raced full speed towards the huddled up figure of his friend, hardly noticing the thin, wailing cry that rose trembling through the night air from the vanished form. Nor did he notice more particularly that several of the graves, newly made, showed signs of recent disturbance, and that the odour of turned earth he had noticed in the room grew stronger. All his attention was concentrated upon the figure at his feet.

“Morton, man, get up! Wake for God’s sake! You’ve been walking in—”

Then the words died upon his lips. The unnatural attitude of his friend’s shoulders, and the way the head dropped back to show the neck, struck him like a blow in the face. There was no sign of movement. He lifted the body up and carried it, all limp and unresisting, by ways he never remembered afterwards, back to the inn.

It was all a dreadful nightmare — a nightmare that carried over its ghastly horror into waking life. He knew that the proprietor and his wife moved busily to and fro about the bed, and that in due course the village doctor was upon the scene, and that he was giving a muddled and feverish description of all he knew, telling how his friend was a confirmed sleep-walker and all the rest.

But he did not realize the truth until he saw the face of the doctor as he straightened up from the long examination.

“Will you wake him?” he heard himself asking, “or let him sleep it out till morning?” And the doctor’s expression, even before the reply came to confirm it, told him the truth. “Ah, monsieur, your friend will not ever wake again, I fear! It is the heart, you see; hélas, it is sudden failure of the heart!” The final scenes in the little tragedy which thus brought his holiday to so abrupt and terrible a close need no description, being in no way essential to this strange story. There were one or two curious details, however, that came to light afterwards. One was, that for some weeks before there had been signs of disturbance among newly-made graves in the cemetery, which the authorities had been trying to trace to the nightly wanderings of the village madman — in vain; and another, that the morning after the death a trail of blood had been found across the church floor, as though someone had passed through from the back entrance to the front. A special service was held that very week to cleanse the holy building from the evil of that stain; for the villagers, deep in their superstitions, declared that nothing human had left that trail; nothing could have made those marks but a vampire disturbed at midnight in its awful occupation among the dead.

Apart from such idle rumours, however, the bereaved carried with him to this day certain other remarkable details which cannot be so easily dismissed. For he had a brief conversation with the doctor, it appears, that impressed him profoundly. And the doctor, an intelligent man, prosaic as granite into the bargain, had questioned him rather closely as to the recent life and habits of his dead friend. The account of their climb to the “Chenille” he heard with an amazement he could not conceal.

“But no such chalet exists,” he said. “There is no ‘Chenille’. A long time ago, fifty years or more, there was such a place, but it was destroyed by the authorities on account of the evil reputation of the people who lived there. They burnt it. Nothing remains today but a few bits of broken wall and foundation.”

“Evil reputation—?”

The doctor shrugged his shoulders “Travellers, even peasants, disappeared,” he said. “An old woman lived there with her daughter, and poisoned milk was supposed to be used. But the neighbourhood accused them of worse than ordinary murder—”

“In what way?”

“Said the girl was a vampire,” answered the doctor shortly.

And, after a moment’s hesitation, he added, turning his face away as he spoke:

“It was a curious thing, though, that tiny hole in your friend’s throat, small as a pinprick, yet so deep. And the heart — did I tell you? — was almost completely drained of blood.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE STRANGE EXPERIENCE
OF THE
REV. PHILLIP AMBLESIDE

The amount of duty and pleasure combined in Alpine summer chaplaincies of a month each just suited the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He was still young enough to climb– carefully; and genuine enough to enjoy seeing the crowd of holiday-makers having a good time. As a rule he was on the Entertainment Committee that organised the tennis, dances, and gymkhanas. During the week one would hardly have guessed his calling. On Sundays he appeared, a bronzed, lean, vigorous figure, in the pulpit of the hot little wooden church, and people liked to see him. His sermons, never over ten minutes, were the same four every year: one for each Sunday of the month; and when he passed on to another month’s duty in the next place he repeated them. The surroundings suggested them obviously: Beauty, Rest, Power, Majesty; and they were more like little confidential talks than sermons. Moreover, incidents from the life of the place — the escape of a tourist, the accident to a guide, and what not, usually came ready to hand to point a moral. One summer, however, there occurred a singular adventure that he has never yet been able to introduce into a sermon. Only in private conversation with souls as full of faith as himself does he ever mention it. And the short recital always begins with a sentence more or less as follows:

“…Talking of the wondrous ways of God, and the little understanding of the children of men, I am always struck by the huge machinery He sometimes adopts to accomplish such delicate and apparently insignificant ends. I remember once when I was doing summer ‘duty.’ in a Swiss resort high up among the mountains of the Valais…”

And then follows the curious occurrence I was once privileged to hear, and have obtained permission to re-tell, duly disguised.

In the particular mountain village where he was taking a month’s duty at the time, his church was full every Sunday — so full indeed that twice a week he held afternoon services for those who cared to worship more quietly. And to these little ceremonies, beloved of his own heart, came two persons regularly who attracted his attention in spite of himself. They sat together at the back; shared the same books, although there was no necessity to do so; courted the shadowy corners of the pews: in a word, they came to worship one another, not to worship God.

But the clergyman took a broad view. Courtships fostered in the holy atmosphere of the sacred building were more likely to be true than those fanned to flame in the feverish surroundings of the dance-room. And true love is ever an offering to God. He knew the couple, too. The man, quiet, earnest, well over forty; the girl, young, dashing, spirited, leader in mischief, hard to believe sincere, flirting with more than one. In spite of the careful concealment with which she covered their proceedings, choosing the deserted afternoon service rather than the glare of the garden or ballroom for their talks, the couple were marked. The difference in their ages, characters, and appearance singled them out, as much as the general knowledge that she was rich, vain, flighty, while he was poor, strenuous, living a life of practical charity in London, that precluded gaiety or pleasure, so called.

“What can she see in that dull man twice her age P” the elder women said to one another — the answer generally being that it probably amused the girl to turn him so easily round her little finger. “What a chance for her fortune to be well spent!” reflected one or two. While the men, when they said anything at all, contented themselves with: “Pretty hard hit, isn’t he? A fine fellow, though Hope he gets her.”

It is always somewhat pathetic to see a man of real value fall before the conquering beauty of an ordinary young girl of the world. The clergyman, however, with an eye for spiritual values, even deeply hidden, divined, that beneath her lightness and love for conquest’s sake there lay the desire for something more real. And he guessed, though at first the wish may have been father to the thought only, that it was the elder man’s fine zeal and power that attracted the butterfly in spite of herself towards a life that was more worth living. Hers, after all, he felt, was a soul worth “saving”; and this middle-aged man, perhaps, was the force God brought into her life to provide her with the opportunity of escape — could she but seize it.

So far Ambleside’s story runs along ordinary lines enough. One sees his man and girl without further detail. From this point, however, it slips into a stride where the sense of proportion seems somehow lost, or else “man’s little understanding” is too close to the thing to obtain the proper perspective. If anyone but this devout and clear-headed clergyman told the tale, one might say “Fancy,” “Delusion,” or any other expression that seemed suitable. But to hear him tell it, with that air of conviction and truth, in those short, abrupt, even jerky sentences, that left so much to the imagination, and with that pallor of the skin that threw into such vivid contrast the fire burning in his far-seeing blue eyes — to sit close to him and hear the story grow in that tense low voice, was to know beyond all question that he spoke of something real and actual, in the same sense that a train or St. Paul’s Cathedral are real and actual.

What he saw, he really saw: though the sight may have been of a kind unfamiliar to the majority. He was used as a real pawn in a real game. The girl’s life and soul were rescued, so to speak, by the marriage brought about, and her forces of mind and spirit lifted bodily for what they were worth into the scheme that God had ordained for them from the beginning of the world. Only — the machinery brought to bear upon the end in view seemed so prodigious, so extraordinary, so unnecessary…. One thinks of the sentence with which Ambleside always began his tale. One wonders. But no one who heard the tale ever asked questions at its close. There was absolutely nothing to say.

Even to the smallest details the affair seemed thought out and planned, for that particular Tuesday Ambleside started without the guide-porter who usually carried his telescope, camera, and lunch. He went off at six a.m., with merely an ice-axe and a small knapsack containing food and Shetland vest, for the summit.

It was one of those days towards the end of August when some quality in the atmosphere — usually sign of approaching rain — brings the mountains uncannily close, yet, at the same time, sets out every detail of pinnacle, precipice, and ridge with a terror of size and grandeur that makes one realise their true and gigantic scale. They press up close, yet at the same time stand away in the depths of the sky like unattainable masses in some dream world. This mingling of proximity and distance has a confusing effect upon the eye. When Ambleside toiled up the zigzags without actually looking beyond, he felt that the towering massif of the Valais Alps all about him loomed very close; but when he stopped for breath and raised his eyes steadily into their detail, he felt that their distance was too great to be conquered by any little two-legged being like himself merely taking steps. And as he rose out of the valley into the clearer strata of air this effect increased. The whole scale of the chain of Alps about him seemed raised to an immeasurably higher power than he had ever known. He felt like an insect crawling over the craters of the moon. The prodigious, giant splendours of the scenery all round oppressed him more than ever before with his own futile littleness, and at the same time made him conscious of the grandeur of his soul before the God who had set him and his kind above all this chaos of tumbled planet.

He thought of the mountains as part of the “garment of God,” and of nature as expressing some portion of the Deity that was not intended to be expressed by man — all part of His purpose, alive with His informing will. This glory of the inanimate Alps linked on to some stranger glory in himself that interpreted for him, as in a mystical revelation, God’s thundering message and purpose as known in the great forms and moods of nature. Closely in touch with the spirit of the mountains he was; glad to be alone.

This, in a sentence, expresses his mood: that the mountains accepted him. Forces in his deepest being that were akin to the life of the planet on which he made his tiny track rose up and triumphed. Over the treacherous Pas d’Iliez, where he usually felt giddy and unsafe, he felt this morning only exhilaration. The gulf yawning at his feet touched him with its splendour, not its terror.

Thus, feeling inclined to shout and run, he eventually reached the desolate valley of rock and shale that lies, unrelieved by a single blade of grass, between the glacier-covered slopes that shut it in impassably on three sides. The bed of this valley lies some 7,000 feet above the sea. The peaks and ridges that rear about it reach 12,000 feet. Here, being a good climber, he rested for the first time at the end of two hours’ steady ascent. The air nipped. The loneliness and desolation were very impressive. Beyond him hung the glaciers like immense thick blankets of blue-white upon the steep slopes, dropping from time to time lumps of ice into the shale-strewn valley below. For the sun shining in a cloudless sky was fierce. The clergyman, before attacking the long snowfield that began at his very feet, took out his blue spectacles and disentangled the cord. He ate some chocolate, and took the dried prunes from his knapsack, knowing that thirst would soon be upon him, and that ice-water was not for drinking.

“What a mite I am, to be sure, amid all this appalling wilderness!” he exclaimed; “and how splendid to be able to hold my own!”

And then it was, just as he stood up to arrange the glasses on his forehead, ready to pull down at a moment’s notice, that he became aware of something that was strange — unaccustomed. Through the giant splendours of the scorching August day, across all this stupendous scenery of desolation and loneliness, something fine as a needle, delicate as a hair, had begun picking at his mind. The idea came to him that he was no longer alone. Like a man who hears his name called out of darkness he turned instinctively to find the speaker; almost as though someone had been speaking to him for a considerable time, and he had only just had his attention drawn to it. He looked keenly up and down the immense, deserted valley.

In every direction, however, he saw nothing but miles of rock, dazzling snowfields, dark precipices, and endless peaks cutting the blue sky overhead with teeth that gleamed like burnished steel. It was desolation everywhere. The gentle wind that fanned his cheek made no sound against the stones. There was neither tree nor grass for it to rustle through. No bird’s wing whirred the air; and the far-off falling of a hundred cascades was of too regular and monotonous a character to have taken on the quality of a voice or the rhythm of uttered words. He examined, so far as he could, the enormous sides of mountain about him, and the great soaring ridges. It was just possible some climber in distress had spied him out, and shouted down upon him from the heights. But he searched in vain. There was no moving human figure. The sound, if sound it had been, was not repeated; only he was no longer alone, as before. That, at least, was certain…. He nibbled more chocolate, put a couple of sour prunes into his mouth to suck, arranged the blue snow-glass over his eyes, and started on again for a steady pull up to the next ridge.

And as he rose the scale of the surrounding mountains rose appallingly with him. The true distance of the peaks proclaimed itself; the tremendous reaches that from below appeared telescoped up into a little space opened up and stretched themselves. The hour grew into two. It was considerably after twelve before he reached the arête where he had promised himself lunch. And all the way, without ceasing, the idea that he was being accompanied remained insistent in his mind. It troubled and perplexed him. Perhaps it frightened him a little, too. More than once it came close enough to make him pause and consider whether he should continue or turn back.

For the curious part of it was that this idea exercised a direct and deliberate effect upon him. By a hundred little details that seemed to be spontaneous until he examined them, it kept suggesting somehow that he should change his route. Something in his consciousness grew that had not been there before. He thought of a bird bringing tiny morsels of grass and twig until a nest formed. In this way the steady stream of thoughts from somewhere outside himself came nesting in his brain until at length they acquired the consistency of an impression, next of a distinct desire, lastly, the momentum of a definite intention. They acted upon his volition, stirring softly among the roots of his will. Before he realised how it had quite come about he had changed his mind.

“Instead of going on to the top, as I intended,” he said to himself, as he sat on the dizzy ledge munching hard-boiled eggs and sugar sandwiches, “I shall strike off to the left and find my way back into the valley again. That, I think, would be — nicer!”

He had no real reason; he invented none.

And the moment he said it there was a sense of pressure removed, a consciousness of relief, the knowledge, in a word, that he was following a route that it was desired he should follow.

To a man, of course, whose habit it was to seek often the will of a personal Deity he worshipped, there was nothing very out-of-the-way in all this, although he never remembered to have felt any guidance so distinctly and forcibly indicated before. The feeling that he was being “guided” now became a certainty, and in order to follow instructions as well as possible he made his will of no account and opened himself to receive the slightest token this other Directing Agency might care to vouchsafe.

After lunch, therefore, he struck out a diagonal course across a steep snow-slope that would eventually bring him down again to the valley a little nearer its head. And before he had gone a hundred yards he ran into the track of another climber. The marks were a couple of days old, perhaps, for in their hollows lay little heaps of fine snow-dust, freshly blown. Judging by the size there had been two men. He noted the trace of the ice-axe and the occasional streak of the trailing rope. The men had made straight for the valley far below. Here and there they had glissaded. Here and there, too, they had also tumbled gloriously, for the snow was tossed about by their floundering. Yet there was no danger; no precipices intervened; the snow sloped without a break right down into the shale below.

“I’ll follow their example,” said the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He strapped on the extra leather seat he carried for sliding and sat down. A moment later he was rushing at high speed over the hard surface. There were hollows of softer snow, however, which stopped him from time to time, drifts as it were into which he plunged, and from which he emerged, wet and shivering. Then he stood up and leaned on his axe, trying to glissade on his feet. For this, however, the surface was not smooth enough. The result was, he tumbled, rolled, slid, sat down, and took immense gliding strides. It was very exhilarating. He revelled in it.

But all the while he kept his eyes sharply about him, for in his heart he felt that he was obeying that guiding Influence so strongly impressed upon him — the Power that had persuaded him to change his route, and was now leading him to some particular point with some particular purpose. Now, too, for the first time a vague sense of calamity touched him. Once introduced, it grew. Soon it amounted to a positive foreboding, a presentiment of disaster almost. He could not avoid the idea that he was being led by supernatural means to the scene of some catastrophe where he was to prove of use — a rescue, an arrival in the nick of time to save someone. He actually looked about him already for — yes, for the body. And through his sub conscious mind, with the force of habit, ran the magnificent use he could make of it all in a future sermon.

Yet nothing came. The tracks of the other men stretched clear and unbroken into the valley of rocks below. He traced the wavering thin line the whole way down.

“It’s nothing to do with these men, at any rate,” he said to himself, as he sat down for the final slide that should take him to the bottom of the slope. “No accident could possibly have happened here. The snow’s too soft, and there are no rocks to fall over or…”

The sentence, or the thought, whichever it was, remained unfinished, for the mouth of the Rev. Phillip was stopped temporarily with wet snow as he lost his balance and rushed sideways with an undignified plunge into a drifted hollow. His eyes were blinded, his feet twisted, the skin of his back drenched and icy. He rose spluttering and gasping. Luckily his axe had a leather loop, or he would have lost it; as it was, his slouch hat was already a hundred feet below, sliding and turning like a top on its way to the bottom, followed by the snow-goggles.

And in the act of brushing himself free of snow, the truth came to him. It was as though a hand had struck him on the back and pointed — as though a voice had uttered the five words: “This is the place. Look!”

Swiftly, searchingly, keenly he looked, and saw — nothing; nothing, at least, that explained the impression of disaster that had possessed him. There was no body certainly, nor any sign of an accident; no place, indeed, where an accident could possibly have come about. He dug quickly in the loose snow with his axe, but the snow was barely two feet deep in this particular hollow, and all round it was a hard surface of smoothly and tightly packed stuff that was almost ice. Nothing bigger than a cat could have lain buried there!

“This is the place! Look well!” the words seemed to ring in his ears.

Yet the more he looked and saw nothing, the more strongly beat this message upon his brain. This was the place where he was to come, where he was to fulfill some purpose, to find something, do something, accomplish the end intended by the Will that had so carefully guided him all day. The feeling was positive; not to be denied. It was, at the same time, distressingly vast — mighty.

Fixing himself securely against his axe, he stood and stared. The sun beat back into his face from the glittering snow on all sides. Tremendous black precipices towered not far behind him; to his left rolled the frozen mass of the huge glacier, its pinnacles of tottering ice catching the afternoon sun; to his right stretched into bewildering distance the interminable and desolate reaches of shale and moraine till the eye rested upon summits of a dozen peaks that literally swam in the sky where white clouds streamed westwards. There was no sound but falling water, no sign of humanity except the single track of those other climbers, no indication of any disturbance upon the vast face of nature that spread all about him, immense, still, terrific.

Then, piercing the monotony of the falling water, a faint sound of fluttering, heard for the first time, reached his ear. He turned as at the sound of a pistol shot in the direction whence it came — but again saw nothing. The sound ceased. From the slope below came a breath of icy wind that made him shiver, and with it, he fancied, came the faint hissing noise of his sliding hat and spectacles. This, perhaps, was the sound he had heard as “fluttering.”

At length, after prolonged and vain searching, the clergyman decided there was nothing for him to do but continue his journey, for the sun was getting low, and he had a long way to go before darkness could be regarded with equanimity. He felt exhausted, wearied, impatient too if the truth were told, yet ashamed of his impatience.

“If this is all real,” he argued under his breath, “why isn’t it made clear what I’m to do?”

And immediately upon the heels of the thought came again that faint and curious sound of something fluttering.

Now, there can be no question that he understood perfectly well that this sound of fluttering had a direct connection with the whole purpose of the day — that it was the clue to his presence in this particular spot, and that he had been forced to halt here by means of his fall in order that he might investigate something or other on this very spot. He knew it; he felt it. But he was too impatient, too cold, too weary to spend any further time over it all. Alarm, too, was plucking uneasily at his reins.

So this time he affected to ignore the sound. Leaning back on his axe he threw his body into position for sliding down to the bottom of the slope. In another second he would have started — when something that froze him into the immobility of a terror worse than death arrested him with a Power beyond anything he had ever known before in his life — a Power that seemed to carry behind it the pressure of the entire universe.

There, close beside him in this mountain wilderness, had risen up suddenly a Face — close as the handle of the ice axe he so tightly grasped, yet at the same time so far away, so immense, so stupendous in scale that he has never understood to this day how it was he could have perceived that it was — a Face. Yet a face it undoubtedly was, a living face; and its eyes — its regard, at any rate, for eyes he divined rather than saw — were focussed upon some object that lay at his very feet.

Clammy with fear, his heart thumping dreadfully, he dropped back upon the snow. Without looking at any particular detail he became aware that the entire world of giant scenery about him was involved in the building up of this appalling Countenance, whose gaze was directed upon a tiny point immediately before him — the point, he now perceived, whence proceeded that familiar little sound of fluttering.

Words obviously fail him when he attempts to describe the terror of this Visage that rose about him through the day. Pallid and immense, it seemed to sketch itself against the wastes of grey rock, with entire slopes of snow upon the cheeks, ridged and furrowed by precipice and cliff, with torn clouds of flying hair that streaked the blue, and the expanse of glaciers for the splendid brows. Across it the dark line of two moraines tilted for eyebrows, and the massive columns of compressed strata embedded in the whole structure of the mountain chain bulged for the muscles of the awful neck…. Moreover, the shoulders upon which it all rested — the vast framework of body that he divined below — the dizzy drop in space where such fearful limbs must seek their resting place

His mind went reeling. The titanic proportions of this Countenance of splendour threatened in some horrible way to overwhelm his life. Its calmness, its immobility, its remorseless fixity of mien petrified him. The thought that he had dared to question it, to put himself in opposition to its purpose, even to be impatient with it — this turned all his soul within him soft and dead with a kind of ultimate terror that bereft him of any clear memory, perhaps momentarily, too, of consciousness.

The clergyman thinks he fainted. Exactly what happened, probably, he never knew or realised. All that he can say in attempting to describe it is that he found his own eyes caught up and carried away in the gigantic stream of vision that this Face of Mountains poured upon the ground — caught up and directed upon a tiny little white object that fluttered in the wind at his very feet.

He saw what the Face was looking at and wished him to look at. It made him see what it saw.

For there, in front of him, unnoticed hitherto, lay a scrap of paper half em bedded in the snow. Automatically he stooped and picked it up. It was an envelope bearing the printed inscription of an hotel in the village. It was sealed. On the outside, in a fine handwriting, he read the Christian name of a man. Opening the corner he saw inside a small lock of dark-coloured hair. This was all…!

And it was just at this moment that the snow where his feet rested gave way, and he started off at full speed to slide to the bottom of the slope, where he only just stopped himself in time to prevent shooting with a violent collision into a mass of shale and loose stones.

In less than thirty seconds it had all happened … and the swift descent and tumble had shaken him back as it were into a normal state of mind. But the oppression that had burdened him all day was gone. The mountains looked as usual. An indescribable sense of relief came over him. He felt a free agent once more — no longer guided, pushed, directed. He had fulfilled the purpose.

Putting the little envelope in his inside pocket, he picked up his slouch hat and snow-goggles, ate some chocolate and dried prunes, and started off at a brisk pace for his return journey of three hours to the village and — dinner. And the whole way home the grandeur of that Face, with its splendid pallor and its expression of majesty, haunted him with indescribable sensations. With it, however, all the time ran the accompanying thought: “What a tremendous business for so small a result! All that vast manoeuvring, all that terror of the imagination, and all that complex pressure upon my insignificant spirit merely in the end to find a wisp of girl’s hair in an envelope evidently fallen from the pocket of some careless climber!”

The more the Rev. Phillip Ambleside thought about it, the more bewildered he felt. He was uncommonly glad, how ever, to get in before dark. The memory of that Mountain Countenance was no agreeable companion for the forest paths and lonely slopes through which his way led in the dusk.

That same night it so happened, before he was able to take any steps to trace the owner of the little envelope, there was a Bal de Têtes at the principal hotel. Although the clergyman was on the Entertainment Committee which organised the simple gaieties of the place, he held that honorary position only as a personal compliment to himself; he did not as a rule take an active part in the details, nor did he as a general rule attend the balls.

This particular night, however, he strolled down to the hotel, and after a little conversation with one or two friends in the hall he made his way to a secluded corner of the glass gallery where the dancers sat out between times, and lit his pipe for a quiet smoke. From behind the shelter of a large sham palm, he was able to see all he wanted of the ballroom, to hear the music, and to take in the pleasant sight of all the people enjoying themselves. And the sight did him good. He liked to see it. A number were in costume, which added to the picturesqueness of the scene. Perhaps he sat more in the shadows than he knew, or perhaps the dancers who came to “sit out” near him in the gallery did not realise how their voices carried. Several couples, as the evening advanced, came so close to him that, had he wished, he could have overheard easily every word they uttered. He did not wish, however. His mind was busy with thoughts of its own. That haunting scene of desolation in the mountains obsessed him still ; and about ten o’clock, his pipe being finished, he was on the point of getting up to leave, when two dancers came and sat down immediately behind him and began to talk in such very distinct tones that it was impossible to avoid hearing every single word they uttered.

The clergyman pushed his chair aside to make room to go, when, in doing so, he threw a passing glance at the couple — and instantly recognised them. The girl, a Carmen, and a very becoming Carmen, was the one who frequented his afternoon services, and the man, who wore simple evening dress and was not in costume at all, was the middle-aged Englishman who had been at her heels like a slave all the summer. They were absorbed in one another, and evidently unaware of his presence.

To say that he hesitated would not be true. Some force beyond himself simply took him by the shoulders, and pushed him back into the chair. Against his own will — for Mr. Ambleside was no eavesdropper — he remained there deliberately to listen.

In telling the story he tells it just like this, making no excuses for conduct that was certainly dishonourable. He declares he could not help himself; the instinct was too imperious to be disobeyed. Again, as in the afternoon, he understood that he was merely being used as a pawn in the game, a game of great importance to some intelligence that saw through to the distant end.

The man was quiet, but tremendously in earnest, with the kind of steady manner that no woman likes unless she finds it in her to respond with a similar sincerity. Under the bronze his skin showed pale a little. He began to speak the instant they sat down; and in his voice was passion.

“I want you, and I want your money, and I want your life and soul — everything,” he said, evidently continuing a conversation; “your youth and energy, your talents, your will, all that is you and yours — all.”

His voice was pitched very low, yet without tremor. He was playing the whole stake, as a strong man of middle age plays it when he is utterly in earnest. “For my scheme, for our scheme, for God’s scheme I want you; and no one else but you will do. I want you to awake, and change your life, and be your true, fine self. We can make a success, you and I, a success for ourselves and for others. I shall never give you up until — until you give yourself to the world, or” — his voice dropped very low — “to another.”

The clergyman waited breathlessly for the answer. The man’s words vibrated with such suppressed fire that only a serious reply could be forthcoming. But for a space Carmen merely toyed with her fan, the little red spangled fan that swung from a single finger. Behind the black domino her eyes sparkled, but the expression of her face was hidden.

“The difference in age is nothing,” he continued almost sternly. “For me, you are the woman, and for you I will prove that I am the man. I see clean through to the great soul hidden in you. I can bring it out. I can make you real — a soul of value in the big order of God’s purposes. What can these boys ever be, or do, for you? I’ve got a big, useful, practical scheme that can use you, just as it can use me. And my great unselfish love has picked you out of the whole world as the one woman necessary. Will you come to me?”

Still the girl was silent. She tapped him on the knee two or three times, would-be playfully, with the tip of her fan. Her head was bent down a little.

“And I’m strong,” he went on earnestly; “I’m a man. The power in me recognises and calls to the power in you. Let me hold you and mould you, and let us take the fine, high life together. Drop this life of child’s play you’ve been leading. Come to me; my arms are hungry for you ! But I want you for a higher purpose than my own happiness — though I swear I can make you happy as no woman in this world has ever be fore been happy. And without you,” he added more softly, after a slight pause, “this splendid scheme of mine, of ours, can come to nothing. For I cannot do it alone — and there is only one You in the world. Answer me, Mary. It was tonight, remember, you promised. I leave tomorrow, and London days lie far ahead. Give me your answer to go back with.”

It was a curious way to make love. The reverend gentleman thought he had never heard anything quite like it. An ordinary frivolous girl, of course, would have been impatient long ago. But the fine passion of the man broke everywhere through his rather lame words, and set something in the air about them aflame. The violins sounded thin and trashy compared to the rhythm of this earnest voice; all the glitter of the ballroom seemed cheap — the costume of Carmen absurdly incongruous. Mr. Ambleside slipped back somehow into the key of the afternoon when Cosmic Powers had held direct communion with his soul. He understood that he was meant to listen. Something big was in progress, something important in a high sense. He did listen — to every word. It was Carmen speaking now; but her voice marred the picture. It was thin, trifling, even affected.

“It’s very flattering,” she simpered, “but — don’t you see — it means the end of all my fun and enjoyment in life. You’re so fearfully in earnest. You’d exhaust me in the first week!” She cocked her pretty head on one side, holding the fan against her cheek. Something, nevertheless, belied the lightness of her words, the listener felt.

“But I’ll teach you a different kind of happiness,” replied the man eagerly, “so that you’ll never again want this passing excitement, this ‘unrest which men miscall delight.’ Give me your answer — now. I see it in your eyes. Let me go away tomorrow with this great new happiness in my heart.” He leaned forward. “Tell me now, Mary. Let your real self speak out once for all!” He took her fan away and she made no resistance. She clapped her hands in her lap, still looking at him mischievously through her mask.

“Let’s wait till we meet later in town,” she sighed at length prettily, coaxingly. “I shall be able to enjoy myself here then for the rest of the summer first — I feel so young for such a programme.” . But the man cut her short. “Now,” he said, holding her steadily with his eyes. “You said that to me a year ago, remember. I have waited ever since. It is your youth I want.”

The girl played with him for another ten minutes, while the clergyman listened, wondering greatly at the other’s patience. Clearly, she delighted to feel his great love beating up against the citadel she meant in the end to yield. The lighter side of her was vastly interested and amused by it; but all the time the deeper part was ready with its answer. It was only that the “child” in her wanted to enjoy itself a little longer before it capitulated forever to the strength that should take her captive, and lead her by sharp ways of sacrifice to the high rôle she was meant to fill.

It would all have vexed and wearied Mr. Ambleside exceedingly, but for this singular feeling that it was part of some much larger scheme of which he might never know the whole perhaps, but in which he was playing his little part with a secret thrill. Through the tawdry glitter of that scented ballroom he saw again that terrible white-lipped Face, and felt the measure of this great purpose rolling past him — immense, remorseless — which, for all its splendour, could include even so small a thing as this vain and silly girl. The tide of it rose about him with a flood of power. He glanced at the small black domino of the Carmen opposite him … he saw the little flashing eyes, the pert lips and mouth — thinking with something like a shudder of that other Countenance in the hollow of whose eyes hid tempests, yet which could look down upon a tiny fluttering paper, because that paper was an item of importance in its great scheme of which both beginning and end were nevertheless veiled….

His thoughts must have wandered for a time. The conversation, at any rate, had meanwhile taken a singular turn. The girl was on her feet, the man facing her.

“Then what is this test of yours?” he was saying, half serious, half laughing — “this test which you say will prove how much I care?”

The girl put back between her lips the small red rose that was part of the Carmen costume. Either it was that the stalk made her lisp a little, or else that a sudden rush of the violins in the waltz drowned her words. The Reverend Phillip, standing there trembling — he never quite understood why he should have awaited her answer so nervously — only caught the second half of her phrase.

“… that I gave you in this very room six weeks ago, and that you promised to carry about with you always?” he heard the end of her sentence, in a voice that for the first time that evening was serious; “because, if you’ve kept your word in a small thing like that I can trust you to keep it in bigger things. It was a part of myself, you know, that little bit of hair!” She laughed deliciously in his face, raising herself on tiptoe with her hands behind her back. “You said so yourself, didn’t you? You promised it should never, never leave you.”

The man made a curiously sudden gesture as though a pain beyond his control passed through him. His hands were on the back of a chair. The chair squeaked audibly along the polished floor beneath a violent momentary pressure. He looked straight into his companion’s eyes, but made no immediate reply.

Carmen’s gaze behind the black mask became hard. With a truly feminine idiocy she was obviously playing this whim as a serious move in the game.

“For if you have lost that,” she continued, her face flushing beneath the paint, “how can you expect to keep the rest of me, the important part of me?” She spoke as though she believed that he, too, was half-playing — that the next minute he would put his hand into his pocket and produce it. His delay, his awkwardness, above all his silence, angered her. For the surface of her self-contradictory character was obviously — minx.

After a pause that seemed interminable the man spoke, and for the first time his deep voice shook a little.

“This time tomorrow night you shall have it,” he said

“But you’re leaving, you said, in the morning!” The tone was piqued and shrill.

“I shall stay another day — on purpose.” A pause followed.

“Then you really have lost it — envelope and all — with your name in my writing on the outside, and my hair for all to recognise who find it — and to sneer.”

Her eyes flashed as she said it. The girl was disappointed, incensed, furious. It was all silly enough, of course, and utterly out of proportion. But how silly and childish real life is apt to be at such moments, only those who have reached middle age and have observed closely can know. At the time, to the clergyman who stood there listening and observing, it seemed genuinely poignant, even tragic.

“Until the day before yesterday it had never left me for a single instant,” he said at length. “I was in the mountains — glissading with your brother. It fell out of my pocket with a lot of other papers. I lost it on the upper snow slopes of the Dents Blanches—”

The rest of his words were drowned by an inrush of people, for the band was beginning a two-step and couples were sorting themselves and seeking their partners. A Frenchman, dressed as Napoleon, came up to claim his dance. Carmen was swept away. Scornfully, angrily, with concentrated resentment in her voice and manner, she turned upon her heel, and from the lips that bit the stalk of the small red rose came the significant words:

“And with it you have also lost — me!”

She was gone. Perhaps the Reverend Phillip Ambleside only imagined the tears in her voice. He never knew, and had no time to think, for he found himself looking straight into the eyes of the lover, thus absurdly rejected, and who now became aware of his close presence for the first time. Even then the absurdity of the whole situation did not wholly reveal itself. It came later with reflection At the moment he felt that it was all like a vivid and singular dream in which the values and proportions were oddly exaggerated, yet in which the sense of tragedy was distressingly real. His heart went out to the faithful and patient man who was being so trifled with, yet who might be in danger of losing by virtue of his very simplicity what was to be of real value in his life — and scheme.

“It’s my move now,” was the thought in his mind as he took a step forward. The other, embarrassed and annoyed to discover that the whole scene had probably been overheard, made an awkward movement to withdraw, but before he could do so, the clergyman approached him. Only one step was necessary. He moved up from behind a palm, and drawing his hand from an inner pocket, he handed across to him a white envelope bearing the printed name of the hotel and a neat inscription in feminine writing just below it.

“I found this on the snow slopes of the Dents Blanches this afternoon,” he said courteously. The other stared him steadily in the face — his colour coming and going quickly. “Take it to her and say that after all it was you — you, who were applying the test — that you wished to see if for so small a thing she was ready to reject so true a love. And, pray, pardon this interference which — er — chance has placed in my power. The matter, I need hardly say, is entirely between yourself and me.”

The man took the paper awkwardly, a soft smile of gratitude and comprehension dawning in his eyes. He began to stammer a few words, but the clergyman did not stay to listen. He bowed politely and left him.

He went out of the hotel into the night, and a wind from the surrounding snow slopes brushed his face with its touch of great spaces. He looked up and saw the crowding stars, brilliant as in winter. The mountains in this faint light seemed incredibly close. Slowly he walked up the little village street to his rooms in the châlet by the church.

And suddenly the true proportion of normal things in this little life returned to him, and with it a sharp realisation of the triviality of the scene he had been forced to witness — and of the horrible grandeur of the means by which he had been dragged, by the scruff of his priestly neck as it were, so awkwardly into the middle of it all: merely to provide a scrap of evidence the loss of which threatened to bring about a foolish estrangement, and might conceivably have prevented a marriage of apparently insignificant importance.

He felt as though the machinery of the entire solar system had been employed to help a pair of ants carry a pine needle too heavy for them to the top of the nest.

And then a moment’s reflection brought to him another thought. For who could say what the result of this marriage might be? Who could say that from just the exact combination of those two forces — the earnest man, and the lighter girl — a son might not be born who should shake the world and lead some cherished purpose of Deity to completion? For, truly, of the threads which weave into the pattern of life and out again, men see but the tiny section immediately beneath their eyes. The majority focus their gaze upon some detail — thus losing the view of the whole. The beginning and the end are forever hidden; and what appears insignificant and out of proportion when caught alone at close quarters, may reveal all the splendour of the Eternal Purpose when surveyed with the proper perspective — of the Infinite. The Reverend Phillip Ambleside felt as if for a moment he had been lifted to a height whence he had caught perhaps a glimpse of these larger horizons.

With his faith vastly strengthened, but his nerves considerably shaken, the clergy man went to bed and slept the sleep of a just man who has done his duty by chance as it were. He had helped forward a purpose of which he really understood nothing, but which, he somehow felt, was bigger than anything with which he had so far been connected in his life. Some day — his faith whispered it next morning while he was preparing his sermon — he would see the matter in the proper perspective, and would understand.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

NIGHT WIND

There were certain things that Uncle Henry, as a writer of “historical novels,” had to explain, or else admit himself a disgraceful failure. For he sometimes read fancy bits aloud to the children, using the latter as a standard. These fancy bits were generally scenes of action: Escape; a Duke landing by night and dressed as a woman to avoid discovery; a dark man stealing “storical” documents from a tapestried chamber in a frightful castle where bats and cobwebs shared the draughty corridors. These and the like he read aloud, judging their success by the reception accorded to them. “Thank you very much, Uncle,” meant failure; the imagination was left untouched. But questions were an indication of success; the scene was alive and real; the audience wanted more details, For he knew that it was the “child” in his readers that enjoyed such scenes, and if Jinny and Jimbo felt no interest, neither would Mr. and Mrs. William Smith of Peckham. To squeeze a question out of Maria, the youngest, however, raised hopes of at least a Second Edition!

These night-scenes, of course, were always windy; sometimes they were stormy. Either the wind rose at an unexpected and unwelcome moment, or else it dropped just when the cover of its roar was needed by the villain; at other times it merely misbehaved itself generally, as night-winds do. But as a rule it wailed, moaned, whistled, whispered, cried, sang, sighed, sobbed or — soughed. Keyholes and chimneys were its favourite places, and sometimes the rafters knew it, too. Thus, to the children, it became a known, expected thing with tastes and habits of its own. They looked for “Mr. Night-Wind,” and recognised it when it came. “A night-wind story, please,” was a classical form of attack between tea and bedtime. It had a personality and led a mysterious existence. It had qualities, privileges, prerogatives. It acquired a definite locus standi in the mythology of the country house. Owing to its various means of vocal expression — singing, moaning, and the rest — a face belonged to it with lips and mouth; teeth, too, since it whistled. It ran about the world, and so had feet; it flew, so wings pertained to it: it blew, and that meant cheeks of sorts. It was a large, swift, shadowy being whose ways were not the ordinary ways of daylight. It struck blows. It had gigantic hands. Moreover, it came out only after dark — an ominous and suspicious characteristic rather.

“Why isn’t there a day-wind too?” enquired Jinny, thoughtfully.

“There is, but it’s quite a different thing,” Uncle Henry explained, calmly. “You might as well ask why midday and midnight aren’t the same because they both come at twelve o’clock. They’re simply different things, you see.”

“Of course,” Jimbo helped him unexpectedly; “and a man can’t be a woman, can it?”

Mr. Night-Wind’s nature, accordingly, remained a mystery rather, and its sex, in spite of the deceptive “Mr.,” was also undetermined. Whether it saw with eyes, or just felt its way about like a blind thing, wandering, was another secret matter undetermined. Each child visualised it differently. Its hiding-place in the daytime was equally unknown. Owls, bats and burglars guessed its habits best, and that it came out of a hole in the sky was, perhaps, the only detail all unanimously agreed upon. It was a pathetic being, rather.

This Night-Wind used to come crying round the bedroom windows Sometimes, and the children liked it, although they did not understand all its melancholy beauty. They heard the different voices in it, although they did not catch the meaning of the words it sang. They heard its footsteps, too. Its way of moving awed them. Moreover, it was forever trying to get in.

“It’s wings,” said Jinny, “big, dark wings, very soft and feathery.”

“It’s a woman with sad black eyes,” thought Jimbo. “That’s how I like it.”

“It’s someone,” declared Maria, who was asleep before it came, so rarely heard it at all. And they turned to Uncle Henry, who knew all that sort of thing, or, at any rate, could describe it. He found the words. They lay hidden in his thick back hair apparently — there was none on the top — for he always scratched his head a good deal when they asked him questions about such difficult matters. “What is it really — the Mr. Night-Wind,” they asked gravely; “and why does it sound so very different from the wind in the morning or the afternoon ?”

“There is a difference,” he replied carefully, realising it for the first time now that they asked. “It’s a quick, dark, rushing thing, and it moves like — like anything.”

“We know that,” they told him contemptuously, yet with considerate patience.

“And it has long hair,” he added hurriedly, looking into Jimbo’s staring eyes. “That’s what makes it swish. The swishing, rushing, hushing sound it makes — that’s its hair against the walls and tiles, you see.”

“It is a woman, then,” said Jimbo, proudly.

All looked up, wondering. An extraordinary thing was in the air. A mystery that had puzzled them for ages was about to be explained. They drew closer round the sofa, and Maria blundered against the table, knocking some books off with a resounding noise.

“Hush! Hush!” said Uncle Henry, holding up a finger and glancing over his shoulder into the darkened room. “It may be coming now… Listen!”

“Yes; but it is a woman, isn’t it?” insisted Jimbo in a hurried whisper. He had to justify himself before his sisters. Uncle Henry must see to that first.

The big man opened his eyes very wide. He shuddered. “It’s a — Thing,” was the answer, given in a whisper that increased the excitement of anticipation. “It certainly is a — Thing! Now hush! Listen! It’s coming!”

They listened then intently. And a sound was heard. Out of the starry summer night it came, quite Softly, and from very far away — upon discovery bent, upon adventure. Reconnoitering, as from deep ambush in the shrubberies where the blackbirds hid and whistled, it flew down against the house, stared in at the nursery windows, fluttered up and down the glass with a marvellous, sweet humming — and was gone again.

“Listen!” the man’s voice whispered: “it will come back presently. It saw us. It’s awfully shy—”

“Why is it awfully shy:” asked Jinny in an undertone.

“Because people make it mean so much more than it means to mean,” he replied, darkly. “It never gets a chance to be just itself and play its own lonely game—”

“We’ve called it things too,” objected Maria.

“But we haven’t written books about it and put it into poetry,” Uncle Henry corrected her with an audacity that silenced them. “We play our game; it plays its.”

“It plays its,” repeated Jimbo, amused by the sound of the words.

“And that’s why it’s shy,” the man held them to the main point, “and dislikes showing itself—”

“But why is its game lonely?” someone asked, and there was a general feeling that Uncle Henry had been caught this time without an answer. For what explanation could there possibly be of that? Their faces were half triumphant, half disappointed already.

He smiled quietly. He knew everything — everything in the world. “It’s unhappy as well as shy,” he sighed, “because nothing will play with it. Everything is asleep at night. It comes out just when other things go in. Trees answer it, but they answer in their sleep. Birds, tucked away in nests and hiding-places, don’t even answer at all. The butterflies are gone, the insects lost. Leaves and twigs don’t care about being blown when there’s no one there to see them. They hide too. If there are clouds, they’re dark and sulky, keeping their jolly sides towards the stars and moon. Nothing will play with Mr. Night-Wind. So it either plays with the tiles on the roof and the telegraph wires — dead things that make a lot of noise, but never leave their places for a proper game — or else it just — plays with itself. Since the beginning of the world the Night-Wind has been shy and lonely and unhappy.”

It was unanswerable. They understood. Their sense of pity was gently touched, their love as well.

“Do pigs really see the wind, as Daddy says?” enquired Maria abruptly, feeling the conversation beyond her. She merely obeyed the laws of her practical, matter-of-fact nature. But no one answered her; no one even heard the question. Another sound absorbed their interest and attention. There was a low, faint tapping on the windowpane. A hush, like church, fell over everybody.

And Uncle Henry stood up to his full height suddenly, and opened his arms wide. He drew a long, deep breath.

“Come in,” he said, splendidly.

The tapping, however, grew fainter and fainter, till it finally ceased. Everybody waited expectantly, but it was not repeated: Nothing happened. Nobody came in. The tapper had retreated.

“It was a twig,” whispered Jinny after a pause. “The Virgin Creeper—”

“But it was the wind that shook it,” exclaimed Uncle Henry, still standing and waiting as though he expected something. “The Night-Wind—”

A roaring sound over the roof drowned his words; it rose and fell like laughter, then like crying. It dropped closer, rushed headlong past the window, rattled and shook the sash, then dived away into the darkness. Its violence startled them. A deep lull followed instantly, and the little tapping of the twig was heard again. Odd l Just when the Night-Wind seemed furthest off it was all the time quite near. It had not really gone at all; it was hiding against the outside walls. It was watching them, trying to get in. The tapping continued for half a minute or more — a series of hurried, gentle little knocks, as from a child’s smallest fingertip.

“It wants to come in. It’s trying,” whispered someone.

“It’s awfully shy.”

“It’s lonely and frightfully unhappy.”

“It likes us and wants to play.”

There was another pause and silence. No one knew quite what to do.

“There’s too much light. Let’s put the lamp out!” said a genius, using the voice of Jinny.

As though by way of answer there followed instantly a sudden burst of wind. The torrent of it drove against the house; it boomed down the chimney, puffing an odour of soot into the room; it shook the door into the passage; it lifted an edge of carpet, flapping it. It shouted, whistled, sang, using a dozen different voices all at once. The roar fell into syllables. It was amazing. A great throat uttered words. They could scarcely believe their ears. The wind was shouting with a joyful, boisterous shout: “Open the window! I’ll put out the light!”

All heard the wonderful thing. Yet it seemed quite natural in a way. Uncle Henry, still standing and waiting as though he knew not exactly what was going to happen, moved forward at once and boldly opened the window’s lower sash. In swept the mighty visitor, the stranger from the air. The lamp gave one quick flicker and went out. Deep stillness followed. There was a silence like the moon. The shy Night-Wind had come into the room.

Ah, there was awe and wonder then! The silence was so unexpected. The whole wind, not merely part of it, was in. It had come so gently, softly, delicately too! In the darkness the outline of the window-frame was visible; Uncle Henry’s big figure blocked against the stars. Jinny’s head could be seen in silhouette against the other window, but Jimbo and Maria, being smaller, were merged in the pool of shadow below the level of the sill. A large, spread thing passed fluttering up and down the room a moment, then came to rest. It settled over everything at once. A rustle was audible as of trailing, floating hair.

“It’s hiding in the corners and behind the furniture,” whispered Uncle Henry. “Keep quiet. If you frighten it — whew!” — he whistled softly — “it’ll be off above the treetops in a second!”

A low, soft whistle answered to his own; somewhere in the room it sounded; there was no mistaking it, though the exact direction was difficult to tell, for while Jimbo said it was through the keyhole, Jinny declared positively it came from the door of the big, broken cupboard opposite. Maria stated flatly, “Chimney.”

“Hush! It’s talking.” It was Uncle Henry’s voice breathing very low. “It likes us. It feels we’re friendly.”

A murmur as of leaves was audible, or as of a pine bough sighing in a tiny breeze. Yet there were words as well — actual spoken words:

“Don’t look for me, please,” they heard. “I do not want to be seen. But you may touch me. I like that.” The children spread their hands out in the darkness, groping, searching, feeling. “Ah, your touch!” the sighing voice continued. “It’s like my softest lawn. Your hair feels as my grass feels on the hilltops, and the skin of your cheeks is cool and smooth as the water-surface of my lily ponds at midnight. I know you” — it raised its tone to singing. “You are children! I kiss you all!”

“I feel you,” Jinny said, in her clear, quiet voice. “But you are cold.”

“Not really,” was the answer that seemed all over the “That’s only the touch of space. I’ve come from very high up tonight. There’s been a change. The lower wind was called away suddenly to the sea, and I dropped down with hardly a moment’s warning to take its place. The sun has been very tiresome all day — overheating the currents.”

“Uncle, you ask it everything,” whispered Jimbo, “simply everything!”

“Say how we love it, please,” sighed Jinny. “I feel it closing both my eyes.”

“It’s over all my face,” put in Maria, drawing her breath in loudly.

“But my hair’s lifting!” Jinny exclaimed. “Oh, it’s lovely, lovely!”

Uncle Henry straightened himself up in the darkness. They could hear him breathing with the effort. “Please tell us what you do,” he said. “We all can feel you touching us. Play with us as you play with trees and clouds and sleeping flowers underneath the hedgerows.”

A singing, whistling sound passed softly round the room: there was a whirr and flutter as when a flight of bees or little birds goes down the sky, and a voice, a plaintive yet happy voice, like the plover who call to each other on the moors, was audible:

I run about the world at night,

Yet cannot see;

My hair has grown so thick these million years,

It covers me.

So, like a big, blind thing,

I run about,

And know all things by touching them.

I touch them with my wings;

I know each one of you

By touching you:

I touch your hearts!

“I feel you!” cried Jinny. “I feel you touching me!” “And I, and I!” the others cried. “It’s simply wonderful!”

An enormous sigh of happiness went through that darkened room.

“Then play with me!” they heard. “Oh, children, play with me!”

The wild, high sweetness in the windy voice was irresistible. The children rose with one accord. It was too dark to see, but they flew about the room without a fault or slip. There was no stumbling; they seemed guided, lifted, swept. The sound of happy, laughing voices filled the air. They caught the Wind and let it go again; they chased it round the table and the sofa; they held it in their arms until it panted with delight, half smothered into silence, then marvellously escaping from them on the elastic, flying feet that tread on forests, clouds and mountain tops. It rushed and darted, drove them, struck them lightly, pushed them suddenly from behind, then met their faces with a puff and shout of glee. It caught their feet: it blew their eyelids down. Just when they cried, “It’s caught! I’ve got it in my hands!” it shot laughing up against the ceiling: boomed down the chimney, or whistled shrilly as it escaped beneath the crack of the door into the passage. The keyhole was its easiest escape. It grew boisterous, singing with delight, yet was never for a moment rough. It cushioned all its blows with feathers.

“Where are you now? I felt your hair all over me. You’ve gone again!” It was Jinny’s voice as she tore across the floor.

“You’re whacking me on the head!” cried Jimbo. “Quick, quick I’ve got you in my hands!” He flew headlong over the sofa where Maria sat clutching the bolster to prevent being blown onto the carpet.

They felt its soft, gigantic hands all over them; its silky coils of hair entangled every movement; they heard its wings, its rushing, sighing voice, its velvet feet. The room was in a whirr and uproar.

“Uncle Henry! Can’t you help? You’re the biggest!”

“But it’s blown me inside out,” he answered, in a curiously muffled voice. “My fingers are blown off. It’s taken all my breath away.”

The pictures rattled on the wall; loose bits of paper fluttered everywhere; the curtains flapped out horizontally into the air.

“Catch it! Hold it! Stop it!” cried the breathless voices.

“Join hands,” he gasped. “We’ll try.” And, holding hands, they raced across the floor. They managed to encircle something with their spread arms and legs. Into the corner by the door they forced a great, loose, flowing thing against the wall. Wedged tight together like a fence, they stooped. They pounced upon it.

“We’ve caught it!” shouted Jimbo. “We’ve got you!”

There was a laughing whistle in the keyhole just behind them. It was gone!

The window shook. They heard the wild, high laughter. It was out of the room. The next minute it passed shouting above the cedar tops and up into the open sky. And their own laughter went out to follow it across the night.

•   •   •

The room became suddenly very still again. Someone had closed the window. The twig no longer tapped. The game was over. Uncle Henry collected them, an exhausted crew, upon the sofa by his side.

“It was very wonderful,” he whispered. “We’ve done what no one has ever done before: We’ve played with the Night-Wind, and the Night-Wind’s played with us. It feels happier now. It will always be our friend.”

“It was awfully strong,” said Jimbo, in a tone of awe. “It fairly banged me.”

“And awfully gentle though,” sighed Jinny. “It kissed me hundreds of times.”

“I felt it stroking me all down the back,” announced Maria.

“It’s only a child really,” Uncle Henry explained, half to himself, “a great wild child that plays with itself in space—”

He went on murmuring for several minutes, but the children hardly heard the words he used. They had their own sensations. For the wind had touched their hearts and made them think. They heard it singing now above the cedars as they had never heard it sing before. It was alive and lovely; it meant a new thing to them. For they had their little aching sorrows too: it had taken them all away; they had their little passionate yearnings and desires: it had prophesied fulfilment. The dreamy melancholy of childhood, the long, long days, the haunted nights, the everlasting afternoons — all these were in its wild, great, windy voice, the sighing, the mystery, the laughter too. The joy of strange fulfilment woke in their wind-kissed hearts. The Night-Wind was their friend; they had played with it. Now everything could come true.

And next day Maria, lost to the authorities for over an hour, was at length discovered by the forbidden pigsties in a fearful state of mess, but very pleased and happy about something. She was watching the pigs with eyes brimful of questioning wonder and excitement. She was listening intently too. She wanted to find out for certain whether pigs really — really and truly — saw — anything unusual.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE MEMORY OF BEAUTY

It began almost imperceptibly — about half-past three o’clock in the afternoon, to be exact — and Lennart, with his curiously sharpened faculties, noticed it at once. Before anyone else, he thinks, was aware of it, this delicate change in his surroundings made itself known to these senses of his, said now to be unreliable, yet so intensely receptive and alert for all their unreliability. No one else, at any, rate, gave the smallest sign that something had began to happen. The throng of people moving about him remained uninformed apparently.

He turned to his companion, who was also nurse. “Hullo!” he said to her, “There’s something up. What in the world is it?”

Obedient to her careful instructions, she made, as a hundred times before, some soothing reply, while her patient — “Jack,” she called him — aware that she had not shared his own keen observation, was disappointed, and let the matter drop. He said no more. He went back into his shell, smiling quietly to himself, peaceful in mind, and only vaguely aware that something, he knew not exactly what, was wrong with him, and that his companion humoured him for his own good. She did the humouring tenderly, and very sweetly, so that he liked it, his occasional disappointment in her rousing no shadow of resentment or impatience.

This was his first day in the open air, the first day for weeks that he had left a carefully-shaded room, where the blinds seemed always down, and looked round him upon a world spread in gracious light. Physically, he had recovered health and strength; nursing and good food, rest and sleep, had made him as fit as when he first went out with his draft, months ago. Only he did not know that he had gone out, nor what had happened to him when he was out, nor why he was the object now of such ceaseless, care, attention and loving tenderness. He remembered nothing; memory, temporarily, had been sponged clean as a new slate. That his nurse was also his sister was unrecognised by his mind. He had forgotten his own name, as well as hers. He had forgotten– everything.

The October day had been overcast, high, uniform clouds obscuring the sun, and moving westwards before a wind that had not come lower. No breeze now stirred the yellow foliage, as he sat with his companion upon a bench by Hampstead Heath, and took the air that helped to make him whole. In spite of the clouds, however, the day was warm, and calm, as with a touch still of lingering summer. He watched the sea of roofs and spires in blue haze below him; he heard the muffled roar of countless distant streets.

“Big place, that,” he mentioned, pointing with his stick. There was an assumed carelessness that did not altogether hide a certain shyness. “Some town — eh?”

“London, yes.’ It’s huge, isn’t it?”

“London….” he repeated, turning to look at her quickly. He said no more. The word sounded strange; the way he said it — new. He looked away again. No, he decided she was not inventing just to humour him; that was the real name, right enough. She wasn’t “pulling his leg.” But the name amused him somehow; he rather liked it.

“Mary,” he said, “now, that’s a nice name too.”

“And so is Jack,” she answered, whereupon the shyness again descended over him, and he said no more. Besides, the change he had noticed a moment ago, was becoming more marked, he thought, and he wished to observe it closely. For in some odd way it thrilled him.

It began, so far as he could judge, somewhere in the air above him, very high indeed, while yet its effect did not stay there, but spread gently downwards, including everything about him. From the sky, at any rate, it first stole downwards; and it was his extreme sensitiveness which made him realise next that it came from a particular quarter of the sky: In the eastern heavens it had its origin. He was sure of this; and the thrill of wonder, faint but marvellously sweet, stirred through his expectant being. He waited and watched in silence for a long time. Since Mary showed no interest, he must enjoy it alone. Indeed, she had not even noticed it at all.

Yet none of these people about him had noticed it either. Some of them were walking a little faster than before, hurrying almost, but no one looked up to see what was happening; there were no signs of surprise anywhere. “Everybody must have forgotten!” he thought to himself, when his mind gave a sudden twitch. Forgotten Forgotten what? He moved abruptly, and the girl’s hand stole into his, though she said no word. He was aware that she was watching him closely but a trifle surreptitiously he fancied.

He did not speak, but his wonder deepened. This “something” from the eastern sky descended slowly, yet so slowly that the change from one minute to another was not measurable. It was soft as a dream and very subtle; it was full of mystery. Comfort, and a sense of peace stole over him, his sight was eased, he had mild thoughts of sleep. Like a whisper the imperceptible change came drifting through the air. It was exquisite. But it was the wonder that woke the thrill in him.

“Something is up, you know,” he repeated, though more to himself than to his companion. “You can’t mistake it. It’s all over the place!” He drew a deeper breath, pointing again with his stick over the blue haze where tall chimneys and needle spires pierced. “By Jove,” he added, “it’s like a veil — gauze, I mean — or something — eh?” And the light drawing itself behind the veil, grew less, while his pulses quickened as he watched it fade.

Her gentle reply that it was time to go home to tea, and something else about the cooling air, again failed to satisfy him, but he was pleased that she slipped her arm into his and made a gesture uncommonly like a caress. She was so pretty, he thought, as he glanced down at her. Only it amazed him more and more that no thrill stirred her blood as it stirred his own, that there was no surprise, and that the stream of passing people hurrying homewards showed no single sign of having noticed what he noticed. For his heart swelled within him as he watched, and the change was so magical that it troubled his breath a little. Hard outlines everywhere melted softly against a pale blue sea that held tints of mother-of-pearl; there was a flush of gold, subdued to amber, a haze, a glow, a burning.

This strange thing stealing out of the east brought a wonder that he could not name, a wonder that was new and fresh and sweet as though experienced for the first time. For , his mind qualified the beauty that possessed him, qualified it in this way, because — this puzzled him — it was not quite “experienced for the first time.” It was old, old as himself; it was familiar….

“Good Lord!” he thought, “I’ve got that rummy feeling that I’ve been through all this before — somewhere,” and his mind gave another sudden twitch, which, again, he did not recognise as a memory. A spot was touched, a string was twanged, now here, now there, while Beauty, playing softly on his soul, communicated to his being gradually her secret rhythm, old as the world, but young ever in each heart that answers to it. Below, behind, the thrill, these deeply buried strings began to vibrate….

“The dusk is falling, See,” the girl said quietly, “It’s time we were going back.”

“Dusk,” he repeated, vaguely, “the dusk…. falling….” It was half a question. A new expression flashed into his eyes, then vanished instantly. Tears, he saw, were standing in her own. She had felt, had noticed, after all, then The disappointment, and with it the shyness, left him; he was no more ashamed of the depth and strength of this feeling that thrilled through him so imperiously.

But it was after tea that the mysterious change took hold upon his being with a power that could build a throne anew, then set its rightful occupant thereon. By his special wish the lights were not turned on. Before the great windows, opened to the mild autumn air, he sat in his big overcoat and watched.

The change, meanwhile, had ripened. It lay now full-blown upon the earth and heavens. Towards the sky he turned his eyes. The change, whose first delicate advent he had noticed, sat now enthroned above the world. The tops of trees were level with his windowsill, and below lay the countless distant streets, not slumbering, he felt surely, but gazing upwards with him into this deep sea of blackness that had purple for its lining and wore ten thousand candles blazing in mid-air. Those lights were not turned out; and this time he wondered why he had thought they might be, ought to be, turned out. This question definitely occurred to him a moment, while he watched the great footsteps of the searchlights passing over space….

The amazing shafts of white moved liked angels lighting up one group of golden points upon another. They lit them and swerved on again. In sheer delight, he lay in his chair and watched them, these rushing footsteps, these lit groups of gold. They, the golden points, were motionless, steady; they did not move or change. And his eyes fastened upon one, then, that seemed to burn more brightly than the rest. Though differing from the others in size alone, he thought it more beautiful than all. Below it far, far down in the west, lay a streak of faded fire, as though a curtain with one edge upturned hung above distant furnaces. But this trail of the sunset his mind did not recognise. His eye returned to the point of light that seemed every minute increasingly familiar, and more than familiar — most kindly and well-loved. He yearned towards it, he trembled. Sitting forward in his chair, he leaned upon the windowsill, staring with an intensity as if he would rise through the purple dark and touch it. Then, suddenly, it — twinkled. “By Jove!” he exclaimed aloud, “I know that chap. It’s — it’s — Now, where the devil did I see it before? Where ever was it….”

He sank back, as a scene rose before his inner eye. It must have been, apparently, his “inner” eye, for both his outer eyes were tightly closed as if he slept. But he did not sleep; it was merely that he saw something that was even more familiar though not less wonderful, than these other sights. Upon a dewy lawn at twilight two children played together, while a white-capped figure, from the window of a big house in the background, called loudly to them that it was time to come in doors and make themselves ready for bed. He saw two Lebanon cedars, the kitchen-garden wall beyond, the elms and haystacks further still, looming out of the summer dusk. He smelt pinks, sweet-william, roses. He ran full speed to catch his companion, a girl in a short tumbled frock, and knew that he was dressed as a soldier, with a wooden sword and a triangular paper hat that fell off, much to his annoyance, as he ran. But he caught his prisoner. Leading her by the hair towards the house, his G.H.Q., he saw the evening star “simply shining like anything” in the pale glow of the western sky. But in the hall, when reached, the butler’s long wax taper, as he slowly lit the big candles, threw a gleam upon his prisoner’s laughing face, and it was, he saw, his sister’s face.

He opened his eyes again and saw the point of light against the purple curtain that hung above the world. It twinkled. The wonder and the thrill coursed through his heart again, but this time another thing had come to join them, and was rising to his brain. “By Jove, I know that chap!” he repeated. “It’s old Venus, or I’m a dug-out!”

And when, a moment later, the door opened and his companion entered, saying something about its being time for bed, because the “night has come” — he looked into her face with a smile: “I’m quite ready, Mary,” he said, “but where in the world have you been to all this time!”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE GARDEN OF SURVIVAL

I

It will surprise and at the same time possibly amuse you to know that I had the instinct to tell what follows to a Priest, and might have done so had not the Man of the World in me whispered that from professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, but since I know of none I fall back upon yourself, my other half, for in writing this adventure to you I almost feel that I am writing it to myself.

The desire for confession is upon me: this thing must out. It is a story, though an unfinished one. I mention this at once lest, frightened by the thickness of the many pages, you lay them aside against another time, and so perhaps neglect them altogether. A story, however, will invite your interest, and when I add that it is true, I feel that you will bring sympathy to that interest: these together, I hope, may win your attention, and hold it, until you shall have read the final word.

That I should use this form in telling it will offend your literary taste — you who have made your name both as critic and creative writer — for you said once, I remember, that to tell a story in epistolary form is a subterfuge, an attempt to evade the difficult matters of construction and delineation of character. My story, however, is so slight, so subtle, so delicately intimate too, that a letter to someone in closest sympathy with myself seems the only form that offers.

It is, as I said, a confession, but a very dear confession: I burn to tell it honestly, yet know not how. To withhold it from you would be to admit a secretiveness that our relationship has never known — out it must, and to you. I may, perhaps, borrow — who can limit the sharing powers of twin brothers like ourselves? — some of the skill your own work spills so prodigally, crumbs from your writing-table, so to speak; and you will forgive the robbery, if successful, as you will accept lie love behind the confession as your due.

Now, listen, please! For this is the point: that, although my wife is dead these dozen years and more — I have found reunion and I love. Explanation of this must follow as best it may. So, please mark tie point which for the sake of emphasis I venture to repeat: that I know reunion and I love.

With the jealous prerogative of the twin, you objected to that marriage, though I knew that it deprived you of no jot of my affection, owing to the fact that it was prompted by pity only, leaving the soul in me wholly disengaged. Marion, by her steady refusal to accept my honest friendship, by her persistent admiration of me, as also by her loveliness, her youth, her singing, persuaded me somehow finally that I needed her. The cry of the flesh, which her beauty stimulated and her singing increased most strangely, seemed raised into a burning desire that I mistook at the moment for the true desire of the soul. Yet, actually, the soul in me remained aloof, a spectator, and one, moreover, of a distinctly lukewarm kind.

It was very curious. On looking back, I can hardly understand it even now; there seemed some special power, some special undiscovered tie between us that led me on and yet deceived me. It was especially evident in her singing, this deep power. She sang, you remember, to her own accompaniment on the harp, and her method, though so simple it seemed almost childish, was at the same time charged with a great melancholy that always moved me most profoundly. The sound of her small, plaintive voice, the sight of her slender fingers that plucked the strings in some delicate fashion native to herself, the tiny foot that pressed the pedal — all these, with her dark searching eyes fixed penetratingly upon my own while she sang of love and love’s endearments, combined in a single stroke of very puissant and seductive kind. Passions in me awoke, so deep, so ardent, so imperious, that I conceived them as born of the need of one soul for another. I attributed their power to genuine love. The following reactions, when my soul held up a finger and bade me listen to her still, small warnings, grew less positive and of ever less duration. The frontier between physical and spiritual passion is perilously narrow, perhaps. My judgement, at any rate, became insecure, then floundered hopelessly. The sound of the harp-strings and of Marion’s voice could overwhelm its balance instantly.

Mistaking, perhaps, my lukewarm-ness for restraint, she led me at last to the altar you described as one of sacrifice. And your instinct, more piercing than my own, proved only too correct: that which I held for love declared itself as pity only, the soft, affectionate pity of a weakish man in whom the flesh cried loudly, the pity of a man who would be untrue to himself rather than pain so sweet a girl by rejecting the one great offering life placed within her gift. She persuaded me so cunningly that I persuaded myself, yet was not aware I did so until afterwards. I married her because in some manner I felt, but never could explain, that she had need of me.

And, at the wedding, I remember two things vividly: the expression of wondering resignation on your face, and upon hers — chiefly in the eyes and in the odd lines about the mouth — the air of subtle triumph that she wore: that she had captured me for her very own at last, and yet — for there was this singular hint in her attitude and behaviour — that she had taken me, because she had this curious deep need of me.

This sharply moving touch was graven into me, increasing the tenderness of my pity, subsequently, a thousandfold. The necessity lay in her very soul. She gave to me all she had to give, and in so doing she tried to satisfy some hunger of her being that lay beyond my comprehension or interpretation. For, note this — she gave herself into my keeping, I remember, with a sigh.

It seems as of yesterday the actual moment when, urged by my vehement desires, I made her consent to be my wife; I remember, too, the doubt, the shame, the hesitation that made themselves felt in me before the climax when her beauty overpowered me, sweeping reflection utterly away. I can hear today the sigh, half of satisfaction, yet half, it seemed, of pain, with which she sank into my arms at last, as though her victory brought intense relief, yet was not wholly gamed in the way that she had wanted. Her physical beauty, perhaps, was the last weapon she had wished to use for my enslavement; she knew quite surely that the appeal to what was highest in me had not succeeded…

The party in our mother’s house that week in July included yourself; there is no need for me to remind you of its various members, nor of the strong attraction Marion, then a girl of twenty-five, exercised upon the men belonging to it. Nor have you forgotten, I feel sure, the adroit way in which she contrived so often to find herself alone with me, both in the house and out of it, even to the point of sometimes placing me in a quasi-false position. That she tempted me is, perhaps, an overstatement, though that she availed herself of every legitimate use of feminine magic to entrap me is certainly the truth. Opportunities of marriage, it was notorious, had been frequently given to her, and she had as frequently declined them; she was older than her years; to inexperience she certainly had no claim: and from the very first it was clear to me — if conceited, I cannot pretend that I was also blind — that flirtation was not her object and that marriage was. Yet it was marriage with a purpose that she desired, and that purpose had to do, I felt, with sacrifice. She burned to give her very best, her all, and for my highest welfare. It was in this sense, I got the impression strangely, that she had need of me.

The battle seemed, at first, uneven, since, as a woman, she did not positively attract me. I was first amused at her endeavours and her skill; but respect for her as a redoubtable antagonist soon followed. This respect, doubtless, was the first blood she drew from me, since it gained my attention and fixed my mind upon her presence. From that moment she entered my consciousness as a woman; when she was near me I became more and more aware of her, and the room, the picnic, the game of tennis that included her were entirely different from such occasions when she was absent, I became self-conscious. It was impossible to ignore her as formerly had been my happy case.

It was then I first knew how beautiful she was, and that her beauty made a certain difference to my mood. The next step may seem a big one, but, I believe, is very natural: her physical beauty gave me definite pleasure. And the instant this change occurred she was aware of it. The curious fact, however, is that, although aware of this gain of power, she made no direct use of it at first. She did not draw this potent weapon for my undoing; it was ever with her, but was ever sheathed. Did she discern my weakness, perhaps, and know that the subtle power would work upon me most effectively if left to itself? Did she, rich in experience, deem that its too direct use might waken a reaction in my better self? I cannot say, I do not know…. Every feminine art was at her disposal, as every use of magic pertaining to young and comely womanhood was easily within her reach. As you and I might express it bluntly, she knew men thoroughly, she knew every trick; she drew me on, then left me abruptly in the wrong, puzzled, foolish, angry, only to forgive me later with the most enchanting smile or word imaginable. But never once did she deliberately make use of the merciless weapon of her physical beauty although — perhaps because — she knew that it was the most powerful in all her armoury.

For listen to this: when at last I took her in my arms with passion that would not be denied, she actually resented it. She even sought to repel me from her touch that had undone me. I repeat what I said before: She did not wish to win me in that way. The sigh of happiness she drew in that moment — I can swear to it — included somewhere, too, the pain of bitter disappointment.

The weapon, however, that she did use without hesitation was her singing. There was nothing special either in its quality or skill; it was a voice untrained, I believe, and certainly without ambition; her repertoire was limited; she sang folk-songs mostly, the simple love-songs of primitive people, of peasants and the like, yet sang them with such truth and charm, with such power and conviction, somehow, that I knew enchantment as I listened. This, too, she instantly divined, and that behind my compliments lay hid a weakness of deep origin she could play upon to her sure advantage. She did so without mercy, until gradually I passed beneath her sway.

I will not now relate in detail the steps of my descent, or if you like it better, of my capture. This is a summary merely. So let me say in brief that her singing to the harp combined with the revelation of her physical beauty to lead me swiftly to the point where I ardently desired her, and that in this turmoil of desire I sought eagerly to find real love. There were times when I deceived myself most admirably; there were times when I plainly saw the truth. During the former I believed that my happiness lay in marrying her, but in the latter I recognised that a girl who meant nothing to my better self had grown of a sudden painfully yet exquisitely desirable. But even during the ascendancy of the latter physical mood, she had only to seat herself beside the harp and sing, for the former state to usurp its place, I watched, I listened, and I yielded. Her voice, aided by the soft plucking of the strings, completed my defeat. Now, strangest of all, I must add one other thing, and I will add it without comment. For though sure of its truth, I would not dwell upon it. And it is this: that in her singing, as also in her playing, in the “colour” of her voice as also in the very attitude and gestures of her figure as she sat beside the instrument, there lay, though marvellously hidden, something gross. It woke a response of something in myself, hitherto unrecognized, that was similarly gross….

It was in the empty billiard-room when the climax came, a calm evening of late July, the dusk upon the lawn, and most of the house-party already gone upstairs to dress for dinner. I had been standing beside the open window for some considerable time, motionless, and listening idly to the singing of a thrush or blackbird in the shrubberies — when I heard the faint twanging of the harp-strings in the room behind me, and turning, saw that Marion had entered and was there beside the instrument. At the same moment she saw me, rose from the harp and came forward. During the day she had kept me at a distance. I was hungry for her voice and touch; her presence excited me — and yet I was half afraid.

“What! Already dressed!” I exclaimed, anxious to avoid a talk a deux. “I must hurry then, or I shall be later than usual.”

I crossed the room towards the door, when she stopped me with her eyes.

“Do you really mean to say you don’t know the difference between an evening frock and — and this,” she answered lightly, holding out the skirt in her fingers for me to touch. And in the voice was that hint of a sensual caress that, I admit, bewildered both my will and judgement. She was very close and her fragrance came on me with her breath, like the perfume of the summer garden. I touched the material carelessly; it was of softest smooth white serge. It seemed I touched herself that lay beneath it. And at that touch some fire of lightning ran through every vein.

“How stupid of me,” I said quickly, making to go past her, “but it’s white, you see, and in this dim light I—”

“A man’s idea of an evening frock is always white, I suppose, or black.” She laughed a little. “I’m not coming to dinner tonight,” she added, sitting down to the harp. “I’ve got a headache and thought I might soothe it with a little music. I didn’t know anyone was here. I thought I was alone.”

Thus, deftly, having touched a chord of pity in me, she began to play; her voice followed; dinner and dressing, the house-party and my mother’s guests, were all forgotten. I remember that you looked in, your eyes touched with a suggestive and melancholy smile, and as quickly closed the door again. But even that little warning failed to help me. I sat down on the sofa facing her, the world forgotten. And, as I listened to her singing and to the sweet music of the harp, the spell, it seemed, of some ancient beauty stole upon my spirit. The sound of her soft voice reduced my resistance to utter impotence. An aggressive passion took its place. The desire for contact, physical contact, became a vehement aching that I scarcely could restrain, and my arms were hungry for her. Shame and repugnance touched me faintly for a moment, but at once died away again.

I listened and I watched. The sensuous beauty of her figure and her movements, swathed in that soft and clinging serge, troubled my judgement; it seemed, as I saw her little foot upon the pedal, that I felt with joy its pressure on my heart and life. Something gross and abandoned stirred in me; I welcomed her easy power and delighted in it. I feasted my eyes and ears, the blood rose feverishly to my head. She did not look at me, yet knew that I looked at her, and how. No longer ashamed, but with a fiery pleasure in my heart, I spoke at last. Her song had ended. She softly brushed the strings, her eyes turned downwards.

“Marion,” I said, agitation making my voice sound unfamiliar, “Marion, dear, I am enthralled; your voice, your beauty—”

I found no other words; my voice stopped dead; I stood up, trembling in every limb. I saw her in that instant as a maid of olden time, singing the love-songs of some far-off day beside her native instrument, and of a voluptuous beauty there was no withstanding. The half-light of the dusk set her in a frame of terrible enchantment.

And as I spoke her name and rose, she also spoke my own, my Christian name, and rose as well. I saw her move towards me. Upon her face, in her eyes and on her lips, was a smile of joy I had never seen before, though a smile of conquest, and of something more besides that I must call truly by its rightful name, a smile of lust. God! those movements beneath the clinging dress that fell in lines of beauty to her feet! Those little feet that stepped upon my heart, upon my very soul….

For a moment I loathed myself. The next, as she touched me and my arms took her with rough strength against my breast, my repugnance vanished, and I was utterly undone. I believed I loved. That which was gross in me, leaping like fire to claim her glorious beauty, met and merged with that similar, devouring flame in her; but in the merging seemed cunningly transformed into the call of soul to soul: I forgot the pity…. I kissed her, holding her to me so fiercely that she scarcely moved. I said a thousand things. I know not what I said. I loved.

Then, suddenly, she seemed to free herself; she drew away; she looked at me, standing a moment just beyond my reach, a strange smile on her lips and in her darkened eyes a nameless expression that held both joy and pain. For one second I felt that she repelled me, that she resented my action and my words. Yes, for one brief second she stood there, like an angel set in judgement over me, and the next we had come together again, softly, gently, happily; I heard that strange, deep sigh, already mentioned, half of satisfaction, half, it seemed, of pain, as she sank down into my arms and found relief in quiet sobbing on my breast.

And pity then returned. I felt unsure of myself again. This was the love of the body only; my soul was silent. Yet — somehow, in some strange hidden way, lay this ambushed meaning — that she had need of me, and that she offered her devotion and herself in sacrifice.

II

T brief marriage ran its course, depleting rather than enriching me, and I know you realized before the hurried, dreadful end that my tie with yourself was strengthened rather than endangered, and that I took from you nothing that I might give it to her. That death should intervene so swiftly, leaving her but an interval of a month between the altar and the grave, you could foreknow as little as I or she; yet in that brief space of time you learned that I had robbed you of nothing that was your precious due, while she as surely realized that the amazing love she poured so lavishly upon me woke no response — beyond a deep and tender pity, strangely deep and singularly tender I admit, but assuredly very different from love.

Now this, I think, you already know and in some measure understand; but what you cannot know — since it is a portion of her secret, of that ambushed meaning, as I termed it, given to me when she lay dying — is the pathetic truth that her discovery wrought no touch of disenchantment in her. I think she knew with shame that she had caught me with her lowest weapon, yet still hoped that the highest in her might complete and elevate her victory. She knew, at any rate, neither dismay nor disappointment; of reproach there was no faintest hint. She did not even once speak of it directly, though her fine, passionate face made me aware of the position. Of the usual human reaction, that is, there was no slightest trace; she neither chided nor implored; she did not weep. The exact opposite of what I might have expected took place before my very eyes.

For she turned and faced me, empty as I was. The soul in her, realizing the truth, stood erect to meet the misery of lonely pain that inevitably lay ahead — in some sense as though she welcomed it already; and, strangest of all, she blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown to me. Moreover, having captured me, she changed; the grossness I had discerned, that which had led me to my own undoing, vanished completely as though it were transmuted into desires and emotions of a loftier kind. Some purpose, some intention, a hope immensely resolute shone out of her, and of such spiritual loveliness, it seemed to me, that I watched it in a kind of dumb amazement.

I watched it — unaware at first of my own shame, emptied of any emotion whatsoever, I think, but that of a startled worship before the grandeur of her generosity. It seemed she listened breathlessly for the beating of my heart, and hearing none, resolved that she would pour her own life into it, regardless of pain, of loss, of sacrifice, that she might make it live. She undertook her mission, that is to say, and this mission, in some mysterious way, and according to some code of conduct undivined by me, yet passionately honoured, was to give — regardless of herself or of response. I caught myself sometimes thinking of a child who would instinctively undo some earlier grievous wrong. She loved me marvellously.

I know not how to describe to you the lavish wealth of selfless devotion she bathed me in during the brief torturing and unfulfilled period before the end. It made me aware of new depths and heights in human nature. It taught me a new beauty that even my finest dreams had left unmentioned. Into the region that great souls inhabit a glimpse was given me. My own dreadful weakness was laid bare. And an eternal hunger woke in me — that I might love.

That hunger remained unsatisfied. I prayed, I yearned, I suffered; I could have decreed myself a deservedly cruel death; it seemed I stretched my little nature to unendurable limits in the fierce hope that the Gift of the Gods might be bestowed upon me, and that her divine emotion might waken a response within my leaden soul. But all in vain. My attitude, in spite of every prayer, of every effort, remained no more than a searching and unavailing pity, but a pity that held no seed of a mere positive emotion, least of all, of love. The heart in me lay unredeemed; it knew ashamed and very tender gratitude; but it did not beat for her. I could not love.

I have told you bluntly, frankly, of my physical feelings towards Marion and her beauty. It is a confession that I give into my own safe keeping. I think, perhaps, that you, though cast in a finer mould, may not despise them utterly, nor too contemptuously misinterpret them. The legend that twins may share a single soul has always seemed to me grotesque and unpoetic nonsense, a cruel and unnecessary notion too: a man is sufficiently imperfect without suffering this further subtraction from his potentialities. And yet it is true, in our own case, that you have exclusive monopoly of the ethereal qualities, while to me are given chiefly the physical attributes of the vigorous and healthy male — the animal: my six feet three, my muscular system, my inartistic and pedestrian temperament. Fairly clean-minded, I hope I may be, but beyond all question I am the male animal incarnate. It was, indeed, the thousand slaveries of the senses, individually so negligible, collectively so overwhelming, that forced me upon my knees before her physical loveliness. I must tell you now that this potent spell, alternating between fiery desire and the sincerest of repugnance, continued to operate. I complete the confession by adding briefly, that after marriage she resented and repelled all my advances. A deep sadness came upon her; she wept; and I desisted. It was my soul that she desired with the fire of her mighty love, and not my body…. And again, since it is to myself and to you alone I tell it, I would add this vital fact: it was this “new beauty which my finest dreams have left unmentioned” that made it somehow possible for me to desist, both against my animal will, yet willingly.

I have told you that, when dying, she revealed to me a portion of her “secret.” This portion of a sacred confidence lies so safe within my everlasting pity that I may share it with you without the remorse of a betrayal. Full understanding we need never ask; the solution, I am convinced, is scarcely obtainable in this world. The message, however, was incomplete because the breath that framed it into broken words failed suddenly; the heart, so strangely given into my unworthy keeping, stopped beating as you shall hear upon the very edge of full disclosure. The ambushed meaning I have hinted at remained — a hint.

III

There was, then, you will remember, but an interval of minutes between the accident and the temporary recovery of consciousness, between that recovery again and the moment when the head fell forward on my knee and she was gone. That “recovery” of consciousness I feel bound to question, as you shall shortly hear. Among such curious things I am at sea admittedly, yet I must doubt forever that the eyes which peered so strangely into mine were those of Marion herself — as I had always known her. You will, at any rate, allow the confession, and believe it true, that I — did not recognize her quite. Consciousness there was, indubitably, but whether it was “recovery” of consciousness is another matter, and a problem that I must forever question though I cannot ever set it confidently at rest. It almost seemed as though a larger, grander, yet somehow a less personal, soul looked forth through the fading eyes and used the troubled breath.

In those brief minutes, at any rate, the mind was clear as day, the faculties not only unobscured, but marvellously enhanced. In the eyes at first shone unveiled fire; she smiled, gazing into my own with love and eager yearning too. There was a radiance in her face I must call glory. Her head was in my lap upon the bed of rugs we had improvised inside the field: the broken motor posed in a monstrous heap ten yards away; and the doctor, summoned by a passing stranger, was in the act of administrating the anaesthetic, so that we might bear her without pain to the nearest hospital — when, suddenly, she held up a warning finger, beckoning to me that I should listen closely.

I bent my head to catch the words. There was such authority in the gesture, and in the eyes an expression so extraordinarily appealing, and yet so touched with the awe of a final privacy beyond language, that the doctor stepped backwards on the instant, the needle shaking in his hand — while I bent down to catch the whispered words that at once began to pass her lips.

The wind in the poplar overhead mingled with the little sentences, as though the breath of the clear blue sky, calmly shining, was mingled with her own.

But the words I heard both troubled and amazed me:

“Help me! For I am in the dark still!” went through me like a sword. “And I do not know how long.”

I took her face in both my hands; I kissed her. “You are with friends,” I said. “You are safe with us, with me — Marion!” And I apparently tried to put into my smile the tenderness that clumsy words forswore. Her next words shocked me inexpressibly: “You laugh,” she said, “but I—” she sighed — “I weep.”

I stroked her face and hair. No words came to me.

“You call me Marion,” she went on in an eager tone that surely belied her pain and weakness, “but I do not remember that. I have forgotten names.” Then, as I kissed her, I heard her add in the clearest whisper possible, as though no cloud lay upon her mind: “Yet Marion will do — if by that you know me now.”

There came a pause then, but after it such singular words that I could hardly believe I heard aright, although each syllable sank into my brain as with pointed steel:

“You come to me again when I lie dying. Even in the dark I hear — how long I do not know — I hear your words.”

She gave me suddenly then a most piercing look, raising her face a little towards my own. I saw earnest entreaty in them. “Tell me,” I murmured; “you are nearer, closer to me than ever before. Tell me what it is?”

“Music,” she whispered, “I want music—”

I knew not what to answer, what to say. Can you blame me that, in my troubled, aching heart, I found but commonplaces? For I thought of the harp, or of some stringed instrument that seemed part of her.

“You shall have it,” I said gently, “and very soon. We shall carry you now into comfort, safety. You shall have no pain. Another moment and—”

“Music,” she repeated, interrupting, “music as of long ago.”

It was terrible. I said such stupid things. My mind seemed frozen.

“I would hear music,” she whispered, “before I go again.”

“Marion, you shall,” I stammered. “Beethoven, Schumann, — what would please you most? You shall have all.”

“Yes, play to me. But those names” — she shook her head — “I do not know.”

I remember that my face was streaming, my hands so hot that her head seemed more than I could hold. I shifted my knees so that she might lie more easily a little.

“God’s music!” she cried aloud with startling abruptness; then, lowering her voice again and smiling sadly as though something came back to her that she would fain forget, she added slowly, with something of mournful emphasis:

“I was a singer …”

As though a flash of light had passed, some inner darkness was cleft asunder in me. Some heaviness shifted from my brain. It seemed the years, the centuries, turned over like a windblown page. And out of some hidden inmost part of me involuntary words rose instantly:

“You sang God’s music then …”

The strange, unbidden sentence stirred her. Her head moved slightly; she smiled. Gazing into my eyes intently, as though to dispel a mist that shrouded both our minds, she went on in a whisper that yet was startlingly distinct, though with little pauses drawn out between the phrases: “I was a singer… in the Temple. I sang — men — into evil. You … I sang into … evil.”

There was a moment’s pause, as a spasm of inexplicable pain passed through my heart like fire, and a sense of haunting things whereof no conscious memory remained came over me. The scene about me wavered before my eyes as if it would disappear.

“Yet you came to me when I lay dying at the last,” I caught her thin clear whisper. “You said, ‘Turn to God!’”

The whisper died away. The darkness flowed back upon my mind and thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead. The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the driver made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a sign — when Marion’s low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind than a living voice, rose into the still evening air:

“I have failed. And I shall try again.”

She gazed up at me with that patient, generous love that seemed inexhaustible, and hardly knowing what to answer, nor how to comfort her in that afflicting moment, I bent lower — or, rather, she drew my ear closer to her lips. I think her great desire just then was to utter her own thought more fully before she passed. Certainly it was no avowal or consolation from myself she sought.

“Your forgiveness,” I heard distinctly, “I need your full forgiveness.”

It was for me a terrible and poignant moment. The emptiness of my pity betrayed itself too mercilessly for me to bear; yet, before my bewilderment enabled me to frame an answer, she went on hurriedly, though with a faultless certainty: the meaning to her was clear as day:

“Born of love … the only true forgiveness…”

A film formed slowly. Her eyes began to close, her breath died off into a sigh; she smiled, but her head sank lower with her fading strength. And her final words went by me in that sigh:

“Yet love in you lies unawakened still… and I must try again….”

There was one more effort, painful with unexpressed fulfilment. A flicker of awful yearning took her paling eyes. Life seemed to stammer, pause, then flush as with this last deep impulse to yield a secret she discerned for the first time fully, in the very act of passing out. The face, with its soft loveliness, turned grey in death. Upon the edge of a great disclosure — she was gone.

I remember that for a space of time there was silence all about us. The doctor still kept his back to us, the driver had ceased his wretched hammering, I heard the wind in the poplar and the hum of insects. A bird sang loudly on a branch above; it seemed miles away, across an empty world…. Then, of a sudden, I became aware that the weight of the head and shoulders had dreadfully increased. I dared not turn my face lest I should look upon her whom I had deeply wronged — the forsaken tenement of this woman whose matchless love now begged with her dying breath for my forgiveness!

A cowardly desire to lose consciousness ran through me, to forget myself, to hide my shame with her in death; yet, even while this was so, I sought most desperately through the depths of my anguished pity to find some hint, if only the tiniest seed, of love — and found it not…. The rest belonged to things unrealized….

I remember a hand being laid upon me. I lifted my head which had fallen close against her cheek. The doctor stood beside me, his grave and kindly face bent low. He spoke some gentle words. I saw him replacing the needle in its little leathern case, unused.

Marion was dead, her deep secret undisclosed. That which she yearned to tell me was something which, in her brief period of devotion, she had lived, had faithfully acted out, yet herself only dimly aware of why it had to be. The solution of this problem of unrequited love lay at last within her grasp; of a love that only asked to give of its unquenched and unquenchable store, undismayed by the total absence of response.

She passed from the world of speech and action with this intense desire unsatisfied, and at the very moment — as with a drowning man who sees his past — when the solution lay ready to her hand. She saw clearly, she understood, she burned to tell me. Upon the edge of full disclosure, she was gone, leaving me alone with my aching pity and with my shame of unawakened love.

“I have failed, but I shall try again….”

IV

That, as you know, took place a dozen years ago and more, when I was thirty-two, and time, in the interval, has wrought unexpected ends out of the material of my life. My trade as a soldier has led me to an administrative post in a distant land where, apparently, I have deserved well of my King and Country, as they say in the obituaries. At any rate, the cryptic letters following my name, bear witness to some kind of notoriety attained.

You were the first to welcome my success, and your congratulations were the first I looked for, as surely as they were more satisfying than those our mother sent. You knew me better, it seems, than she did. For you expressed the surprise that I, too, felt, whereas mother assured me she had “always known you would do well, my boy, and you have only got your deserts in this tardy recognition.” To her, of course, even at forty-five, I was still her “little boy.” You, however, guessed shrewdly that Luck had played strong cards in bringing me this distinction, and I will admit at once that it was, indeed, due to little born in me, but, rather, to some adventitious aid that, curiously, seemed never lacking at the opportune moment. And this adventitious aid was new.

This is the unvarnished truth. A mysterious power dealt the cards for me with unfailing instinct; a fortunate combination of events placing in my hands, precisely at the moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my own skill and judgement.

So, at least, you and I, knowing my limited abilities, consent to attribute my success to luck, to chance, to fate, or to any other name for the destiny that has placed me on a height my talent never could have reached alone. You, and I, too, for that matter, are as happy over the result as our mother is; only you and I are surprised, because we judge it, with some humour, out of greater knowledge. More — you, like myself, are a little puzzled, I think. We ask together, if truth were told: Whose was the unerring, guiding hand?

Amid this uncertainty I give you now another curious item, about which you have, of course, been uninformed. For none could have detected it but myself: namely, that apart from these opportunities chance set upon my path, an impulse outside myself — and an impulse that was new — drove me to make use of them. Sometimes even against my personal inclination, a power urged me into decided, and it so happened, always into faultless action. Amazed at myself, I yet invariably obeyed.

How to describe so elusive a situation I hardly know, unless by telling you the simple truth: I felt that somebody would be pleased.

And, with the years, I learned to recognize this instinct that never failed when a choice, and therefore an element of doubt, presented itself. Invariably I was pushed towards the right direction. More singular still, there rose in me unbidden at these various junctures, a kind of inner attention which bade me wait and listen for the guiding touch. I am not fanciful, I heard no voice, I was aware of nothing personal by way of guidance or assistance; and yet the guidance, the assistance, never failed, though often I was not conscious that they had been present until long afterwards. I felt, as I said above, that somebody would be pleased.

For it was a consistent, an intelligent guidance; operating, as it were, out of some completer survey of the facts at a given moment than my own abilities could possibly have compassed; my mediocre faculties seemed gathered together and perfected — with the result, in time, that my “intuition,” as others called it, came to be regarded with a respect that in some cases amounted to half reverence. The adjective “uncanny” was applied to me. The natives, certainly, were aware of awe.

I made no private use of this unearned distinction; there is nothing in me of the charlatan that claimed mysterious power; but my subordinates, ever in growing numbers as my promotions followed, held me in greater respect, apparently, on that very account. The natives, especially, as I mentioned, attributed semi-deific properties to my poor personality. Certainly my prestige increased out of all proportion to anything my talents deserved with any show of justice.

I have said that, so far as I was concerned, there lay nothing personal in this growth of divining intuition. I must now qualify that a little. Nothing persuaded me that this guidance, so infallible, so constant, owed its origin to what men call a being; I certainly found no name for it; exactness, I think, might place its truest description in some such term as energy, inner force or inspiration; yet I must admit that, with its steady repetition, there awoke in me an attitude towards it that eluded somewhere also an emotion. And in this emotion, in its quality and character, hid remotely a personal suggestion: each time it offered itself, that is, I was aware of a sharp quiver of sensitive life within me, and of that sensation, extraordinarily sweet and wonderful, which constitutes a genuine thrill.

I came to look for this “thrill,” to lie in wait with anticipatory wonder for its advent; and in a sense this pause in me, that was both of expectancy and hope, grew slowly into what I may almost call a habit. There was an emptiness in my heart before it came, a sense of peace and comfort when it was accomplished. The emptiness and then the satisfaction, as first and last conditions, never failed, and that they took place in my heart rather than in my mind I can affirm with equal certainty.

The habit, thus, confirmed itself. I admitted the power. Let me be frank — I sought it, even longing for it when there was no decision to be made, no guidance therefore needed: I longed for it because of the great sweetness that it left within my heart. It was when I needed it, however, that its effect was most enduring. The method became quite easy to me. When a moment of choice between two courses of action presented itself, I first emptied my heart of all personal inclination, then, pausing upon direction, I knew — or rather felt — which course to take. My heart was filled and satisfied with an intention that never wavered. Some energy that made the choice for me had been poured in. I decided upon this or that line of action. The Thrill, always of an instantaneous nature, came and went — and somebody was pleased.

Moreover — and this will interest you more particularly — the emotion produced in me was, so far as positive recognition went, a new emotion; it was, at any rate, one that had lain so feebly in me hitherto that its announcement brought the savour of an emotion before unrealized. I had known it but once, and that long years before, but the man’s mind in me increased and added to it. For it seemed a development of that new perception which first dawned upon me during my brief period of married life, and had since lain hidden in me, potential possibly, but inactive beyond all question, if not wholly dead. I will now name it for you, and for myself, as best I may. It was the Thrill of Beauty.

I became, in these moments, aware of Beauty, and to a degree, while it lasted, approaching revelation. Chords, first faintly struck long years before when my sense of Marion’s forgiveness and generosity stirred worship in me, but chords that since then had lain, apparently, unresponsive, were swept into resonance again. Possibly they had been vibrating all these intervening years, unknown to me, unrecognized. I cannot say. I only know that here was the origin of the strange energy that now moved me to the depths. Some new worship of Beauty that had love in it, of which, indeed, love was the determining quality, awoke in the profoundest part of me, and even when the “thrill” had gone its way, left me hungry and yearning for its repetition. Here, then, is the “personal” qualification that I mentioned. The yearning and the hunger were related to my deepest needs. I had been empty, but I would be filled. For a passionate love, holding hands with a faith and confidence as passionate as itself, poured flooding into me and made this new sense of beauty seem a paramount necessity of my life.

Will you be patient now, if I give you a crude instance of what I mean? It is one among many others, but I choose it because its very crudeness makes my meaning clear.

In this fevered and stricken African coast, you may know, there is luxuriance in every natural detail, an exuberance that is lavish to excess. Yet beauty lies somewhat coyly hid — as though suffocated by over-abundance of crowding wonder. I detect, indeed, almost a touch of the monstrous in it all, a super-expression, as it were, that bewilders, and occasionally even may alarm. Delicacy, subtlety, suggestion in any form, have no part in it. During the five years of my exile amid this tropical extravagance I can recall no single instance of beauty “hinting” anywhere. Nature seems, rather, audaciously abandoned; she is without restraint. She shows her all, tells everything — she shouts, she never whispers. You will understand me when I tell you that this wholesale lack of reticence and modesty involves all absence in the beholder of — surprise. A sudden ravishment of the senses is impossible. One never can experience that sweet and troubling agitation to which a breathless amazement properly belongs. You may be stunned; you are hardly ever “thrilled.”

Now, this new sensitiveness to Beauty I have mentioned has opened me to that receptiveness which is aware of subtlety and owns to sharp surprise. The thrill is of its very essence. It is unexpected. Out of the welter of prolific detail Nature here glories in, a delicate hint of wonder and surprise comes stealing. The change, of course, is in myself, not otherwise. And on the particular “crude” occasion I will briefly mention, it reached me from the most obvious and banal of conditions — the night sky and the moon.

Here, then, is how it happened:

There had arisen a situation of grave difficulty among the natives of my Province, and the need for taking a strong, authoritative line was paramount. The reports of my subordinates from various parts of the country pointed to very vigorous action of a repressing, even of a punitive, description. It was not, in itself, a complicated situation, and no Governor, who was soldier too, need have hesitated for an instant. The various Stations, indeed, anticipating the usual course of action indicated by precedent, had automatically gone to their posts, prepared for the “official instructions” it was known that I should send, wondering impatiently (as I learned afterwards) at the slight delay. For delay there was, though of a few hours only; and this delay was caused by my uncomfortable new habit — pausing for the guidance and the “thrill.” Intuition, waiting upon the thrill of Beauty that guided it, at first lay inactive.

My behaviour seemed scarcely of the orthodox, official kind, soldierly least of all. There was uneasiness, there was cursing, probably; there were certainly remarks not complimentary. Prompt, decisive action was the obvious and only course… while I sat quietly in the Headquarters Bungalow, a sensitive youth again, a dreamer, a poet, hungry for the inspiration of Beauty that the gorgeous tropical night concealed with her excess of smothering abundance.

This incongruity between my procedure and the time-honoured methods of “strong” Governors must have seemed exasperating to those who waited, respectful, but with nerves on edge, in the canvassed and tented regions behind the Headquarters clearing. Indeed, the Foreign Office, could it have witnessed my unpardonable hesitation, might well have dismissed me on the spot, I think. For I sat there, dreaming in my deck-chair on the verandah, smoking a cigarette, safe within my net from the countless poisonous mosquitoes, and listening to the wind in the palms that fringed the heavy jungle round the building.

Smoking quietly, dreaming, listening, waiting, I sat there in this mood of inner attention and expectancy, knowing that the guidance I anticipated must surely come.

A few clouds sprawled in their beds of silver across the sky; the heat, the perfume, were, as always, painfully, excessive; the moonlight bathed the huge trees and giant leaves with that habitual extravagance which made it seem ordinary, almost cheap and wonderless. Very silent the wooden house lay all about me, there were no footsteps, there was no human voice. I heard only the wash of the heavy-scented wind through the colossal foliage that hardly stirred, and watched, as a hundred times before, the immense heated sky, drenched in its brilliant and intolerable moonlight. All seemed a riot of excess, an orgy.

Then, suddenly, the shameless night drew on some exquisite veil, as the moon, between three-quarters and the full, slid out of sight behind a streaky cloud. A breath, it seemed, of lighter wind woke all the perfume of the burdened forest leaves. The shouting splendour hushed; there came a whisper and, at last — a hint.

I watched with relief and gratitude the momentary eclipse, for in the half-light I was aware of that sharp and tender mood which was preparatory to the thrill. Slowly sailing into view again from behind that gracious veil of cloud—

The moon put forth a little diamond peak,

No bigger than an unobserved star,

Or tiny point of fairy scimitar;

Bright signal that she only stooped to tie

Her silver sandals, ere deliciously

She bowed into the heavens her timid head.

And then it came. The Thrill stole forth and touched me, passing like a meteor through my heart, but in that lightning passage, cleaving it open to some wisdom that seemed most near to love. For power flowed in along the path that Beauty cleft for it, and with the beauty came that intuitive guidance I had waited for.

The inspiration operated like a flash. There was no reasoning; I was aware immediately that another and a better way of dealing with the situation was given me.

I need not weary you with details. It seemed contrary to precedent, advice, against experience too, yet it was the right, the only way. It threatened, I admit, to destroy the prestige so long and laboriously established, since it seemed a dangerous yielding to the natives that must menace the white life everywhere and render trade in the Colony unsafe. Yet I did not hesitate…. There was bustle at once within that Bungalow; the orders went forth; I saw the way and chose it — to the dismay, outspoken, of every white man whose welfare lay in my official hands.

And the results, I may tell you now without pride, since, as we both admit, no credit attaches to myself — the results astonished the entire Colony…. The Chiefs came to me, in due course, bringing fruit and flowers and presents enough to bury all Headquarters, and with a reverential obedience that proved the rising scotched to death — because its subtle psychological causes had been marvellously understood.

Full comprehension, as I mentioned earlier in this narrative, we cannot expect to have. Its origin, I may believe, lies hid in the nature of that Beauty which is truth and love — in the source of our very life, perhaps, which lies hid again with beauty very far away…. But I may say this much at least: that it seemed, my inspired action had co-operated with the instinctive beliefs of these mysterious tribes — cooperated with their primitive and ancient sense of Beauty. It had, inexplicably to myself, fulfilled their sense of right, which my subordinates would have outraged. I had acted with, instead of against, them.

More I cannot tell you. You have the “crude instance,” and you have the method. The instances multiplied, the method became habit. There grew in me this personal attitude towards an impersonal power I hardly understood, and this attitude included an emotion — love. With faith and love I consequently obeyed it. I loved the source of my guidance and assistance, though I dared attach no name to it. Simple enough the matter might have been, could I have referred its origin to some name — to our mother or to you, to my Chief in London, to an impersonal Foreign Office that has since honoured me with money and a complicated address upon my envelopes, or even, by a stretch of imagination, to that semi-abstract portion of my being some men call a Higher Self.

To none of these, however, could I honestly or dishonestly ascribe it. Yet, as in the case of those congratulatory telegrams from our mother and yourself, I was aware — and this feeling never failed with each separate occurrence — aware that somebody, other than ourselves individually or collectively — was pleased.

V

What I have told you so far concerns a growth chiefly of my inner life that was almost a new birth. My outer life, of event and action, was sufficiently described in those monthly letters you had from me during the ten years, broken by three periods of long-leave at home, I spent in that sinister and afflicted land. This record, however, deals principally with the essential facts of my life, the inner; the outer events and actions are of importance only in so far as they interpret these, since that which a man feels and thinks alone is real, and thought and feeling, of course, precede all action.

I have told you of the Thrill, of its genesis and development; and I chose an obvious and rather banal instance, first of all to make myself quite clear, and, secondly, because the majority were of so delicate a nature as to render their description extremely difficult. The point is that the emotion was, for me, a new one. I may honestly describe it as a birth.

I must now tell you that it first stirred in me some five years after I left England, and that during those years I had felt nothing but what most other men feel out here. Whether its sudden birth was due to the violent country, or to some process of gradual preparation that had been going forward in me secretly all that time, I cannot tell. No proof, at any rate, offered itself of either. It came suddenly. I do know, however, that from its first occurrence it has strengthened and developed until it has now become a dominating influence of a distinctly personal kind.

My character has been affected, perhaps improved. You have mentioned on several occasions that you noted in my letters a new tenderness, a new kindness towards my fellow-creatures, less of criticism and more of sympathy, a new love; the “birth of my poetic sense” you also spoke of once; and I myself have long been aware of a thousand fresh impulses towards charity and tolerance that had, hitherto, at any rate, lain inactive in my being.

I need not flatter myself complacently, yet a change there is, and it may be an improvement. Whether big or small, however, I am sure of one thing: I ascribe it entirely to this sharper and more extended sensitiveness to Beauty, this new and exquisite receptiveness that has established itself as a motive-power in my life. I have changed the poet’s line, using prose of course: There is beauty everywhere and therefore joy.

And I will explain briefly, too, how it is that this copybook maxim is now for me a practical reality. For at first, with my growing perception, I was distressed at what seemed to me the lavish waste, the reckless, spendthrift beauty, not in nature merely but in human nature, that passed unrecognized and unacknowledged. The loss seemed so extravagant. Not only that a million flowers waste their sweetness on the desert air, but that such prodigal stores of human love and tenderness remain unemployed, their rich harvest all ungathered — because, misdirected and misunderstood, they find no receptacle into which they may discharge.

It has now come to me, though only by a slow and almost imperceptible advance, that these stores of apparently unremunerative beauty, this harvest so thickly sown about the world, unused, ungathered — prepare yourself, please, for an imaginative leap — are used, are gathered, are employed.

By Whom?

I can only answer: By someone who is pleased; and probably by many such.

How, why, and wherefore — I catch your crowd of questions in advance — we need not seek exactly to discover, although the answer of no uncertain kind, I hear within the stillness of a heart that has learned to beat to a deeper, sweeter rhythm than before.

Those who loved beauty and lived it in their lives, follow that same ideal with increasing power and passion afterwards — and forever.

The shutter of black iron we call Death hides the truth with terror and resentment; but what if that shutter were, after all, transparent?

A glorious dream, I hear you cry. Now listen to my answer. It is, for me, a definite assurance and belief, because — I know.

Long before you have reached this point you will, I know, have reached also the conclusion (with a sigh) that I am embarked upon some commonplace experience of ghostly return, or, at least, of posthumous communication. Perhaps I wrong you here, but in any case I would at once correct the inference, if it has been drawn. You remember our adventures with the seance-mongers years ago? … I have not changed my view so far as their evidential value is concerned. Be sure of that.

The dead, I am of opinion, do not return; for, while individuals may claim startling experiences that seem to them of an authentic and convincing kind, there has been no instance that can persuade us all — in the sense that thunderstorm convinces us all. Such individual experiences I have always likened to the auto-suggestion of those few who believe the advertisements of the hair-restorers — you will forgive the unpoetic simile for the sake of its exactitude — as against the verdict of the world that a genuine discovery of such a remedy would leave no single doubter in Europe or America, nor even in the London Clubs! Yet each time I read the cunning article (I have less hair than when I ran away from Sandhurst that exciting July night and met you in the Strand!), and look upon the picture of the man, John Henry Smith, “before and after using,” I admit the birth of an unreasonable belief that there may be something in it after all.

Of such indubitable proof, however, there is, alas, as yet no sign.

And so with the other matter — the dead do not “return.” My story, therefore, be comforted, has no individual instance to record. It may, on the other hand, be held to involve a thread of what might be called — at a stretch — posthumous communication, yet a thread so tenuous that the question of personal direction behind it need hardly be considered at all. For let me confess at once that, the habit of the “thrill” once established, I was not long in asking myself point blank this definite question: Dared I trace its origin to my own unfruitful experience of some years before? — and, discovering no shred of evidence, I found this positive answer: Honestly I could not.

That “somebody was pleased” each time Beauty offered a wisdom I accepted, became an unanswerable conviction I could not argue about; but that the guidance — waking a responsive emotion in myself of love — was referable to any particular name I could not, by any stretch of desire or imagination, bring myself to believe.

Marion, I must emphasise, had been gone from me five years at least before the new emotion gave the smallest hint of its new birth; and my feeling, once the first keen shame and remorse subsided — I confess to the dishonouring truth — was one of looking back upon a painful problem that had found an unexpected solution. It was chiefly relief, although a sad relief, I felt…. And with the absorbing work of the next following years (I took up my appointment within six months of her death) her memory, already swiftly fading, entered an oblivion whence rarely, and at long intervals only, it emerged at all. In the ordinary meaning of the phrase, I had forgotten her. You will see, therefore, that there was no desire in me to revive an unhappy memory, least of all to establish any fancied communication with one before whose generous love I had felt myself dishonoured, if not actually disgraced. Even the remorse and regret had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a “personal emotion” is quite another matter.

The more remarkable, therefore, is the statement truth now compels me to confess to you — namely, that this origin is recognizable, and that I have traced in part the name it owns to. My next sentence you divine already; you at once suspect the name I mean. I hear you say to yourself with a smile — “So, after all…!”

Please, wait a moment, and listen closely now; for, in reply to your suspicion, I can give neither full affirmation or full denial. Yet an answer of a certain kind is ready: I have stated my firm conviction that the dead do not return; I do not modify it one iota; but I mentioned a moment ago another conviction that is mine because I know. So now let me supplement these two statements with a third: the dead, though they do not return, are active; and those who lived beauty in their lives are — benevolently active.

This may prepare you for a further assurance, yet one less easy to express intelligibly. Be patient while I make the difficult attempt.

The origin of the wisdom that now seeks to shape and guide my life through Beauty is, indeed, not Marion, but a power that stands behind her, and through which, with which, the energy of her being acts. It stood behind her while she lived. It stands behind not only her, but equally behind all those peerless, exquisite manifestations of self-less love that give bountifully of their best without hope or expectation of reward in kind. No human love of this description, though it find no object to receive it, nor one single flower that “wastes” its sweetness on the desert air, but acknowledges this inexhaustible and spendthrift source. Its evidence lies strewn so thick, so prodigally, about our world, that not one among us, whatever his surroundings and conditions, but sooner or later must encounter at least one marvellous instance of its uplifting presence. Some at once acknowledge the exquisite flash and are aware; others remain blind and deaf, till some experience, probably of pain, shall have prepared and sensitized their receptive quality. To all, however, one day, comes the magical appeal. As in my own case, there was apparently some kind of preparation before I grew conscious of that hunger for beauty which, awakening intuition, opened the heart to truth and so to wisdom. It then came softly, delicately, whispering like the dawn, yet rich with a promise I could, at first, not easily fathom, though as sure of fulfilment as that promise of day that steals upon the world when night is passing.

I have tried to tell you something of this mystery. I cannot add to that. I was lifted, as it were, towards some region or some state of being, wherein I was momentarily aware of a vaster outlook upon life, of a deeper insight into the troubles of my fellow-creatures, where, indeed, there burst upon me a comprehension of life’s pains and difficulties so complete that I may best describe it as that full understanding which involves also full forgiveness, and that sympathy which is love, God’s love.

This exaltation passed, of course, with the passing of the thrill that made it possible; it was truly instantaneous; a point of ecstasy, perhaps, in some category not of time at all, but of some state of consciousness that lifted me above, outside of, self. But it was real, as a thunderstorm is real. For, with this glimpse of beauty that I call the “thrill,” I touched, for an instant so brief that it seemed timeless in the sense of having no duration, a pinnacle of joy, of vision, beyond anything attainable by desire or by intellect alone. I stood aware of power, wisdom, love; and more, this power, wisdom, love were mine to draw upon and use, not in some future heaven, but here and now.

With this, moreover, Marion was involved, as warmth must ever be involved with light. She was a portion of it, if you will; she used it, worked by means of it, conveyed it, poured it into me even as light pours warmth into the body. Does this seem idle metaphysics to you? Believe me, it was practical as bread and butter. I do not mean that her personality, as an individual consciousness, sought to influence my own, but that, owing to the beauty of her self-less love, she was one with this great power, benevolently active, a power of which in life she had been an exquisite manifestation. And it was her self-less love for me that opened the connecting channel. That which was gross, perhaps, in life, had vanished with the gross elements of the flesh; she was become “one with that loveliness” which now she “made more lovely.” … And I, seizing upon an item in this power, called it Marion, since she was my channel into it. This statement may exceed the actual truth. It is, at any rate, the nearest to the actual truth that, by way of description, I can reach. There was this personal attitude in myself, there was this strong emotion; and it was of love — the deepest, purest love life had yet shown me.

It was a considerable time, perhaps a year or two, from the birth of this new emotion to the moment when the personal attitude stole into me. I had, as you realize, no positive link with Marion, but merely a vague, unhappy memory of distressing kind, a negative memory, if I may call it so — in the main, a desire to forget. Indeed, I had forgotten her, in the sense that into the stress and strain of my busy, active life no emotion ever inserted itself. Least of all was there the faintest wish for her return, ghostly or otherwise.

But now, with the growth of this personal attitude, there grew also a certain strange revival of memory that, for the first time, was not distasteful to me. This was the first change I noticed in myself. I had hitherto banished any tendency to such revival, and so successfully, that the brief days of our married life had faded into the kind of general haze that covers early childhood. I now welcomed it. …

Those few weeks had been happy in a negative way; no scene, no single incident of clashing wills, of jarring disagreement, had marred a single hour; it was only that the gulf fixed between us had grown more and more painfully apparent, and with a consequent sadness of remorse in myself that she, for her part, never once acknowledged. She knew, as I have told you, yet never showed me that she knew. In the sense so paramountly precious to all lovers, I can say that no ill-considered word or action threw any cloud upon one single moment of our mild, short honeymoon. Regret of that vile kind I had been spared. My pity was too sure and deep, my tenderness too real; and a passion of grave worship in my heart must, in any case, have rendered impossible anything crude or petty. There seemed only, alas, this gulf we could not bridge — that, as against my tenderest pity, her mighty love seemed wasted and unfruitful.

Here, then, is the marvel and the wonder in me as I write: that her divine and generous love was not unfruitful after all. It was not wasted, it was not unharvested. Listen carefully, please, for I tell you her secret that is now at last my own. Not only was this love not unharvested — it was regenerative, it was creative. It has remade my soul.

All true love, I suppose, is regenerative and creative in a sense: if it wins no response in the few years at its disposal, it wakes at least some ghost of a desire of response; it makes its recipient aware of emptiness which, being the first shamed consciousness of unworthiness, holds, perhaps, some ghostly seedling of desire. Why cannot I love? — stirs faintly in the heart.

Again and again, at any rate, this bitter question had made itself audible within me, until the failure to give of my very best in return woke a positive, though then a despairing, hunger. Looking back upon the short time we had together, and her great offering, it is a fact that I was aware of this dim hope, almost a belief, that one day it must come, that her unstinted passion must eventually win a similarly great response.

The death-scene talk I cannot explain. This is not a novel, but a transcript from actual life. Nor do I care to speculate whether those strange words were uttered out of some memory of a former life in which, as a Singer in the Temple, she had contracted a debt towards me that she sought to pay — a memory awakened in the act of death. Was this love a restitution dating from some long-forgotten platform where our souls had stood together, and had she, untrue then to her vocation, used her power to undo the souls of men, my own among them? Were we, indeed, washed down the ages by the waves of our own acts? Who knows? It was sweet enough to think that I had brought repentance to her at the close of some forgotten life, and so earned the benefit of love she offered. The idea was logical as well as picturesque, while our strange mood of passion needed, I think, an explanation that did not offer….

As for the memories that I said revived in me, and with an absence now of pain that soon passed into actual happiness, I began to recall in particular two definite items. The accident, for all its dreadful vividness, I seemed unable to reconstruct — the one touch of horror and ugliness we had known together. This ghastly thing was somehow blurred and veiled, so that I recalled only the sweetness of the autumn sky, the soft wind in the poplars, the fresh grass whereon she lay, and the dumb sympathy of the doctor who was a stranger to us both. Of our mild happiness together — the drives by the sea, the walks, the laughter in theatres and gatherings of friends, the talks and reading over the fire those chill September nights, the scenes in sunshine and … in the darkness, that might have been so sweet yet remained so barren: of these, as a whole, no picture came back sharply. But two items in the brief panorama revived in me as though of yesterday — her singing to the accompaniment of the harp she loved, and her last sentences the wind took off into the evening sky:

“I need your forgiveness, born of love, but love lies unawakened in you still,” and the final phrase of all: “I have failed … but I shall try again…”

VI

I returned to England with an expectant hunger born of this love of beauty that was now ingrained in me. I came home with the belief that my yearning would be satisfied in a deeper measure; and more — that, somehow, it would be justified and explained. I may put it plainly, if only to show how difficult this confession would have been to anyone but yourself; it sounds so visionary from a mere soldier and man of action such as I am. For my belief included a singular dream that, in the familiar scenes I now revisited, some link, already half established, would be strengthened, and might probably be realized, even proved.

In Africa, as you know, I had been set upon the clue at home in England. Among the places and conditions where this link had been first established in the flesh, must surely come a fuller revelation. Beauty, the channel of my inspiration, but this time the old sweet English beauty, so intimate, so woven through with the fresh wonder of earliest childhood days, would reveal the cause of my first failure to respond, and so, perhaps, the intention of those final pathetic sentences that still haunted me with their freight of undelivered meaning. In England, T believed, my “thrill” must bring authentic revelation.

I came back, that precarious entity, a successful man. I was to be that thing we used to laugh about together in your Cambridge days, a distinguished personality; I should belong to the breed of little lions. Yet, during the long, tedious voyage, I realized that this held no meaning for me; I did not feel myself a little lion, the idea only proved that the boy in me was not yet dead. My one desire, though inarticulate until this moment of confessing it, was to renew the thrills, and so to gather from an intenser, sweeter beauty some measure of greater understanding they seemed to promise. It was a personal hope, a personal desire; and, deep at the heart of it, Memory, passionate though elusive, flashed her strange signal of a personal love. In this dream that mocked at time, this yearning that forgot the intervening years, I nursed the impossible illusion that, somehow or other, I should become aware of Marion.

Now, I have treated you in this letter as though you were a woman who reads a novel, for in my first pages I have let you turn to the end and see that the climax is a happy one, lest you should faint by the way and close my story with a yawn. You need not do that, however, since you already know this in advance. You will bear with me, too, when I tell you that my return to England was in the nature of a failure that, at first, involved sharpest disappointment. I was unaware, as a whole, of the thrills I had anticipated with such longing. The sweet picture of English loveliness I had cherished with sentimental passion during my long exile hardly materialized.

That I was not a lion, but an insignificant quasi-colonial adventurer among many others, may have sprinkled acid upon my daily diet of sensation, but you will do me the justice to believe that this wounded vanity was the smallest item in my disenchantment. Ten years, especially in primitive, godforsaken Africa, is a considerable interval; I found the relationship between myself and my beloved homeland changed, and in an unexpected way.

I was not missed for one thing, I had been forgotten. Except from our mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the first sight of the “old country,” I found England and the English dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave heavy dinner-parties, they wrote letters to the Times, and ignored an outside world beyond their island. Their estimate of themselves and of foreigners remained unaltered, their estimate of rich or influential neighbours was what it always had been, there were many more motorcars and a few more peers, it was more difficult than formerly to get into a good club; but otherwise, God bless them, they were worthier than ever. The “dear old country,” that which “out there” we had loved and venerated, worked and fought for, was stolid and unshaken; the stream of advancing life that elsewhere rushed, had left England complaisantly unmoved and unresponsive.

You have no idea how vividly — and in what curious minor details — the general note of England strikes a traveller returning after an interval of years. Later, of course, the single impression is modified and obscured by other feelings. I give it, therefore, before it was forgotten. England had not budged. Had it been winter instead of early spring, I might sum up for you what I mean in one short sentence: I travelled to London in a third-class railway carriage that had no heating apparatus.

But to all this, and with a touch of something akin to pride in me, I speedily adjusted myself. I had been exiled, I had come home. As our old nurse, aged and withered, but otherwise unaltered, said to me quietly by way of greeting: “Well, they didn’t kill you, Master Richard!” I was, therefore, alive. It was for me, the unimportant atom, to recover my place in the parent mass. I did so. I was English. I recovered proportion. I wore the accustomed mask; I hid both my person and my new emotions, as was obviously expected of me. Having reported my insignificance to the Foreign Office…. I came down to the Manor House.

Yet, having changed, and knowing that I had changed, I was aware of a cleft between me and my native stock. Something un-English was alive in me and eager to assert itself. Another essence in my blood had quickened, a secret yearning that I dared not mention to my kind, a new hunger in my heart that clamoured to be satisfied, yet remained, speaking generally, un-nourished. Looking for beauty among my surroundings and among my kith and kin, I found it not; there was no great Thrill from England or from home. The slowness, the absence of colour, imagination, rhythm, baffled me, while the ugliness of common things and common usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I am peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception — I am no artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression — but that a certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so proud to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, not a leader, far less a prophet. There was no imagination.

In little things, as I said, a change was manifest, however. Much that tradition had made lovely with the perfume of many centuries I found modernized until the ancient spirit had entirely fled, leaving a shell that was artificial to the point of being false. The sanction of olden time that used to haunt with beauty was deceived by a mockery I found almost hideous. The ancient inns, for instance, adapted to weekend motor traffic, were pretentious and uncomfortable, their “menus” of inferior food written elaborately in French. The courtliness had vanished, and the cost had come. Telephones everywhere not only destroyed privacy, but brought dismay into countless gentle intimacies, their nuisance hardly justified by their usefulness. Life, it seemed, in a frantic hurry, had been cheapened, not improved; there was no real progress, but only more unrest. England — too solid to go fast, had made ungainly efforts; but she had moved towards ungraciousness where she had moved at all; I found her a cross between a museum and an American mushroom town that advertises all the modern comforts with a violent insistence that is meant to cloak their very absence.

This, my first impression, toned down, of course, a little later; but it was my first impression. The people, however, even in the countryside, seemed proud both of mushroom and museum, and commercial ugliness, greedy and unashamed, now distorted every old-world village. The natives were pleased to the point of vanity.

For myself, I could not manage this atrocious compromise, and looking for the dear old England of our boyhood days, I found it not. The change, of course, was not in the country only, but in myself. The soul in me, awakened to a new standard, had turned round to face another way.

•   •   •

The Manor House was very still when I arrived from London — a late May evening between the sunset and the dark. Mother, as you know, met me at the station, for they had stopped the down-train by special orders, so that I stepped out upon the deserted platform of the countryside quite alone, a distinguished man, with my rug and umbrella. A strange footman touched his hat, an old, stooping porter stared hard at me, then smiled vaguely, while the guard, eyeing respectfully the individual for whom his train had halted, waved his red flag, and swung himself into the disappearing van with the approved manner we once thought marvellous. I left the empty platform, gave up my ticket to an untidy boy, and crossed the gloomy booking-hall. The mournfulness of the whole place was depressing. I heard a blackbird whistle in a bush against the signal-box. It seemed to scream.

Mother I first saw, seated in the big barouche. She was leaning back, but sat forwards as I came. She looked into my face across the wide interval of years now ended, and my heart gave a great boyish leap, then sank into stillness again abruptly. She seemed to me exactly the same as usual — only so much smaller. We embraced with a kind of dignity:

“So here you are, my boy, at last,” I heard her say in a quiet voice, and as though she had seen me a month or two ago, “and very, very tired, I’ll be bound.”

I took my seat beside her. I felt awkward, stiff, self-conscious; there was disappointment somewhere.

“Oh, I’m all right, mother, thanks,” I answered. “But how are you?” And the next moment, it seemed to me, I heard her asking if I was hungry — whereupon, absurd as it must sound, I was aware of an immense emotion that interfered with my breathing. It broke up through some repressive layer that had apparently concealed it, and made me feel — well, had I been thirty-five years younger, I could have cried — for pleasure. Mother, I think, forgot those years perhaps. To her I was still in overalls and wanted food. We drove, then, in comparative silence the four miles behind the big pair of greys, the only remark that memory credits me with being an enquiry about the identity of the coachman whose dim outline I saw looming in the darkness just above me. The lamplight showed one shoulder, one arm, one ear, the rest concealed; but the way he drove was, of course, unmistakeable; slowly, more cautiously, perhaps, but with the same flourish of the whip, the same air of untold responsibility as ever. And, will you believe it, my chief memory of all that scene of anticipated tenderness and home-emotion is the few words he gave in reply to my enquiry and recognition when at length the carriage stopped and I got out:

“Well, Brown, I’m glad to see you again. All well at home, I hope?” followed by something of sympathy about his beloved horses.

He looked down sideways at me from the box, touching his cockade with the long yellow whip in his thick, gloved hand. I can hear his warm, respectful answer now; I can see the gleam of proud pleasure in his eye:

“Yes, sir, thank you, Sir Richard, and glad to see you back again, sir, and with such success upon you.”

I moved back to help our mother out. I remember thinking how calm, how solid, how characteristically inarticulate it all was. Did I wish it otherwise? I think not. Only there was something in me beating its wings impatiently like a wild bird that felt the bars close round it…. Mother, I realized, could not have said even what the old coachman had said to save her life, and I remember wondering what would move her into the expression of natural joy. All that half-hour, as the hoofs echoed along the silence of the country road, and the old familiar woods and fields slid past, no sign of deep emotion had escaped her. She had asked if I was hungry….

And then the smells! The sweet, faint garden smell in the English twilight — of laurels and laurestinus, of lilac, pinks, and the heavy scent of May, wall-flowers and sweet william too — these, with the poignant aroma of the old childhood house, were the background of familiar loveliness against which my subsequent disillusion of the homeland set itself in such afflicting contrast. I remember, as we entered the dim hall, the carriage lamps fell on, the flowering horse-chestnut by the door; the bats were flitting; a big white moth whirred softly against the brilliant glass as though you and I were after it again with nets and killing-bottles… and, helping mother out, I noticed, besides her smallness, how slow and aged her movements were.

“Mother, let me help you. That’s what I’ve come home for,” I said, feeling for her little hand. And she replied so quietly, so calmly it was almost frigid, “Thank you, dear boy; your arm, perhaps — a moment. They are so stupid about the lamps in the hall, I’ve had to speak so often. There, now! It is an awkward step.” I felt myself a giant beside her. She seemed so tiny now. There was something very strong in her silence and her calm; and though a portion of me liked it, another portion resented it and felt afraid. Her attitude was like a refusal, a denial, a refusal to live, a denial of life almost. A tinge of depression, not far removed from melancholy, stole over my spirit. The change in me, I realized then, indeed, was radical.

•   •   •

Now, lest this narrative should seem confused, you must understand that my disillusions with regard to England were realized subsequently, when I had moved about the counties, paid many solid visits, and tasted the land and people in some detail. And the disappointment was the keener owing to the fact that very soon after my arrival in the old Home Place, the “thrill” came to me with a direct appeal that was disconcerting. For coming unexpectedly, as it did, in this familiar scene where yet previously I had never known it, it had the effect of marking the change in me with a certainty from which there was no withdrawal possible. It standardized this change. The new judgement was made uncompromisingly clear; people and places must inevitably stand or fall by it. And the first to fall — since the test lies beyond all control of affection or respect — was our own dear, faithful mother.

You share my reverence and devotion, so you will feel no pain that I would dishonour a tie that is sacred to us both in the old Bible sense. But, also, you know what a sturdy and typical soul of England she has proved herself, and that a sense of beauty is not, alas, by any stretch of kindliest allowance, a national characteristic. Culture and knowledge we may fairly claim, no doubt, but the imaginative sense of beauty is so rare among us that its possession is a peculiarity good form would suppress. It is a pose, an affectation, it is unmanly — it is not English. We are too strong to thrill. And that one so near and dear to me, so honoured and so deeply loved, should prove herself to my new standard thus typically English, while it came as sharpest pain, ought not, I suppose, to have caused me the surprise it did. It made me aware, however, of the importance of my new criterion, while at the same time aware of a lack of sympathy between us that amounted to disenchantment. It was a shock, to put it plainly. A breath of solitude, of isolation, stole on me and, close behind it, melancholy.

From the smallest clue imaginable the truth came into me, from a clue so small, indeed, that you may smile to think I dared draw such big deductions from premises so insignificant. You will probably deny me a sense of humour even when you hear. So let me say at once, before you judge me hastily, that the words, and the incident which drew them forth, were admittedly inadequate to the deduction. Only, mark this, please — I drew no deduction. Reason played no part. Cause and effect were unrelated. It was simply that the truth flashed into me. I knew.

What did I know? Perhaps that the gulf between us lay as wide as that between the earth and Sirius; perhaps that we were, individually, of a kind so separate, so different, that mutual understanding was impossible; perhaps that while she was of Today and proud of it, I was of another time, another century, and proud of that. I cannot say precisely. Her words, while they increased my sense of isolation, of solitude, of melancholy, at the same time also made me laugh, as assuredly they will now make you laugh.

For, while she was behind me in the morning-room, fingering some letters on the table, I stood six feet away beside the open window, listening to the nightingales — the English nightingales — that sang across the quiet garden in the dusk. The high-pitched clamour of the jungle choruses with their monstrous turmoil, their prolific detail, came back to me in startling contrast. This exquisite and delicious sound I now heard belonged still to England. And it had not changed. “No hungry generations tread thee down…” rose in some forgotten corner of my mind, and my yearning that would be satisfied moved forth to catch the notes.

“Listen, mother,” I said, turning towards her.

She raised her head and smiled a little before reading the rest of the letter that she held.

“I only pray they won’t keep you awake, dear boy,” she answered gently. “They give us very little peace, I’m afraid, just now.”

Perhaps she caught some expression in my face, for she added a trifle more quickly: “That’s the worst of the spring — our English spring — it is so noisy!” Still smiling, she picked up her letter again, while I, though still listening by the window, heard only the harsh scream and rattle of the jungle voices, thousands and thousands of miles away across the world.

VII

It was some little time after my arrival, as I shall presently relate, that the experience I call the thrill came to me in England — and, like all its predecessors, came through Nature. It came, that is, through the only apparatus I possessed as yet that could respond.

The point, I think, is of special interest; I note it now, on looking back upon the series as a whole, though at the time I did not note it.

For, compared with yourself at any rate, the aesthetic side of me is somewhat raw; of pictures, sculpture, music I am untaught and ignorant; with other Philistines, I “know what I like,” but nothing more. It is the honest but uncultured point of view. I am that primitive thing, the mere male animal. It was my love of Nature, therefore, that showed me beauty, since this was the only apparatus in my temperament able to respond. Natural, simple things, as before, were the channel through which beauty appealed to that latent store of love and wisdom in me which, it almost seemed, were being slowly educated.

The talks and intimacies with our mother, then, were largely over; the re-knitting of an interrupted relationship was fairly accomplished; she had asked her questions, and listened to my answers. All the dropped threads had been picked up again, so that a pattern, similar to the one laid aside, now lay spread more or less comfortably before us. Outwardly, things seemed much as they were when I left home so many years ago. One might have thought the interval had been one of months, since her attitude refused to recognize all change, and change, qua growth, was abhorrent to her type. For whereas I had altered, she had remained unmoved.

So unsatisfying was this state of things to me, however, that I felt unable to confide my deepest, as now I can do easily to you — so that during these few days of intercourse renewed, we had said, it seemed, all that was to be said with regard to the past. My health was most lovingly discussed, and then my immediate and remoter future. I was aware of this point of view — that I was, of course, her own dear son, but that I was also England’s son. She was intensely patriotic in the insular sense; my soul, I mean, belonged to the British Empire rather than to humanity and the world at large. Doubtless, a very right and natural way to look at things…. She expressed a real desire to “see your photographs, my boy, of those outlandish places where they sent you”; then, having asked certain questions about the few women (officers’ wives and so forth) who appeared in some of them, she leaned back in her chair, and gave me her very definite hopes about “my value to the country,” my “duty to the family traditions,” even to the point, finally, of suggesting Parliament, in what she termed with a certain touch of pride and dignity, “the true Conservative interest.”

“Men like yourself, Richard, are sorely needed now,” she added, looking at me with a restrained admiration; “I am sure the Party would nominate you for this Constituency that your father and your grandfather both represented before you. At any rate, they shall not put you on the shelf!”

And before I went to bed — it was my second or third night, I think — she had let me see plainly another hope that was equally dear to her: that I should marry again. There was an ominous reference to my “ample means,” a hint of regret that, since you were unavailable, and Eva dead, our branch of the family could not continue to improve the eastern counties and the world. At the back of her mind, indeed, I think there hovered definite names, for a garden party in my honour was suggested for the following week, to which the Chairman of the Local Conservatives would come, and where various desirable neighbours would be only too proud to make my acquaintance and press my colonial and distinguished fingers.

In the interval between my arrival and the “experience” I shall presently describe, I had meanwhile renewed my acquaintance with the countryside. The emotions, however, I anticipated, had even cherished and eagerly looked forward to, had not materialized. There was a chill of disappointment over me. For the beauty I had longed for seemed here so thickly veiled; and more than once I surprised in my heart a certain regret that I had come home at all. I caught myself thinking of that immense and trackless country I had left; I even craved it sometimes, both physically and mentally, as though, for all its luscious grossness, it held something that nourished and stimulated, something large, free and untamed that was lacking in this orderly land, so neatly fenced and parcelled out at home.

The imagined richness of my return, at any rate, was unfulfilled; the tie with our mother, though deep, was uninspiring; while that other more subtle and intangible link I had fondly dreamed might be strengthened, if not wholly proved, was met with a flat denial that seemed to classify it as non-existent. Hope, in this particular connection, returned upon me, blank and unrewarded…. The familiar scenes woke no hint of pain, much less of questing sweetness. The glamour of association did not operate. No personal link was strengthened.

And, when I visited the garden we had known together, the shady path beneath the larches; saw, indeed, the very chairs that she and I had used, the framed portrait in the morning-room, the harp itself, now set with its limp and broken strings in my own chamber — I was unaware of any ghostly thrill; least of all could I feel that “somebody was pleased.”

Excursion farther afield deepened the disenchantment.

The gorse was out upon the Common, that Common where we played as boys, thinking it vast and wonderful with the promise of high adventure behind every prickly clump. The vastness, of course, was gone, but the power of suggestion had gone likewise. It was merely a Common that deserved its name. For though this was but the close of May, I found it worn into threadbare patches, with edges unravelled like those of some old carpet in a seaside lodging-house. The lanes that fed it were already thick with dust as in thirsty August, and instead of eglantine, wild-roses, and the rest, a smell of petrol hung upon hedges that were quite lustreless. On the crest of the hill, whence we once thought the view included heaven, I stood by those beaten pines we named The Fort, counting jagged bits of glass and scraps of faded newspaper that marred the bright green of the sprouting bracken.

This glorious spot, once sacred to our dreams, was like a great backyard — the Backyard of the County — while the view we loved as the birthplace of all possible adventure, seemed to me now without spaciousness or distinction. The trees and hedges cramped the little fields and broke their rhythm. No great winds ever swept them clean. The landscape was confused: there was no adventure in it, suggestion least of all. Everything had already happened there.

And on my way home, resentful perhaps yet eager still, I did a dreadful thing. Possibly I hoped still for that divine sensation which refused to come. I visited the very field, the very poplar … I found the scene quite unchanged, but found it also — lifeless. The glamour of association did not operate. I knew no poignancy, desire lay inert. The thrill held stubbornly aloof. No link was strengthened…. I came home slowly, thinking instead of my mother’s plans and wishes for me, and of the clear intention to incorporate me in the stolid and conventional formulas of what appeared to me as uninspired English dullness. My disappointment crystallized into something like revolt. A faint hostility even rose in me as we sat together, talking of politics, of the London news just come to hand, of the neighbours, of the weather too. I was conscious of opposition to her stereotyped plans, and of resentment towards the lack of understanding in her. I would shake free and follow beauty. The yearning, for want of sympathy, and the hunger, for lack of sustenance, grew very strong and urgent in me.

I longed passionately just then for beauty — and for that revelation of it which included somewhere the personal emotion of a strangely eager love.

VIII

This, then, was somewhat my state of mind, when, after our late tea on the verandah, I strolled out on to the lawn to enjoy my pipe in the quiet of the garden paths. I felt dissatisfied and disappointed, yet knew not entirely perhaps, the reason. I wished to be alone, but was hungry for companionship as well. Mother saw me go and watched attentively, but said no word, merely following me a moment with her eyes above the edge of the Times she read, as of old, during the hours between tea and dinner. The Spectator, her worldly Bible, lay ready to her hand when the Times should have been finished. They were, respectively, as always, her dictionary of opinion, and her medicine-chest. Before I had gone a dozen yards, her head disappeared behind the printed sheet again. The roses flowed between us.

I felt her following glance, as I felt also its withdrawal. Then I forgot her…. A touch of melancholy stole on me, as the garden took me in its charge. For a garden is a ghostly place, and an old-world garden, above all, leads thought backwards among vanished memories rather than forward among constructive hopes and joys.

I yielded, in any case, a little to this subtle pressure from the past, and I must have strolled among the lilac and laburnums for a longer time than I knew, since the gardener who had been trimming the flowerbeds with a hand lawn-mower was gone, and dusk already veiled the cedars, when I found myself leaning against the wooden gate that opened into the less formal part beyond the larches.

The house was not visible from where I stood. I smelt the May, the lilac, the heavy perfume everywhere of the opening year; it rose about me in waves, as though full-bosomed summer lay breathing her great promises close at hand, while spring, still lingering, with bright eyes of dew, watched over her. Then, suddenly, behind these richer scents, I caught a sweeter, wilder tang than anything they contained, and turning, saw that the pines were closer than I knew. A waft of something purer, fresher, reached my nostrils on a little noiseless wind, as, leaning across the gate, I turned my back upon the cultivated grounds and gazed into a region of more natural, tangled growth.

The change was sudden. It was exquisite, sharp and unexpected, too, as with a little touch of wonder. There was surprise in it. For the garden, you will remember, melts here insensibly into a stretch of scattered pines, where heather and bracken cover wide reaches of unreclaimed and useless land. Irregular trails of whitish sand gleamed faintly before the shadows swallowed them, and in the open patches I saw young silver-birches that made me think of running children arrested in mid-play. They stood outlined very tenderly against the sky; their slender forms still quivered; their feathery hair fell earthwards as they drew themselves together, bending their wayward little heads before the approaching night. Behind them, framed by the darker pines into a glowing frieze, the west still burned with the last fires of the sunset; I could see the heather, rising and falling like a tumbled sea against the horizon, where the dim heave of distant moorland broke the afterglow.

And the dusk now held this region in its magic. So strange, indeed, was the contrast between the ebony shadows and the pools and streaks of amberish light, that I looked about me for a moment, almost sharply. There was a touch of the unearthly in this loveliness that bewildered sight a little. Extraordinarily still the world was, yet there seemed activity close upon my footsteps, an activity more than of inanimate Nature, yet less than of human beings. With solidarity it had nothing to do, though it sought material expression. It was very near. And I was startled, I recognized the narrow frontier between fear and wonder. And then I crossed it.

For something stopped me dead. I paused and stared. My heart began to beat more rapidly. Then, ashamed of my moment’s hesitation, I was about to move forward through the gate, when again I halted. I listened, and caught my breath. I fancied the stillness became articulate, the shadows stirred, the silence was about to break.

I remember trying to think; I wanted to relieve the singular tension by finding words, if only inner words — when, out of the stillness, out of the silence, out of the shadows — something happened. Some faculty of judgement, some attitude in which I normally clothed myself, were abruptly stripped away. I was left bare and sensitive. I could almost have believed that my body had dropped aside, that I stood there naked, unprotected, a formless spirit, stirred and lifted by the passing breeze.

And then it came. As with a sword-thrust of blinding sweetness, I was laid open. Yet so instant, and of such swiftness, was the stroke, that I can only describe it by saying that, while pierced and wounded, I was also healed again.

Without hint or warning, Beauty swept me with a pain and happiness well nigh intolerable. It drenched me and was gone. No lightning flash could have equalled the swiftness of its amazing passage; something tore in me; the emotion was enveloping but very tender; it was both terrible yet dear. Would to God I might crystallize it for you in those few mighty words which should waken in yourself — in everyone! — the wonder and the joy. It contained, I felt, both the worship that belongs to awe and the tenderness of infinite love which welcomes tears. Some power that was not of this world, yet that used the details of this world to manifest, had visited me.

No element of surprise lay in it even. It was too swift for anything but joy, which of all emotions is the most instantaneous: I had been empty, I was filled. Beauty that bathes the stars and drowns the very universe had stolen out of this wild morsel of wasted and uncared-for English garden, and dropped its transforming magic into — me. At the very moment, moreover, when I had been ready to deny it altogether. I saw my insignificance, yet, such was the splendour it had wakened in me, knew my right as well. It could be ever thus; some attitude in myself alone prevented….

And — somebody was pleased.

This personal ingredient lay secure in the joy that assuredly remained when the first brief intolerable ecstasy had passed. The link I desired to recognize was proved, not merely strengthened. Beauty had cleft me open, and a message, if you will, had been delivered. This personal hint persisted; I was almost aware of conscious and intelligent direction. For to you I will make the incredible confession, that I dare phrase the experience in another fashion, equally true: In that flashing instant I stood naked and shelterless to the gaze of someone who had looked upon me. I was aware of sight; of eyes in which “burning memory lights love home.” These eyes, this sight had gazed at me, then turned away. For in that blinding sweetness there was light, as with the immediate withdrawal again there was instant darkness. I was first visible, then concealed. I was clothed again and covered.

And the thick darkness that followed made it appear as though night, in one brief second, had taken the place of dusk.

Trembling, I leaned across the wooden gate and waited while the darkness settled closer. I can swear, moreover, that it was neither dream, nor hope, nor any hungry fantasy in me that then recognized a further marvel — I was no longer now alone.

A presence faced me, standing breast-high in the bracken. The garden had been empty; somebody now walked there with me.

•   •   •

It was, as I mentioned, the still hour between the twilight and the long, cool dark of early summer. The little breeze passed whispering through the pines. I smelt the pungent perfume of dry heather, sand, and bracken. The horizon, low down between the trunks, shone gold and crimson still, but fading rapidly. I stood there for a long time trembling; I was a part of it; I felt that I was shining, as though my inner joy irradiated the world about me. Nothing in all my life has been so real, so positive. I was assuredly not alone….

The first sharp magic, the flash that pierced and burned, had gone its way, but Beauty still stood so perilously near, so personal, that any moment, I felt, it must take tangible form, betray itself in visible movement of some sort, break possibly into audible sound of actual speech. It would not have surprised me — more, it would have been natural almost — had I felt a touch upon my hands and lips, or caught the murmur of spoken words against my ear.

Yet from such direct revelation I shrank involuntarily and by instinct. I could not have borne it then. I had the feeling that it must mar and defile a wonder already great enough; there would have lain in it, too, a betrayal of the commonplace, as of something which I could not possibly hold for true. I must have distrusted my own senses even, for the beauty that cleft me open dealt directly with the soul alone, leaving the senses wholly disengaged. The Presence was not answerable to any lesser recognition.

Thus I shrank and turned away, facing the familiar garden and the “wet bird-haunted English lawn,” a spiritual tenderness in me still dreading that I might see or hear or feel, destroying thus the reality of my experience. Yet there was, thank God, no speech, no touch, no movement, other than the shiver of the birches, the breath of air against my cheek, the droop and bending of the nearer pine boughs. There was no audible or visible expression; I saw no figure breast-high in the bracken. Yet sound there was, a moment later. For, as I turned away, a bird upon a larch twig overhead burst into sudden and exultant song.

IX

Now, do not be alarmed lest I shall attempt to describe a list of fanciful unrealities that borrowed life from a passing emotion merely; the emotion was permanent, the results enduring. Please believe the honest statement that, with the singing of that bird, the pent-up stress in me became measurably articulate. Some bird in my heart, long caged, rang out in answering inner song.

It is also true, I think, that there were no words in me at the moment, and certainly no desire for speech. Had a companion been with me, I should probably have merely lit my pipe and smoked in silence; if I spoke at all, I should have made some commonplace remark: “It’s late; we must be going in to dress for dinner….” As it was, however, the emotion in me, answering the singing of the bird, became, as I said, measurably articulate. I give you simple facts, as though this were my monthly Report to the Foreign Office in days gone by. I spoke no word aloud, of course. It was rather that my feelings found utterance in the rapturous song I listened to, and that my thoughts knew this relief of vicarious expression, though of inner and inaudible expression. The beauty of scene and moment were adequately recorded, and forever in that song. They were now part of me.

Unaware of its perfect mission the bird sang, of course because it could not help itself; perhaps some mating thrush, perhaps a common blackbird only; I cannot say; I only realized that no human voice, no human music, even of the most elaborate and inspired kind, could have made this beauty, similarly articulate. And, for a moment I knew my former pain that I could not share this joy, this beauty, with others of my kind, that, except for myself, the loveliness seemed lost and wasted. There was no spectator, no other listener; the sweet spring night was lavish for no audience; the revelation had been repeated, would be repeated, a thousand thousand times without recognition and without reward.

Then, as I listened, memory, it seemed, took yearning by the hand, and led me towards that inner utterance I have mentioned. There was no voice, least of all that inner voice you surely have anticipated. But there was utterance, as though my whole being combined with nature in its birth.

Into the mould of familiar sentences of long ago it ran, yet nearer at last to full disclosure, because the pregnant sentences had altered:

“I need your forgiveness born of love…” passed through me with the singing of the bird.

I listened with the closest inner attention I have ever known. I paused. My heart brimmed with an expectant wonder that was happiness. And the happiness was justified. For the familiar sentence halted before its first sorrowful completion; the poignant close remained unuttered — because it was no longer true.

Out of deep love in me, new-born, that held the promise of fulfilment, the utterance concluded:

“… I have found a better way….”

Before I could think or question, and almost as though a whisper of the wind went past, there rose in me at once this answering recognition. It seemed authentically convincing; it was glorious; it was full of joy:

“That beauty which was Marion lives on, and lives for me.”

It was as though a blaze of light shone through me; somewhere in my body there were tears of welcome; for this recognition was to me reunion.

•   •   •

It must seem astonishing for me, a mere soldier and Colonial Governor, to confess you that I stood there listening to the song for a long interval of what I can only term, with utmost sincerity, communion. Beauty and love both visited me; I believe that truth and wisdom entered softly with them. As I wrote above, I saw my own insignificance, yet, such was the splendour in me, I knew my right as well. It could be ever thus. My attitude alone prevented. I was not excluded, not cut off. This Beauty lay ready to my hand, always available, forever, now. It was not unharvested. But more — it could be shared with others; it was become a portion of myself, and that which is part of my being must, inevitably and automatically, be given out.

It was, thus, nowhere wasted or unharvested; it offered with prodigal opportunity a vehicle for that inspiration which is love, and being love of purest kind, is surely wisdom too. The dead, indeed, do not return, yet they are active, and those who lived beauty in their lives are still, through that beauty, benevolently active.

I will give you now the change instantaneously produced in me:

There rose in me another, deeper point of view that dispelled as by magic the disenchantment that had chilled these first days of my return. I stood here in this old-world garden, but I stood also in the heart of that beauty, so carefully hidden, so craftily screened behind the obvious, that strong and virile beauty which is England. Within call of my voice, still studying by lamplight now the symbols of her well-established strength, burning, moreover, with the steady faith which does not easily break across restraint, and loving the man as she had loved the little boy, sat one, not wondering perhaps at my unspoken misunderstanding, yet hoping, patiently and in silence, for its removal in due time. In the house of our boyhood, of our earliest play and quarrels, unchanged and unchangeable, knowing simply that I had “come home again to her,” our mother waited….

I need not elaborate this for you, you for whom England and our mother win almost a single, undivided love. I had misjudged, but the cause of my misjudgment was thus suddenly removed. A subtler understanding insight, a sympathy born of deeper love, something of greater wisdom, in a word, awoke in me. The thrill had worked its magic as of old, but this time in its slower English fashion, deep, and characteristically sure. To my country (that is, to my first experience of impersonal love) and to my mother (that is, to my earliest acquaintance with personal love) I had been ready, in my impatience, to credit an injustice. Unknown to me, thus, there had been need of guidance, of assistance. Beauty, having cleared the way, had worked upon me its amazing alchemy.

There, in fewest possible words, is what had happened.

I remember that for a long time, then, I waited in the hush of my childhood’s garden, listening, as it were, with every pore, and conscious that someone who was pleased interpreted the beauty to my soul. It seemed, as I said, a message of a personal kind. It was regenerative, moreover, in so far that life was enlarged and lifted upon a nobler scale; new sources of power were open to me; I saw a better way. Irresistibly it came to me again that beauty, far from being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming kind, and that someone who was pleased co-operated with it for my personal benefit. No figure, thank God, was visible, no voice was audible, but a presence there indubitably was, and, whether I responded or otherwise, would be always there.

And the power was such that I felt as though the desire of the planet itself yearned through it for expression.

X

I watched the little bird against the paling sky, and my thoughts, following the happy singing, went slowly backwards into the half-forgotten past…. They led me again through the maze of gorgeous and mysterious hopes, un-remembered now so many years, that had marked my childhood. Few of these, if any, it seemed, had known fulfilment…. I stole back with them, past the long exile in great Africa, into the region of my youth and early boyhood….

And, as though a hand uncovered it deliberately, I recalled an earliest dream — strangest, perhaps, of all the mysterious dreams of that far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly, till this moment, it had lain forgotten — a boyish dream that behind the veils of the Future someone waited for me with the patience of a perfect love that was my due.

The dream reached forward towards someone who must one day appear, and whose coming would make life sweet and wonderful, fulfilling, even explaining, the purpose of my being. This dream which I had thought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if not to the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable vanity (and probably a grimace at being neatly duped), I had laid it on one side. At any rate, I forgot it, for nothing happened to keep it active, much less revive it.

Now, however, looking backwards, and listening to the singing in the sky, I recalled what almost seemed to have been its attempt at realization. Having recovered its earliest appearance, my thought next leaped forward to the moment that might possibly have been its reappearance. For memory bore me off without an effort on my part, and set me abruptly within a room of the house I had come home to, where Marion sat beside me, singing to the harp she loved. The scene rose up before me as of yesterday… the emotions themselves reconstituted. I recalled the deep, half-sad desire to be worthy of her, to persuade myself I loved as she did, even the curious impulse to acknowledge an emotion that came and went before it could be wholly realized — the feeling, namely, that I ought to love her because — no more, no less is the truth — because she needed it: and then the blank dismay that followed my failure, as with a kind of shameful horror before a great purpose that my emptiness left unfulfilled.

The very song came back that moved me more than any else she sang — her favourite it was as well. I heard the twanging of the strings her fingers plucked. I heard the words:

About the little chambers of my heart

Friends have been coming — going — many a year.

The doors stand open there.

Some, lightly stepping, enter; some depart.

Freely they come and go, at will.

The walls give back their laughter; all day long

They fill the house with song.

One door alone is shut, one chamber still.

With each repetition of the song, I remembered, how at that time my boyhood’s dream came back to me, as though its fulfilment were at last at hand; as though, somehow, that “door” must open, that “still chamber” welcome the sweetness and the loveliness of her who sang. For I could not listen to the music, nor watch her fingers moving down the strings, her slender wrist and rounded arm, her foot upon the pedal as she held the instrument so close — without this poignant yearning that proved ever vain, or this shame of unshed tears my heart mysteriously acknowledged. To the end, as you know, that door remained unopened, that chamber still.

It was the singing of this sweet English bird, making articulate for me the beauty I could not utter, that brought back to memory the scene, the music, and the words….

I looked round me; I looked up. As I did so, the little creature, with one last burst of passionate happiness, flew away into the darkness. And silence followed, so deep that I could hear the murmur of my blood… an exquisite joy ran through me, making me quiver with expectancy from head to foot….

And it was then suddenly I became aware that the long-closed door at last was open, the still chamber occupied. Someone who was pleased, stretching a hand across the silence and the beauty, drew me within that chamber of the heart, so that I passed behind the door that was now a veil, and now a mist, and now a shining blaze of light… passed into a remote and inner stillness where that direct communion which is wordless can alone take place.

It was, I verily believe, a stillness of the spirit. At the centre of the tempest, of the whirlpool, of the heart’s commotion, there is peace. I stood close against that source of our life which lies hid with beauty very far away, and yet so near that it is enclosed in every hope, in every yearning, and in every tear. For the whisper came to me, beyond all telling sure.

Beauty had touched me, Wisdom come to birth; and Love, whispering through the silence those marvellous words that sum up all spiritual experience, proved it to me:

“Be still — and know….”

•   •   •

I found myself moving slowly across the lawn again towards the house. I presently heard the wind mousing softly in the limes. The air was fresh and cool. The first stars were out. I saw the laburnum drooping, as though thick clusters of these very stars had drifted earthwards among the branches; I saw the gleam of the lilac; across the dim tangle of the early roses shone the familiar windows, cosy now with the glow of lighted lamps… and I became suddenly, in a very intimate sense, “aware” of the garden. The Presence that walked beside me moved abruptly closer. This Presence and the garden seemed, as in some divine mysterious way, inseparable.

There was a stirring of the dimmest and most primitive associations possible. Memory plunged back among ancestral, even racial, shadows. I recalled the sweet and tender legend of the beginnings of the world, when something divine, it was whispered, was intimate with man, and companioning his earliest innocence, walked with him in that happier state those childlike poets called — a garden. That childhood of the world seemed very near.

I found again the conditions of innocence and pristine wonder — of simplicity. There was a garden in my heart, and someone walked with me therein. For Life in its simplest form — of breathing leaves and growing flowers, of trees and plants and shrubs — glowed all about me in the darkness. The blades of grass, the blossoms hanging in the air, strong stems and hidden roots, fulfilled themselves with patience upon every side, brimming with beauty and stillness did not seek to advertise. And of this simplest form of life — the vegetable kingdom — I became vividly aware, prodigal, mysterious, yet purposive. The outer garden merged with the inner, and the Presence walked in both of them….

I was led backwards, far down into my own being. I reached the earliest, simplest functions by which I myself had come to be, the state where the frontier lies between that which is dead and that which is alive. Somewhere between the mineral and vegetable worlds, I knew, that frontier lay. For the vegetable kingdom alone possesses the power of converting the mineral or the chemical into the living organism by absorption; and here, among the leaves and roots and flowers, that power was sweetly, irresistibly, at work.

It seemed I reached that frontier, and I passed it. Beauty came through the most primitive aspect of my being.

And so I would tell you, you alone of all the world, that the Presence walking beside me in the scented darkness came suddenly so close that I was aware of it in what seemed my earliest and most innocent state of soul.

Beside me, in that old-world garden, walked the Cause of all things. The Beauty that in you was truth, in Marion tenderness, was harvested: and somebody was pleased.

XI

All this I have told to you because we have known together the closest intimacy possible to human beings — we have shared beauty.

They said, these many days ago, that you had gone away, that you were dead. The wind on the Downs, your favourite Downs, your favourite south-west wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen into space. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you now in my long letter. It is enough. I know.

There were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the other realized at the time…. In the body there was promise. There is now accomplishment.

It is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill your empty room — on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt, congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of the matter. I am evidently not “an artist” — that at any rate I gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write about something they had never “lived.” I could almost believe that the writers of these subtle analyses have never themselves felt beauty — the burn, the rapture, the regenerating fire. They have known, perhaps, a reaction of the physical nerves, but never this light within the soul that lifts the horizons of the consciousness and makes one know that God exists, that death is not even separation, and that eternity is now.

Metaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after the proper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies in the object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end I came back hungrily to my simple starting-point — that beauty moved me. It opened my heart to one of its many aspects — truth, wisdom, joy, and love — and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered!

I sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question my judgement: coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all. Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I cared or any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these. The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarly explanations of beauty’s genesis and laws of working, because I felt it. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anything be more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, and to the second a tangible man or woman — and let those who have the time analyse both cravings at their leisure.

For the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in common with that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen to miss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is no shock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill I speak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is of the spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, I think, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writing this intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it is unearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously, then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of the entire being into light and knowledge.

The element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes unheralded — a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is unrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across the phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is not in time. It is eternity.

I suspect you know it now with me; in fact I am certain that you do….

I remember how, many years ago — in that delightful period between boyhood and manhood when we felt our wings and argued about the universe — we discovered this unearthly quality in three different things: the song of a bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flower come upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, we agreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which is spontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains to Eternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things.

So, at least, in our youthful eagerness, we agreed; and to this day one in particular of the three — a bird’s song — always makes me think of God. That divine, ecstatic, simple sound is to me ever both surprising and unearthly. Each time it takes me by surprise — that people do not hush their talk to kneel and listen…. And of the eyes of little children — if there is any clearer revelation granted to us of what is unearthly in the sense of divinity brought close, I do not know it. Each time my spirit is arrested by surprise, then filled with wondering joy as I meet that strange open look, so stainless, accepting the universe as its rightful toy, and, as with the bird and flower, saying Yes to life as though there could not possibly exist a No.

The wildflower too: you recall once — it was above Igls when the Tyrolean snows were melting — how we found a sudden gentian on the dead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts stroked all one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no single blade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon that star of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, the whole passion of the earth in each pointed petal. A distant avalanche, as though the hills were settling, the bustle of the torrent, the wind in the pines and larches, only marked by contrast the incredible stillness of the heights — then, suddenly, this star of blue blazing among the desolation. I recall your cry and my own — wonder, joy, as of something unearthly — that took us by surprise.

In these three, certainly, lay the authentic thrill I speak of; while it lasts, the actual moment seems but a pedestal from which the eyes of the heart look into Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leaps out into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the essential meaning of the thrill — that Heaven is here and now. The gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening — upon the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of Eternity is yours forever — now.

•   •   •

I am writing this to you, because I know you listen with your heart, not with your nerves; and the garden that I write about you know now better than I do myself. I have but tasted it, you dwell therein, unaged, unageing. And so we share the flowers; we know the light, the fragrance and the birds we know together…. They tell me — even our mother says it sometimes with a sigh — that you are far away, not understanding that we have but recovered the garden of our early childhood, you permanently, I whenever the thrill opens the happy gates. You are as near to me as that. Our love was forged inside those ivory gates that guard that childhood state, facing four ways, and if I wandered outside a-while, puzzled and lonely, the thrill of beauty has led me back again, and I, have found your love unchanged, unaged, still growing in the garden of our earliest memories. I did but lose my way for a time….

That childhood state must be amazingly close to God, I suppose, for though no child is consciously aware of beauty, its whole being cries Yes to the universe and life as naturally and instinctively as a flower turns to the sun. The universe lies in its overall pocket of alpaca, and beauty only becomes a thing apart when the growing consciousness, hearing the world cry No, steps through the gates to enquire and cannot find the entrance any more. Beauty then becomes a signpost showing the way home again. Baudelaire, of course, meant God and Heaven, instead of “genius” when he said, “Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté….” (Genius is only childhood rediscovered at will)

And so when I write to you, I find myself again within the garden of our childhood, that English garden where our love shared all the light and fragrance and flowers of the world together. “Time’s but a golden wind that shakes the grass,” and since my thought is with you, you are with me now… and now means always or it means nothing.

So these relationships are real still among a thousand shadows. Your beauty was truth, hers was unselfish love. The important thing is to know you still live, not with regret and selfish grief, but with that joy and sure conviction which makes the so-called separation a temporary test, perhaps, but never a final blow. What are the few years of separation compared to this certainty of co-operation in eternity? We live but a few years together in the flesh, yet if those few are lived with beauty and beautifully, the tie is unalterably forged which fastens us lovingly together forever. Where, how, under what precise conditions it were idle to enquire and unnecessary — the wrong way too. Our only knowledge (in the scientific sense) comes to us through our earthly senses. To forecast our future life, constructing it of necessity upon this earthly sensory experience, is an occupation for those who have neither faith nor imagination. All such “heavens” are but clumsy idealizations of the present — “Happy Hunting Grounds” in various forms: whereas we know that if we lived beauty together, we shall live it always — “afterwards,” as our poor time-ridden language phrases it. For Beauty, once known, cannot exclude us. We cooperated with the Power that makes the universe alive.

And, knowing this, I do not ask for your “return,” or for any so-called evidence that you survive. In beauty you both live now with less hampered hands, less troubled breath, and I am glad.

Why should you come, indeed, through the gutter of my worn, familiar, personal desires, when the open channel of beauty lies ever at the flood for you to use? Coming in this way, you come, besides, for many, not for me alone, since behind every thrill of beauty stand the countless brave souls who lived it in their lives. They have entered the mighty rhythm that floats the spiral nebulae in space, as it turns the little aspiring Nautilus in the depths of the sea. Having once felt this impersonal worship which is love of beauty, they are linked to the power that drives the universe towards perfection, the power that knocks in a million un-advertised forms at every human heart: and that is God.

With that beneficent power you cooperate. I ask no other test. I crave no evidence that you selfishly remember me. In the body we did not know so closely. To see into your physical eyes, and touch your hand, and hear your voice — these were but intermediary methods, symbols, at the best. For you I never saw nor touched nor heard. I felt you — in my heart. The closest intimacy we knew was when together we shared one moment of the same beauty; no other intimacy approaches the reality of that; it is now strengthened to a degree unrealized before. For me that is enough. I have that faith, that certainty, that knowledge. Should you come to me otherwise I must disown you. Should you stammer through another’s earthly lips that you now enjoy a mere idealized repetition of your physical limitations, I should know my love, my memory, my hope degraded, nay, my very faith destroyed.

To summon you in that way makes me shudder. It would be to limit your larger uses, your wider mission, merely to numb a selfish grief born of a faithless misunderstanding.

Come to me instead — or, rather, stay, since you have never left — be with me still in the wonder of dawn and twilight, in the yearning desire of inarticulate black night, in the wind, the sunshine, and the rain. It is then that I am nearest to you and to your beneficent activity, for the same elemental rhythm of Beauty includes us both. The best and highest of you are there; I want no lesser assurance, no broken personal revelation. Eternal beauty brings you with an intimacy unknown, impossible, indeed, to partial disclosure. I should abhor a halting masquerade, a stammering message less intelligible even than our intercourse of the body.

Come, then! Be with me, your truth and Marion’s tenderness linked together with what is noblest in myself. Be with me in the simple loveliness of an English garden where you and I, as boys together, first heard that voice of wonder, and knew the Presence walking with us among the growing leaves.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

ONANONANON

Certain things had made a deep impression in his child hood days; among these was the incident of the barking dog.

It barked during his convalescence from something that involved scarlet and a peeling skin; his early mind associated bright colour and peeling skin with the distress of illness. The tiresome barking of a dog accompanied it. In later years this sound always brought back the childhood visualisation: across his mind would flit a streak of vivid colour, a peeling skin, a noisy dog, all set against a background of emotional discomfort and physical distress. “It’s barking at me!” he complained to his old nurse, whose explanation that it was “Carlo with his rheumatics in the stables” brought no relief. He spoke to his mother later: “It never, never stops. It goes on and on and on on purpose — onanonanon!”

How queer the words sounded! He had got them wrong somewhere — onanonanon. Or was it a name, the name of the barking animal — Onan Onan Onanonanon? His mother’s words were more comforting:

“Carlo’s barking because you’re ill, darling; he wants you to get well.” And she added: “Soon I’ll bring him in to see you. You shall ride on his back again.”

“Would he peel if I stroked him?” he enquired, a trifle frightened. “Is the skin shiny like mine?”

She shook her head and smiled. “I’ll explain to him,” she went on, “and then he’ll understand. He won’t bark any more.” She brought the picture-book of natural history that included all creatures in Ark and Zoo and Jungle. He picked out the brightly-coloured tiger.

“A tiger doesn’t bark, does it?” he asked, and her reply added slightly to his knowledge, but much to his imagination. “But does it ever bark?” he persisted. “That’s really what I asked.”

“Growls and snarls,” said a deep voice from the door way. He started; but it was only his father, who then came in and amused him by imitating the sound a tiger makes, until Carlo’s naughtiness was forgotten, and the world went on turning smoothly as before.

After that the barking ceased; the rheumatic creature sniffed the air and nosed the metal biscuit tray in silence. He understood apparently. It had been rather dreadful, this noise he made. The sharp sound had broken the morning stillness for many days; no one but the boy was awake at that early hour; the boy and the dog had the dawn entirely to themselves. He used to lie in bed, counting the number of barks. They seemed endless, they jarred, they never stopped. They came singly, then in groups of three and four at a time, then in a longer series, then singly again. These single barks often had a sound of finality about them, the creature’s breath was giving out, it was tired; it was the full-stop sound. But the true full-stop, the final bark, never came and the boy had complained.

He loved old Carlo, loved riding on his burly back that wobbled from side to side, as they moved forward very slowly; in particular he loved stroking the thick curly hair; it tickled his fingers and felt nice on his palm. He was relieved to know it would not peel. Yet he wondered impatiently why the creature he loved to play with should go on making such a dreadful noise. “Doesn’t he know? Can’t he wait till I’m ready?” There were moments when he doubted if it really was Carlo, when he almost hated the beast, when he asked himself, “Is this Carlo, or is it Onanonanon…?” The idea alarmed him rather. Onanonanon was not quite friendly, not quite safe.

•   •   •

At the age of fifty he found himself serving his King during the Great War — in a neutral country whose police regarded him with disfavour, and would have instantly arrested and clapped him into gaol, had he made a slip. He did not make this slip, though incessant caution had to be his watchword. He belonged to that service which runs risks yet dare claim no credit. He passed under another name than his own, and his alias sometimes did things his true self would not do. This alter ego developed oddly. He projected temporarily, as it were, a secondary personality — which he disliked, often despised, and sometimes even feared. His sense of humour, however, made light of the split involved. When he was followed, he used to chuckle: “I wonder if the sleuths know which of the two they’re tracking down — myself or my alias?”

It was in the melancholy season between autumn and winter, snow on the heights and fog upon the lower levels, when he was suddenly laid low by the plague that milked the world. The Spanish influenza caught him. He went to bed; he had a doctor and a nurse; no one else in the hotel came near his room; the police forgot him, and he forgot the police. His hated alias, Baker, also was forgotten, or perhaps merged back into the parent self…. Outside his quarters on the first floor the plane-trees shed their heavy, rain-soaked leaves, letting them fall with an audible plop upon the gravel path; he heard the waves of the sullen lake in the distance; the crunching of passing feet he heard much closer. The heating was indifferent, the light too weak to read by. It was a lonely, dismal time. On the floor above two people died, three on the one below, the French officer next door was carried out. The hotel, like many others, became a hospital.

In due course, the fever passed, the intolerable aching ceased, he forgot the times when he had thought he was going to die. He lay, half convalescent, remembering the recent past, then the remoter past, and so slipped back to dim childhood scenes when the cross but faithful old nurse had tended him. He smelt the burning leaves in the kitchen-garden, and heard the blackbird whistle beyond the summerhouse. The odour of moist earth in the tool-house stole back, with the fragrance of sweet apples in the forbidden loft. These earliest layers of memory fluttered their ghostly pictures like a cinema before his receptive mind. There were eyes long closed, voices long silent, the touch of hands long dead and gone. The rose-garden on a sultry August afternoon was vivid, with the smell of the rain-washed petals, as the sun blazed over them after a heavy shower. The soaked lawn emitted warm little bubbles like a soft squeezed sponge, audibly, even the gravel steamed. He remembered Carlo, with his rheumatism, his awkward gambol, his squashy dog-biscuit beside the kennel and — his bark.

In the state of semi-unconsciousness he lay, weary, weak, depressed and very lonely. The nurse, on her rare visits, afflicted him, the hotel guests did not ask after him. To the Service at home he was on the sick-list, useless. The morning newspaper and the hurried, perfunctory visits of the doctor were his only interest. It seemed a pity he had not died. The mental depression after influenza can be extremely devastating. He looked forward to nothing.

Then, suddenly, the dog began its barking. He heard it first at six o’clock when, waking, hot and thirsty in a bed that had lost its comfort, he wondered vaguely if the day was going to be fine or wet. His window opened on to the lake. He watched the shadows melt across the dreary room. The late dawn came softly, its, hint of beauty ever unfulfilled. Would it be gold or grey behind the mountains? The dog went on barking.

He dozed, counting the barks without being aware that he did so. He felt hot and uncomfortable, and turned over in bed, counting automatically as he did so: “fifteen, sixteen, seventeen” — pause — “eighteen, nineteen” — another pause, then with great rapidity, “twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three—” He opened his eyes wide and cursed aloud. The barking stopped.

The wind came softly off the lake, entering the room. He heard the last big leaf of the plane-trees rattle to the gravel path. As it touched the ground the barking began again, his counting — now conscious counting — began with it.

“Curse the brute!” he muttered, and turned over once more to try and sleep. The rasping, harsh, staccato sound reached his ears piercingly through sheets and blankets; not even the thick duvet could muffle it. Would no one stop it? Did no one care? He felt furious, but helpless, dreadfully helpless.

It barked, stopped, then barked again. There were: solitary, isolated barks, followed by a rapid series, short and hurried. A shower of barks came next. Pauses were frequent, but they were worse than the actual sound. It continued, it went on, the dog barked without ceasing. It barked and barked. He had lost all count. It barked and barked and barked. It stopped.

“At last!” he groaned. “My God! Another minute, and I—!”

His whole body, as he turned over, knew an immense, deep relaxation. His jangled nerves were utterly exhausted. A great sigh of relief escaped him. The silence was delicious. It was real silence. He rested at last. Sleep, warm and intoxicating, stole gently back. He dozed. Forgetfulness swam over him. He lay in down, in cotton-wool. Police, alias,nurse and loneliness were all obliterated, when, suddenly, across the blissful peace, cracked out that sharp, explosive sound again — the bark.

But the dog barked differently this time; the sound was much nearer. At first this puzzled him. Then he guessed the truth; the animal had come into the hotel and up the stairs; it was outside in the passage. He opened his eyes and sat up in bed. The door, to his surprise, was being cautiously pushed ajar. He was just in time to see who pushed it with such gentle, careful pressure. Standing on the landing in the early twilight was Baker, his other self, his alias, the personality he disliked and sometimes dreaded. Baker put his head round the corner, glanced at him, nodded familiarly, and withdrew, closing the door instantly, making no slightest sound. But, before it closed, and before he had time even to feel astonishment, the dog had been let in. And the dog, he saw at once, was old Carlo!

Having expected a little stranger dog, this big, shaggy, familiar beast caused him to feel a sense of curious wonder and bewilderment.

“But were you the dog down there that barked?” he asked aloud, as the friendly creature came waddling up to the bedside. “And have you come to say you’re sorry?”

It blinked its rheumy eyes and wagged its stumpy tail. He put out his hand and stroked its familiar, wobbly back. His fingers buried themselves in the stiff crinkly hair. Its dim old eyes turned affectionately up at him. It smiled its silly, happy smile. He went on rubbing. “Carlo, good old Carlo!” he mumbled; “well, I’m blessed! I’ll get on your back in a minute and ride—”

He stopped rubbing. “Why did you come in?” he asked abruptly, and repeated the question, a touch of anxiety in his voice. “How did you manage it, really? Tell me, Carlo?”

The old beast shifted its position a little, making a sideways motion that he did not like. It seemed to move its hind legs only. Its muzzle now rested on the bed. Its eyes, seen full, looked not quite so kind and friendly. They cleared a little. But its tail still wagged. Only, now that he saw it better, the tail seemed longer than it ought to have been. There was something unpleasant about the dog — a faint inexplicable shade of difference. He stared a moment straight into its face. It no longer blinked in the silly, affectionate way as at first. The rheum was less. There was a light, a gleam, in the eyes, almost a flash.

“Are you — Carlo?” he asked sharply, uneasily, “or are you — Onanonanon?”

It rose abruptly on its hind legs, laying the front paws on the counterpane of faded yellow. The legs made dark streaks against this yellow. He had begun stroking the old back again. He now stopped. He withdrew his hand. The hair was coming out. It came off beneath his fingers, and each stroke he made left a line of lighter skin behind it. This skin was yellowish, with a slight tinge, he thought, of scarlet.

The dog — he could almost swear to it — had altered; it was still altering. Before his very eyes, it grew, became curiously enlarged. It now towered over him. It was longer, thinner, leaner than before, its tail came lashing round its hollow, yellowing flanks, the eyes shone brilliantly, its tongue was a horrid red. The brute straightened its front paws. It was huge. Its open mouth grinned down at him. He was petrified with terror.

He tried to scream, but the only sound that came were little innocent words of childhood days. He almost lisped them, simpering with horror: “I’d get on your back — if I was allowed out of bed. You’d carry me. I’d ride.”

It was a desperate attempt to pacify the beast, to persuade it, even in this terrible moment, to be friendly, a feeble, hopeless attempt to convince himself that it was — Carlo.

The Monster was twelve feet from head to tail of dull yellow striped with black. The great jaws, wide open, dripped upon his face. He saw the pointed teeth, the stiff, quivering whiskers of white wire. He felt the hot breath upon his cheeks and lips. It was foetid. He tasted it.

He was on the point of fainting when a step sounded outside the door. Someone was coming.

“Saved!” he gasped.

The suspense and relief were almost intolerable. The touch of a hand feeling cautiously, stealthily, over the door was audible. The handle rattled faintly.

“Saved!” his heart repeated, as the great brute turned its giant head to listen. He knew that touch. It was Baker, his hated alias, come in the nick of time to rescue him. Yet the door did not open. Instead, the monster lashed its tail, it stiffened horribly, it turned its head back from watching the door, and lowered itself appallingly. The key turned in the lock, a bolt was shot. He was locked in alone with a tiger. He closed his eyes.

His recurrent nightmare had ruined sleep again, and outside, in the dreary autumn dawn, a little dog was yapping fiendishly on and on and on and on.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE FIRE BODY

A Story

Are persons with a definite delusion more numerous, perhaps, than we suppose, persons sane and normal in their reactions to all the stimuli of daily life, yet entirely, even gravely, deluded on some one particular point?

It was my experience with the Fire Body that raised the question in my mind, and so persistently that I began a thorough and careful investigation of my own special field of weakness. Such a search, of course, however honestly undertaken, can only lead to one conclusion, namely, that any genuine delusion, no matter how gross and outstanding, could never seem a delusion to its possessor. To an outsider alone would it appear as such. Yet an outsider who dared point it out would appear to its possessor as himself deluded, speaking therefore without authority, his reward merely a pitying smile. A real cure can only come from the same source as the delusion — from within oneself.

The lady who introduced me to the Fire Body (my own) was as normal, wholesome, charming and cultured as any I have ever met. She discussed Greek sculpture, winter sports, horses, stock market speculation, music and literature as sensibly as she discussed this Fire Body. All these, I mean, lay in the same plane of reality and actuality as the Fire Body. She did not regard a Fire Body as an exceptional or abnormal object of perception, beyond that it was not, certainly, as commonly known as most things. Though difficult of access, it was not supernatural. It was, to her, as literally real as her gain or loss of one-eighth, or her hearing of Hoist and Scriabin.

•   •   •

The esoterically learned will forgive a few words of preliminary explanation to clear the ground, so to speak, and make what follows intelligible. My explanation may not be strictly orthodox or accurate, for my acquaintance with this particular branch of lore is scanty. From desultory reading of various queer volumes, however, the vague imaginative surmise lay in me that the elements were once regarded as the field of activity, if not the actual clothing, of certain sub-human beings. The four elements of mediaeval superstition seem a trifle out of date at a time when science admits to several score of them, yet some Rosicrucian glamour formerly shed its strange haunting twilight upon the notion that Earth, Air, Fire and Water represented precisely such fields of activity, and that each was inhabited by its own special denizens. Gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders, to say nothing of “Elementals” in general were, if not actual entities, at least Powers of a sort to conjure with.

In these sub-human regions, moreover, the Soul could likewise function and adventure, though not in its ordinary waking consciousness. It must use the appropriate vehicle of Body, of which vehicles or Bodies it possessed the requisite four. The Earth Body was the only one the majority knew about, but Air, Water and Fire Bodies were there for those whose special knowledge or training enabled them to function in them. Leaving their Earth Bodies in sleep or unconsciousness, these few, assuming one or other of the four vehicles according to desire, might adventure in strange airy, watery, or fiery heavens.

Some such imaginative faith apparently enriched the private mental life of the charming woman who introduced me to my own Fire Body; something of this kind of lore, at any rate, lay behind the little episode that follows.

•   •   •

There is no need to remind ourselves at this time of the portentous farce of Johanna Southcott and her ludicrous “Box,” at the opening of which twenty-four bishops, according to the conditions laid down by the Seeress, were to be present. Its opening “when England was in peril,” having been delayed for well over a hundred years, if I remember rightly, was to reveal the means for saving the old country; so when a friend mentioned, “I’m going to the Sesame Club, and you had better come with me,” adding that the occasion was a meeting to consider the immediate opening of the famous Box, possibly its opening then and there, I accepted with all the curiosity of an old New York newspaper reporter. My friend, as a member, led me in; we were already late; the lecture room, where the ceremony was to take place, I found crowded to the ceiling — with women. Not a black coat or a tweed coat was to be seen.

I recall standing a moment on the threshold with my hostess, glancing quickly round at the packed rows of women, and whispering, while I turned nervously to scuttle out, “This is no place for me — I’m off!” At which moment precisely I heard my name rather breathlessly spoken just behind me, and, turning, saw an acquaintance. Miss T., confronting me.

She was rather breathless with forcing her way down from an upper row.

“I’m so glad I just caught you!” she exclaimed, catching, metaphorically, at least, at my coat-tails. “There’s a woman here who’s dying to meet you. Says she simply must. A friend of mine. She was sitting next me when she saw you…!”

I edged towards the hall. “But — er — why exactly?”

“Most extraordinary thing,” pursued Miss T., pursuing me at the same time into the Club vestibule, “but she’s just seen you standing there with all your four Bodies, all in a row, side by side. She hasn’t the faintest notion of your name or who you are.”

“Yes,” I repeated. “My four Bodies, you said?”

“Your Earth Body she has never set eyes on. It’s one of the others she suddenly recognized — your Fire Body. She’s known it for ten years. Known it intimately, she says. She’s dying to meet you. I gave her your name, but she’d never heard of it.”

“How,” I stammered, “where — when — has she met it — me?” Miss T. looked earnestly at me.

My escaping step hesitated. I was intrigued, to say the least.

“Oh, I know nothing of all that,” she explained. “She was sitting next me, when you stepped inside the doorway and looked round the room. You were only there a minute, when she nudged me excitedly and whispered: ‘There he is! My God!’ and pointed. I looked in the direction of her finger and said ‘But that’s a man I know — a Mr. Blackwood.’ Then she jumped up and cried: ‘Oh, do introduce me. I know his Fire Body,’ or I knew him in his Fire Body. I’ve been out with him for years, ten years at least, but I hadn’t a notion who it was. He used to teach me things, all sorts of things, oh, such wonderful things. Oh, please, please introduce me to him before he goes. He’s going already!’ So, please,” urged Miss T., “do stay a moment and I’ll fetch her down!”

She disappeared, leaving me in the vestibule, feeling half intrigued, half foolish. Slightly bewildered, too, I felt. A strange atmosphere of expectancy had already been evoked by the mixed vision of England’s peril, Johanna Southcott, the weird seeress of a century and a half ago, the fluttering lawn sleeves of twenty-four ghostly Bishops hovering in the background, and now, in addition to all this, the splendid dream that I possessed — visibly — three bodies in addition to my familiar physical one. And this in the Sesame Club in Dover Street, London, W. 1. in the Twentieth Century!

I remember looking round me for something to lean upon in more senses than one. People were still crowding in to hear about the Box; but my hostess, a cynical, matter-of-fact lady, was already in her seat, listening to the chairwoman, Mrs. Fox I think, who was now opening the proceedings. My eye rested with satisfaction, I remember, upon the portly hall porter, who was most certainly of this world — when Miss T.’s voice again startled me:

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re still here,” she was saying more breathlessly than before even, “for I’ve brought my friend down. She wants so much to meet you.” And I was introduced forthwith to a charming, good-looking woman of perhaps thirty-three, who stared at me with keen interest and a distinctly scrutinizing and critical expression. Her calm appealed to me from the first; she was dignified, quiet, self-possessed. She said what she had to say once, not twice. After a brief apology for forcing an introduction in this way, and a word of thanks to me for waiting, she expressed her pleasure and her interest at meeting me — “at last.”

“When I told Miss T.,” she said, “I didn’t know your name, I was mistaken. At first, in my excitement, I didn’t connect you with the books — I have read one of your books. But what interests me,” she continued with a stark honesty I admired and appreciated, “was that I saw your figure standing in the porch with three other figures beside it, and that one of these figures I had known for years, I have felt, and still feel,” she added quietly, “a deep, deep gratitude towards it. Until this minute I had no idea who it was.”

In the slight pause that came I asked what the figure was, and why she felt this gratitude.

Before answering me, she looked about for a seat. I reminded her that the meeting had begun, and that Johanna’s Box might possibly be opened while we chatted in the vestibule.

“I’d rather talk with you,” she replied, and led me to a sofa in the guests’ waiting-room.

“The ‘figure,’” she began, “was undoubtedly a Fire body — someone in his Fire Body. I know,” she went on with quiet conviction, “because I myself am Fire.”

I made no comment, and she continued in her even, gentle voice:

“You know,” she explained, “for of course you do — that we all have the Four Elements in us, Earth, Air, Fire and Water. One of them, however, predominates. An individual is thus one of them — an Earth, Air, Fire or Water person. Your horoscope and the Zodiac easily determine this. A Fire person and a Water person never get on — they extinguish each other, while Air and Fire people, on the other hand, stimulate each other. A Fire person will never come to grief by fire, nor a Water person drown — their instinct preserves them. But, of course, you know all this, because you have written about it in your books—”

“So, you are Fire,” I put in quickly.

“I am Fire, yes,” she assured me, “and I know a Fire Body when I see one — naturally. I travel in my Fire Body every night in sleep. That’s how I met yours. You, too, are Fire — though, I judge. Air and Fire too.”

“And why,” I asked, sticking to my original question, “does that make you feel grateful? For you mentioned gratitude just now.”

She paused a minute or two before replying. “Because,” she said at length gravely, “you — you in your Fire Body — have taught me such wonderful things.”

I stared blankly at her.

“Amazing, marvellous things,” she added quietly, yet with intense admiration. “I can never, never, be grateful enough for your guidance, help, instruction. On more than one occasion you have saved my life. The help you gave was above rubies.”

I sat there speechless — in the vestibule of the Sesame Club in Dover Street in the Twentieth Century; but a moment later, having recovered my self-possession, when I proceeded to inquire the nature of this help, how and where we met, what words I spoke, and a few other practical details I wanted to know about, she remarked quietly:

“If you will come to tea tomorrow I will try and tell you a little more about it, if you don’t mind and will forgive — I find this atmosphere difficult to talk in — unsympathetic.” She indicated the fact that neighbours were listening to us. There was certainly a lack of privacy.

She rose, and I rose with her, naturally. I made many apologies for having detained her. I promised to come to tea — it was a flat in Albemarle Street next door, and on the top floor. I made a note of the number, and the following day I arrived punctually at the hour appointed.

We resumed our conversation practically where it had been interrupted. The flat, I noticed, was cosy and delightful, the cakes and China tea were of the best. It was the flat of a cultured woman — lined bookshelves, pictures, sculpture, a piano smothered with music, the best weeklies lying about, serious books everywhere — a flat untidy, lived-in, human, and alert to all the movements of the day. Evidences of an up to date and wide intelligence were obvious enough. And they were natural. First-rate drawings of famous horses too, I noticed, with various splendid photographs of Greek sculpture, water colours of Paestum, Pompei Streets, and some lovely reproductions of Florentine masterpieces.

Under the broad mantelpiece I saw a few indifferent watercolours of Alpine scenery, samples of winter-sport adventure, skiing and the like, and among these one painting in particular that caught my eye. Why this particular painting attracted me I can not explain; the point is that it did so. I kept looking at it, looking back at it, while my hostess talked. It interested me, it drew my attention. For some reason, I wanted to know more about it. It would be only too easy to assert, in view of what was told me later, that it seemed familiar, dramatic too. Yet that would not be strictly true. The strict truth is stated when I say that it interested me — apart from any intrinsic merit. For it was merely a commonplace, distinctly amateur watercolour of a youth with flaming red hair which stood up as though blown by a wind, the face and features ordinary enough, yet with something in the eyes, and in the eyes alone, that startled. Yet the idea rose in me that I had seen it somewhere before. It was in this vague notion of having “seen it before” that the sense of familiarity doubtless arose. I must add that no evidence can possibly support this notion. I had never seen it before, I have never seen anything like it since,

Sufficient, then, for the moment, that I kept looking at it with particular interest; and I recall that I intended at the first opportunity to ask what, and whom, it represented.

My hostess, meanwhile, was chatting over the teacups.

“I was going to tell you about my Fire Body excursions,” she resumed calmly our interrupted conversation. “It must be over ten years ago,” she went on, “that I first became aware of having unusual dreams. Most of us dream, I know, and some of us” — she smiled understandingly — “think our dreams of importance. I never made that mistake. The first thing that made me take my dreams seriously was that I dreamed so coherently.”

“Coherently?” I repeated.

“In the sense,” she explained, “that each dream was a sequel to the last one. I met the same person I had met the night before. The talk of the previous night was resumed where I had left it off on waking. Sometimes I woke on a question I had asked. The next night that question was answered at once — as though there had been no interruption.”

“But the questions and the person?” I ventured: “Were they of interest?”

She stared at me a moment, though I got the impression she looked past me rather than at me. She was thinking. It was not I — as I sat there over my teacup who interested her.

“The questions,” she replied gravely, “were of great interest to me, of supreme interest, I might say. The person was yourself.”

“Myself!” I exclaimed, egotism fixing attention on the point of the person rather than on the nature of the questions.

“You,” she stated emphatically and with intense conviction, “but you — not as I see you now. At this actual moment — drinking tea in my flat,” she explained. “It was you in your Fire Body.”

I stirred my tea. I thought hard a moment. My temperament and interests were not adverse, not hostile certainly, to any conceivable mental adventure. I had William James, Dr. Osty, Boris and Sidehart, so to speak, at my fingertips. The text books, from Charcot to Binet and Feret, to mention no others, poured their accumulated content into my mind. If not hostile, I was certainly advised, and therefore critical. Doubtless, in view of this packed reading and questioning, I was critical in a very real sense.

“In my Fire Body?” I repeated. “You mean, I suppose, that alleged body or vehicle in which our normal consciousness is said to manifest — er — otherwise?”

She gazed at me without comprehension.

“I suppose so,” she answered, after a considerable pause. “All I know is that I met this figure night after night in my dreams, that it told me wonderful things, that it taught me splendid, amazing teachings, and that it was always the same figure — you, whom I saw yesterday afternoon for the first time in waking. I saw this figure standing close beside you at the Sesame Club. I saw you in your physical — or Earth — body. Beside you I saw three other figures I did not know or recognize. I recognized one only — the figure I had met so often in dream — your Fire Body. I was so excited I asked Miss T. who it was.”

We both stared hard.

“May I ask,” I ventured presently, “where we met — in your dream? And what the teaching was?” — for my tongue refused somehow to ask “what I taught you?” No recollection lay in me of having taught this lady anything, in dream or otherwise. “What kind of thing, for instance?”

Our stare continued for some minutes. My impressions during the little interval were mixed, perhaps, yet one stands out clearly. If any woman told the truth, it was my hostess. She was telling quietly, with intense conviction, something she had indubitably experienced. It was as genuine as her gain or loss in the stock market, as her account of skiing down the Murren Race Track, as her reactions at Paestum or Pompei. Of that I feel assured.

“Where?” she repeated my first question. “Well, it’s always the same place. Up a mountainside. You take me up a mountain. It’s very steep, painfully steep. No, you don’t take my hand or help me. You pay little attention to me. You lead and I follow. At a certain spot, always the same spot, you just stop. You turn, You don’t look at me. You just stand there, looking out and down. An immense landscape stretches below us. You gaze out over it. And — you talk. You tell me things. You answer my questions. You are kind, patient, but completely indifferent to me — as an individual. You just tell me things I want to know because you know them and I don’t. You might be talking to a tree or sheep or stone, for all the interest you show in me myself.”

“And — the things we talk about? The questions you ask and I answer?”

She paused again, and again her intense conviction and sincerity came over me. She drew a long breath. “Marvellous,” she whispered. “Perfectly marvellous — and yet so simple that it always mortifies me that I hadn’t understood them without asking.”

A wild hope flashed through me that I might here find myself on the brink, the perilous, uncertain brink, of gathering at some unusual information snatched, stolen even, from the pregnant subconscious searching of what the text books term a “lucid somnambulist.” I caught my breath a moment, probably.

“Tell me,” I suggested, using all the combined command and sympathy of eye and voice at my disposal.

She gazed past me as before. She made an effort, a sincere effort, I am convinced. She was trying to think, trying to remember.

“I can’t,” she said presently with a sigh. “Try as I will, I can not remember. I only know that what you tell me, what you teach me, affects my whole life,” she added. “I never can remember what we talk about — never. I only know it guides and helps, and even saves me. My life in the world would collapse but for that help. Yet I never can remember a single detail afterwards. Not one!”

I did not stir my tea, I drank it down.

“The gist of the teaching stays in you, though you recall nothing of the actual words?” I asked presently, putting it as simply as I could.

Waiting for some time before answering, she said it seemed to be something like that perhaps. During the affairs of the day, when she was perplexed, doubtful, uncertain how to act or what to think, an idea would suddenly flash into her. It seemed to come from nowhere, yet it solved her immediate little problem — marvellously. And each time this happened, there flashed with it a faint haunting memory of some marvellous strange figure belonging to a dream. Not only in daily acts did this occur, but also with her reading, thinking mental life. A puzzle was suddenly resolved, something that perplexed her simplified, a mental problem in some region of her inner life made clear — and always this same fleeting, vanishing picture of a figure who supplied the solution, then fled before memory could possibly seize or label it. Never could she honestly attribute this help to any other source except the figure of her dream, for she could recall only the figure, and never what the figure had told or taught her.

Certainly, I detected no attempt to elaborate or justify. She remembered the figure, yet never precisely what the figure said. She attributed the solution of a given problem, mental or otherwise, to the figure merely because each time the sudden guidance and solution came, this flashing memory of the figure darted across her mind.

It was an interesting story. I had to admit that I myself rarely, if ever, dreamed. My dream-content, possibly, she suggested, found vent in my books, and hence my sleep was blameless and uneventful. We talked, or rather I listened, for an hour or more, but my hostess committed herself to nothing I dared label as nonsense, foolish, or hysterical. There was no personal encounter of any sort, nor any hint of its possibility even. She was interested in my Fire Body, not in me. She made one or two more than thoughtful comments. “Things we have utterly forgotten and can not place,” she mentioned once, “influence the more because we have forgotten them. Having utterly forgotten them,” she explained, “the will and imagination do not oppose or criticize.”

And before I left, on the point of saying good-bye in fact, my eye again caught the little watercolour drawing that had drawn my attention so vividly earlier in the afternoon, and I asked what and who it was.

“Oh, that,” she answered, turning to the picture as I pointed to it. “That,” she explained apologetically, “is a little sketch, a clairvoyante friend of mine, a girl, did for me. She was here one day and said she saw a figure standing behind me always. I asked her to draw it. It’s you,” she said with a smile as I went out. “You in your Fire Body.” She made me a present of it, and it hangs on my walls today in a neat black frame.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

ROMAN REMAINS

Anthony Breddle, airman, home on sick leave from India, does not feel himself called upon to give an opinion; he considers himself a recorder only. The phrase credo quia impossibile, had never come his way; neither had Blake’s dictum that “everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.”

He was under thirty, intelligent enough, observant, a first-rate pilot, but with no special gifts or knowledge. A matter-of-fact kind of fellow, unequipped on the imaginative side, he was on his way to convalesce at his step-brother’s remote place in the Welsh mountains. The brother, a much older man, was a retired surgeon, honoured for his outstanding work with a knighthood and now absorbed in research.

The airman glanced again at the letter of invitation:

“… a lonely, desolate place, I’m afraid, with few neighbours, but good fishing which, I know, you adore. Wild little valleys run straight up into the mountains almost from the garden, you’ll have to entertain yourself. I’ve got lots of fishing rods for you. Nora Ashwell, a cousin you’ve never met, a nurse, also on sick leave of sorts but shortly going back to her job, is dying for companionship of her own age. She likes fishing too. But my house isn’t a hospital! And there’s Dr. Leidenheim, who was a student with me at Heidelberg ages ago, a delightful old friend. Had a Chair in Berlin, but got out just in time. His field is Roman Culture — lots of remains about here — but that’s not your cup of tea, I know. Legends galore air over the place and superstitions you could cut with a knife. Queer things said to go on in a little glen called Goat Valley. But that’s not down your street either. Anyhow, come along and make the best of it; at: least we have no bombing here….”

So Breddle knew what he was in for more or less, but was so relieved to get out of the London blitz with a chance of recovering his normal strength, that it didn’t matter. Above all, he didn’t want a flirtation, nor to hear about Roman remains from the Austrian refugee scholar.

It was certainly a desolate spot, but the house and grounds were delightful, and he lost no time in asking about the fishing. There was a trout stream, it seemed, and a bit of the Wye not too far away with some good salmon pools. At the moment, as rain had swollen the Wye, the trout stream was the thing to go for; and before an early bed that night he had made the acquaintance of the two others, Nora and Emil Leidenheim. He sized, them up, as he called it: the latter a charming, old-fashioned man with considerable personality, cautious of speech, and no doubt very learned; but Nora, his cousin, by no means to his taste. Easy to look at certainly, with a kind of hard, wild beauty, pleasant enough too, if rather silent, yet with something about her he could not quite place beyond that it was distasteful. She struck him as unkempt, untidy, self-centred, careless as to what impression she made on her company, her mind and thoughts elsewhere all the time. She had been out walking that afternoon, yet came to their wartime supper still in shorts. A negligible matter, doubtless, though the three men had all done something by way of tidying up a bit, Her eyes and manner conveyed something he found baffling; as though she was always on the watch, listening, peering for something that was not there. Impersonal, too, as the devil. It seemed a foolish thing to say, but there was a hint in her atmosphere that made him uncomfortable, uneasy, almost gave him a touch of the creeps. The two older men, he fancied, left her father alone.

Outwardly, at any rate, all went normally enough, and a fishing trip was arranged for the following morning.

“And I hope you’ll bring back something for the table,” his brother commented, when she had gone up to bed. “Nora has never yet brought back a single fish. God knows what she does with herself, but I doubt if she goes to the stream at all.” At which an enigmatic expression passed across Dr. Leidenheim’s face, though he did not speak.

“Where is this stream?” his brother asked. “Up that Goat Valley you said was queer, or something. And what did you mean by ‘queer’?”

“Oh, no, not Goat Valley,” came the answer; “and as for ‘queer,’ I didn’t mean anything particular. Just that the superstitious locals avoid it even in the daytime. There’s a bit of hysteria about, you know,” he added, “these, war days, especially in god-forsaken places like this—”

“God-forsaken is good,” Dr. Leidenheim put in quietly, giving the airman an impression somehow that he could have said more but for his host’s presence, while Breddle thought he would like to tap the old fellow’s mind when he got the chance.

•   •   •

And it was with that stressed epithet in his ears that he went up to his comfortable bedroom. But before he fell asleep another impression registered as he lay on that indeterminate frontier between sleeping and waking. He carried it into sleep with him, though no dream followed. And it was this: there was something wrong in this house, something that did not emerge at first. It was concerned with the occupants, but it was due neither to his brother, nor to the Austrian archaeologist. It was due to that strange, wild girl. Before sleep took him, he defined it to himself: Nora was under close observation the whole time by both the older men. It was chiefly, however, Dr. Leidenheim who watched her.

The following morning, broke in such brilliant sunshine that, fishing was out of the question; and when the airman got down to a late breakfast he was distinctly relieved to hear that Nora was already out of the house. She, too, knew that clear skies were no good for trout; she had left a verbal excuse and gone off by herself for a long walk. So Breddle announced that he would do the same. His choice was Goat Valley, he would take sandwiches and entertain himself. He got rough directions from Dr. Leidenheim, who mentioned that the ruins of an ancient temple to the old god, Silvanus, at the end of the valley might interest him. “And you’ll have the place to yourself,” said his brother, laughingly, before disappearing into his sanctum, “unless you run across one of the young monsters, the only living things apparently that ever go there.”

“Monsters! And what may you mean by that?”

It was Dr. Leidenheim who explained the odd phrase.

“Nothing,” he said, “nothing at all. Your brother’s a surgeon, remember. He still uses the words of his student days. He wants to scare you.”

The other, finding him for once communicative, pressed him, if with poor results…

“Merely,” he said in his excellent English, “that there have been one or two unpleasant births during these war years — in my language, Missgeburt (freaks) we call them. Due to the collective hysteria of these strange natives probably.” He added under his breath, as if to himself, something about Urmenschen (primitives) and unheimlich (sinister), though Breddle didn’t know the words.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, catching his meaning “that sort of thing, eh? I thought they were always put out of the way at birth or kept in glass bottles—”

“In my country, that is so, yes. They do not live.”

The airman laughed. “It would take more than a Missgeburt to scare me,” he said, and dropped the unsavoury subject before the old archaeologist got into his stride about the temple to Silvanus and Roman remains in general. Later he regretted he had not asked a few other questions.

•   •   •

Now, Anthony Breddle must be known as what is called a brave man; he had the brand of courage that goes with total absence of imagination. He was a simple mind of the primitive order. Pictures passed through it which he grouped and regrouped, he drew inferences from them, but it is doubtful if he had ever really thought.

As he entered the little valley, his mind worked as usual, automatically. Pictures of his brother and the Austrian flitted across it, both old men, idling through the evening of their day after reasonable success, the latter with a painful background of bitter sufferings under the Nazis. The chat about collective hysteria and the rest did not hold his interest. And Nora flitted through after them; a nurse maybe, but an odd fish assuredly, not his cup of tea in any case. Bit of a wild cat, he suspected, for all her quiet exterior in the house. If she lingered in his mind more vividly than the other two it was, because of that notion of the night before — that she was under observation. She was, obviously, up to something: never bringing in a fish, for instance, that strange look in her eyes, the decided feeling of repulsion she stirred in him. Then her picture faded too. His emotions at the moment were of enjoyment and, carefree happiness. The bright, sunny morning, the birds singing, the tiny stream pretending it was a noisy torrent, the fact that “Operations” lay behind him and weeks of freedom lay ahead … which reminded him that he was, after all, convalescing from recent fevers, and that he was walking a bit too fast for his strength;

He dawdled more slowly up the little glen as the mountain-ash trees and silver birch thickened and the steep sides of the; valley narrowed, passed the tumbled stones of the Silvanus temple without a glance of interest, and went on whistling happily to himself — then, suddenly wondered how an echo of his whistling could reach him through the dense undergrowth. It was not an echo, he realized with a start. It was a different whistle. Someone else, not very far away, someone following him possibly, someone else yes, was whistling. The realization disturbed him. He wanted, above all, to be alone. But, for all that, he listened with a certain pleasure, as he lay in a patch of sunshine, ate his lunch, and smoked, for the tune, now growing, fainter, had an enticing lilt, a haunting cadence, though it never once entered his mind that it was possibly a folk tune of sorts.

It died away; at any rate, he no longer heard it; he stretched out in the patch of warm sunshine, he dozed; probably, he dropped off to sleep …

Yet he is certain he must really have slept, because when he opened his eyes he felt there had been an interval. He lay now in shadow, for the sun had moved. But something else had moved too while he was asleep. There was an alteration in his immediate landscape, restricted though that landscape was. The absurd notion then intruded that someone had been near him while he slept, watching him. It puzzled him; an uneasy emotion disturbed him.

He sat up with a start and looked about him. No wind stirred, not a leaf moved; nor was there any sound but the prattle of the little stream some distance away. A vague disquiet deepened in him. Then he cupped his ears to listen, for at this precise moment the whistling became audible again with the same queer, haunting lilt in it. And he stiffened. This stiffening, at any rate he recognized; this sudden tautening of the nerves he had experienced before when flying. He knew precisely that if came as a prelude to danger: it was the automatic preparation made by body and mind to meet danger; it was — fear.

But why fear in this smiling, innocent woodland? And that no hint of explanation came, made it worse. A nameless fear could not be met and dealt with; it could bring in its wake a worse thing — terror. But an unreasoning terror is an awful thing, and well he knew this. He caught a shiver running over him; and instinctively then he thought he would “whistle to keep his courage up,” only to find that he could not manage it. He was unable to control his lips. No sound issued, his lips were trembling, the flow of breath blocked. A kind of wheeze, however, did emerge, a faint pretence of whistling, and he realized to his horror that the other whistler answered it. Terror then swept in; and, trying feebly again, he managed a reply. Whereupon that other whistling piper moved closer in, and the distance between them was reduced. Yet, oh, what a ravishing and lovely lilt it was! Beyond all words he felt rapt and caught away. His heart, incredibly, seemed mastered. An unbelievable storm of energy swept through him.

He was brave, this young airman, as already mentioned, for he had faced death many times, but this amazing combination of terror and energy was something new. The sense of panic lay outside all previous experience. Genuine panic terror is a rare thing; its assault now came on him like a tornado. It seemed he must lose his head and run amok. And the whistler, the strange piper, came nearer, the distance; between, them again reduced. Energy and terror flooding his being simultaneously, he found relief in movement. He plunged recklessly through the dense undergrowth in the direction of the sound, conscious only of one overmastering impulse — that he must meet this piper face to face, While yet half unconsciously aware that at the same time he was also taking every precaution to move noiselessly, softly, quietly, so as not to be heard. This strange contradiction came back to memory long afterwards, hinting possibly at some remnant of resisting power that saved him from an unutterable disaster.

His reward was the last thing in the world he anticipated.

That he was in an abnormal condition utterly beyond his comprehension there can be no doubt; but that what, he now witnessed registered with complete and positive clarity lay beyond all question. A figure caught his eye through the screen of leaves, a moving — more: a dancing figure, as he stood stock still and stared at — Nora Ashwell. She was perhaps a dozen yards away, obviously unaware of his presence, her clothes in such disorder that she seemed half naked, hatless, with flowers in her loosened hair, her face radiant, arms and legs gesticulating in a wild dance, her body flung from side to side, but gracefully, a pipe of sorts in one hand that at moments went to her lips to blow the now familiar air. She was moving in the direction away from where he stood concealed, but he saw enough to realize that he was watching a young girl in what is known as ecstasy, an ecstasy of love.

He stood motionless, staring at the amazing spectacle: a girl beside herself with love; love, yes, assuredly, but not of the kind his life had so far known about; a lover certainly the banal explanation of her conduct flashed through his bewilderment — but not a lover of ordinary sort. And, as he stared, afraid to move a step, he was aware that this flood of energy, this lust for intense living that drove her, was at work in him too. The frontiers of his normal self, his ordinary world, were trembling; any moment there might come collapse and he, too, would run amok with panic, joy, and terror. He watched as the figure disappeared behind denser foliage, faded then was gone, and that he stood there alone dominated suddenly by one overmastering purpose — that he must escape from this awful, yet enticing valley, before it was too late.

How he contrived it he hardly remembers; it was in literal panic that he raced and stumbled along, driven by a sense of terror wholly new to all his experience. There was no feeling of being followed, nor of any definite threat of a personal kind; he was conscious more of some power, as of the animal kingdom, primitive, powerful, menacing, that assaulted his status as a human being … a panic, indeed, of pagan origin.

He reached the house towards sunset. There was an interval of struggle to return to his normal self, during which, he thanked heaven, he met no member of the household. At supper, indeed, things seemed as usual … he asked and answered questions about his expedition without hesitation, if aware all the time, perhaps, that Dr. Leidenheim observed him somewhat closely, as he observed Nora too. For Nora, equally, seemed her usual, silent self, beyond that her eyes, shining like stars, somehow lent a touch of radiance to her being.

She spoke little; she never betrayed herself. And it was only when, later, Breddle found himself alone with Dr. Leidenheim for a moment before bedtime, that the urgent feeling that he must tell someone about his experiences persuaded him to give a stammering account. He could not talk to his brother, but to a stranger it was just possible. And it brought a measure of relief, though Leidenheim was laconic and even mysterious in His comments. “Ah, yes … yes … interesting, of course, and — er — most unusual. The combination of that irresistible lust for life, yes, and — and the unreasoning terror. It was always considered extremely powerful and — equally dangerous, of course. Your present condition — convalescing, I mean — made you specially accessible, no doubt….”

But the airman could not follow this kind of talk; after listening for a bit, he made to go up to bed, too exhausted to think about it.

It was about three o’clock in the morning when things began to happen and, the first air raid of the war came to the hitherto immune neighbourhood. It was the night the Germans attacked Liverpool. A pilot, scared possibly by the barrage, or chased by a Spitfire and anxious to get rid of his bombs, dropped them before returning home, some of them evidently in the direction of Goat Valley. The three men, gathered in the hall, counted the bursts and estimated a stick had fallen up that way somewhere; and it was while discussing this, that the absence of Nora Ashwell was first noticed. It was Dr. Leidenheim, after a whispered exchange with his host, who went quickly up to her bedroom, and getting no answer to their summons, burst open, the locked door to find the room empty. The bed had not been slept in; a sofa had been dragged to the open window where a rope of knotted sheets hung down to the lawn below; The two brothers hurried out of the house at once, joined after a slight delay by Dr. Leidenheim who had brought a couple of spades with him but made no comment by way of explaining why he did so. He handed one to the airman without a word. Under the breaking dawn of another brilliant day, the three men followed the line of craters made by the stick of bombs towards Goat Valley, as they had surmised. Dr. Leidenheim led them by the shortest way, having so often visited the Silvanus temple ruins; and some hundred yards further on the grey morning light soon showed them what was left of Nora Ashwell, blasted almost beyond recognition. They found something else as well, dead but hardly at all injured.

“It should — it must be buried,” whispered Dr. Leidenheim, and started to dig a hole, signing to the airman to help him with the second spade.

“Burned first, I think,” said the surgeon.

And they all agreed. The airman, as he collected wood and helped dig the hole, felt slightly sick. The sun was up when they reached the house, invaded the still deserted kitchen and made coffee. There was duties to be attended to presently, but there was little talk; and the surgeon soon retired to his study sofa for a hap.

“Come to my room a moment, if you will,” Dr. Leidenheim proposed to the young airman. “There’s something I’d like to read to you; it would perhaps interest you.”

Up in the room he took a book, from, his shelves; “The travels and observations of an old Greek,” he explained, “notes of things he witnessed in his wanderings. Pausanias, you know. I’ll translate an incident he mentions.”

“‘It is said that one of these beings was brought to Sylla as that General returned from Thessaly. The monster had been surprised asleep in a cave. But his voice was inarticulate. When brought into the presence of Sylla, the Roman General, he was so disgusted that he ordered it to be instantly removed. The monster answered in every degree to the description which poets and painters have given of it.’”

“Oh, yes,” said the airman. “And — er — what was it supposed to be, this monster?”

“A Satyr, of course,” replied Dr. Leidenheim, as he replaced the, volume without further comment except the muttered words, “One of the retinue of Pan.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •