from the beginning. Both were tired after, not a day’s, but a year’s
work; both felt selfish and secretly ashamed; both realised also that an
unsuccessful holiday was too grave a risk to run--it involved eleven
months’ disappointment and regret. Yet, if this plan failed, any future
holiday together would be impossible.
“After all,” sighed Frances peevishly at length, “perhaps we _had_
better go separately.”
It was so tiring, this endless effort to find the right place; their
reserve of vitality was not equal to the obstacles that cropped up
everywhere. Full, high spirits are necessary to see things whole. They
exaggerated details. “It’s funny,” he thought; “she _might_ realise that
climbing is what I need. One can paint everywhere!” But in her own mind
the reflection was the same, turned the opposite way: “Bill doesn’t
understand that one can’t paint _anything_. Yet, for climbing, one peak
is just as good as another.” He thought her obstinate and faddy; she
felt him stubborn and rather stupid.
“Now, old girl,” he said at length, pushing his papers aside with a
weary gesture of resignation, having failed to convince her how
admirable his choice had been, “let’s look at _your_ place.” He laughed
patiently, but the cushions provided by food and wine and excitement had
worn thin. Friction increased; words pricked; the tide of sympathy
ebbed--it had been forced really all along, pumped up; their tastes and
temperaments did _not_ amalgamate. Frances opened her Baedeker and
explained mechanically. She now saw clearly the insuperable
difficulties in the way, but for sentimental and affectionate reasons
declined to be the first to admit the truth. She was braver, bigger than
he was, but her heart prevented the outspoken honesty that would have
saved the situation. He, though unselfish as men go, could not conceal
his knowledge that he was so. Each vied with the other in the luxury of
giving up with apparent sweetness, only the luxury was really beyond the
means of either. With the Baedeker before them on the table, the ritual
was again gone through--from her point of view, while in sheer weariness
he agreed to conditions his strength could never fulfil when the time
came. They met half-way upon Champéry in the Valais Alps above the
Rhone. It satisfied neither of them. But speech was exhausted; energy
flagged; the restaurant, moreover, was emptying and lights being turned
out.
They put away Baedeker and paper, paid the bill, and rose to go, each
keenly disappointed, each feeling conscious of having made a big
sacrifice. On the steps he turned to help her put her coat on, and their
eyes met. They felt miles apart. “So much for my holiday,” he thought,
“after waiting eleven months!” and there was a flash of resentful anger
in his heart. He turned it unconsciously against his sister.
“Don’t write for rooms till the end of the week,” he suggested. “I
_may_ think of a better place after all.”
It was the tone that stung her nerves, perhaps. She really hated
Champéry--a crowded, touristy, ‘organised’ place. Her sacrifice had gone
for nothing. “Even now he’s not satisfied!” she realised with
bitterness.
“Oh, if you don’t feel it’ll do, Bill, dear,” she answered coolly, “I
really think we’d better give it up--going together, I mean.” Her force
was exhausted.
He felt sore, offended, injured. He looked sharply at her, almost
glared. A universe lay between them now. Before there was time to
reflect or choose his words, even to soften his tone, he had answered
coldly:
“Just as you like, Frances. I don’t want to spoil your holiday. You’re
right. We’d better go separately then.”
Nothing more was said. He saw her to the station of the Tube, but the
moment the train had gone he realised that the final wave of her little
hand betrayed somehow that tears were very close. She had not shown her
face again. He felt sad, ashamed, and bitter. Deeper than the
resentment, however, was a great ache in his heart that was pain.
Remorse surged over him. He thought of her year of toil, her tired
little face, her disappointment. Her brief holiday, so feverishly
yearned for, would now be tinged with sadness and regret, wherever she
went. Memory flashed back to their childhood together, when life smiled
upon them in that Kentish garden. They were the only two survivors. Yet
they could not manage even a holiday together....
Though so little had been said at the end, it was a rupture.... He went
home to bed, planning a splendid reconstruction. Before they went to
their respective work-places in the morning he would run over and see
her, put everything straight and sweet again, explaining his
selfishness, perhaps, on the plea that he was overtired. He wondered, as
he lay ashamed and sad upon his sleepless bed, what _she_ was thinking
and feeling now ... and fell asleep at last with his plan of
reconstruction all completed. His last conscious thought was--“I wish I
had not let her go like that ... without a nice good-bye!”
In the morning, however, he had not time to go; he postponed it to the
evening, sending her a telegram instead: “Come dinner to-night same
place and time. Have worked out perfect plan.” And all day long he
looked forward eagerly to their meeting. Those childhood thoughts
haunted him strangely--he remembered the enormous plans all had made
together years ago in that old Kentish garden where the hopfields peered
above the privet hedge and frightened them. There were five of them
then; now there were only two.
But plans, large or small, are not so easily made. Fate does not often
give two chances in succession. And Fate that day was very busy in and
out among the London traffic. Frances, hopeful and delighted, kept the
appointment,--and waited a whole hour before she went anxiously to his
flat to find out what was wrong. In the awful room she knew that Fate
had made a different plan, and had carried it out. She was too late for
him to recognise her, even. In the pocket of the coat he had been
wearing she found a sheet of paper giving the names of hotels at Maloja,
pension terms, and railway connections from London. She also found the
letter he had written engaging the rooms. The envelope was addressed and
stamped, but left open for her final approval. She keeps it still.
What she also keeps, however, more than the recollection of real, big
quarrels that had come into their lives at other times, is the memory of
the way they had left one another at that Tube station, and the horrid
fact that she had gone home with resentment and unforgiveness in her
heart. It was such a little thing at the moment. But the big, formidable
quarrels had been adjusted, made up, forgotten, whereas this other
regret would burn her till she died. “We were so cross and tired. But it
might so easily have been different. If only ... I had not left him ...
just like that ...!”
XVIII
ENTRANCE AND EXIT
These three--the old physicist, the girl, and the young Anglican parson
who was engaged to her--stood by the window of the country house. The
blinds were not yet drawn. They could see the dark clump of pines in the
field, with crests silhouetted against the pale wintry sky of the
February afternoon. Snow, freshly fallen, lay upon lawn and hill. A big
moon was already lighting up.
“Yes, that’s the wood,” the old man said, “and it was this very day
fifty years ago--February 13--the man disappeared from its shadows;
swept in this extraordinary, incredible fashion into invisibility--into
_some other place_. Can you wonder the grove is haunted?” A strange
impressiveness of manner belied the laugh following the words.
“Oh, please tell us,” the girl whispered; “we’re all alone now.”
Curiosity triumphed; yet a vague alarm betrayed itself in the
questioning glance she cast for protection at her younger companion,
whose fine face, on the other hand, wore an expression that was grave
and singularly “rapt.” He was listening keenly.
“As though Nature,” the physicist went on, half to himself, “here and
there concealed vacuums, gaps, holes in space (his mind was always
speculative; more than speculative, some said), through which a man
might drop into invisibility--a new direction, in fact, at right angles
to the three known ones--‘higher space,’ as Bolyai, Gauss, and Hinton
might call it; and what you, with your mystical turn”--looking toward
the young priest--“might consider a spiritual change of condition, into
a region where space and time do not exist, and where all dimensions are
possible--because they are _one_.”
“But, _please_, the story,” the girl begged, not understanding these
dark sayings, “although I’m not sure that Arthur ought to hear it. He’s
much too interested in such queer things as it is!” Smiling, yet uneasy,
she stood closer to his side, as though her body might protect his soul.
“Very briefly, then, you shall hear what I remember of this haunting,
for I was barely ten years old at the time. It was evening--clear and
cold like this, with snow and moonlight--when someone reported to my
father that a peculiar sound, variously described as crying, singing,
wailing, was being heard in the grove. He paid no attention until my
sister heard it too, and was frightened. Then he sent a groom to
investigate. Though the night was brilliant the man took a lantern. We
watched from this very window till we lost his figure against the trees,
and the lantern stopped swinging suddenly, as if he had put it down. It
remained motionless. We waited half an hour, and then my father,
curiously excited, I remember, went out quickly, and I, utterly
terrified, went after him. We followed his tracks, which came to an end
beside the lantern, the last step being a stride almost impossible for a
man to have made. All around the snow was unbroken by a single mark, but
the man himself had vanished. Then we heard him calling for help--above,
behind, beyond us; from all directions at once, yet from none, came the
sound of his voice; but though we called back he made no answer, and
gradually his cries grew fainter and fainter, as if going into
tremendous distance, and at last died away altogether.”
“And the man himself?” asked both listeners.
“Never returned--from that day to this has never been seen.... At
intervals for weeks and months afterwards reports came in that he was
still heard crying, always crying for help. With time, even these
reports ceased--for most of us,” he added under his breath; “and that is
all I know. A mere outline, as you see.”
The girl did not quite like the story, for the old man’s manner made it
too convincing. She was half disappointed, half frightened.
“See! there are the others coming home,” she exclaimed, with a note of
relief, pointing to a group of figures moving over the snow near the
pine trees. “Now we can think of tea!” She crossed the room to busy
herself with the friendly tray as the servant approached to fasten the
shutters. The young priest, however, deeply interested, talked on with
their host, though in a voice almost too low for her to hear. Only the
final sentences reached her, making her uneasy--absurdly so, she
thought--till afterwards.
“--for matter, as we know, interpenetrates matter,” she heard, “and two
objects may conceivably occupy the same space. The odd thing really is
that one should hear, but not see; that air-waves should bring the
voice, yet ether-waves fail to bring the picture.”
And then the older man: “--as if certain places in Nature, yes, invited
the change--places where these extraordinary forces stir from the earth
as from the surface of a living Being with organs--places like islands,
mountain-tops, pine-woods, especially pines isolated from their kind.
You know the queer results of digging absolutely virgin soil, of
course--and that theory of the earth’s being _alive_----” The voice
dropped again.
“States of mind also helping the forces of the place,” she caught the
priest’s reply in part; “such as conditions induced by music, by
intense listening, by certain moments in the Mass even--by ecstasy
or----”
“I say, what _do_ you think?” cried a girl’s voice, as the others came
in with welcome chatter and odours of tweeds and open fields. “As we
passed your old haunted pine-wood we heard _such_ a queer noise. Like
someone wailing or crying. Cæsar howled and ran; and Harry refused to go
in and investigate. He positively funked it!” They all laughed. “More
like a rabbit in a trap than a person crying,” explained Harry, a blush
kindly concealing his startling pallor. “I wanted my tea too much to
bother about an old rabbit.”
It was some time after tea when the girl became aware that the priest
had disappeared, and putting two and two together, ran in alarm to her
host’s study. Quite easily, from the hastily opened shutters, they saw
his figure moving across the snow. The moon was very bright over the
world, yet he carried a lantern that shone pale yellow against the white
brilliance.
“Oh, for God’s sake, quick!” she cried, pale with fear. “Quick! or we’re
too late! Arthur’s simply wild about such things. Oh, I might have
known--I might have guessed. And this is the very night. I’m terrified!”
By the time he had found his overcoat and slipped round the house with
her from the back door, the lantern, they saw, was already swinging
close to the pine-wood. The night was still as ice, bitterly cold.
Breathlessly they ran, following the tracks. Half-way his steps
diverged, and were plainly visible in the virgin snow by themselves.
They heard the whispering of the branches ahead of them, for pines cry
even when no airs stir. “Follow me close,” said the old man sternly. The
lantern, he already saw, lay upon the ground unattended; no human figure
was anywhere visible.
“See! The steps come to an end here,” he whispered, stooping down as
soon as they reached the lantern. The tracks, hitherto so regular,
showed an odd wavering--the snow curiously disturbed. Quite suddenly
they stopped. The final step was a very long one--a stride, almost
immense, “as though he was pushed forward from behind,” muttered the old
man, too low to be overheard, “or sucked forward from in front--as in a
fall.”
The girl would have dashed forward but for his strong restraining grasp.
She clutched him, uttering a sudden dreadful cry. “Hark! I hear his
voice!” she almost sobbed. They stood still to listen. A mystery that
was more than the mystery of night closed about their hearts--a mystery
that is beyond life and death, that only great awe and terror can summon
from the deeps of the soul. Out of the heart of the trees, fifty feet
away, issued a crying voice, half wailing, half singing, very faint.
“Help! help!” it sounded through the still night; “for the love of God,
pray for me!”
The melancholy rustling of the pines followed; and then again the
singular crying voice shot past above their heads, now in front of them,
now once more behind. It sounded everywhere. It grew fainter and
fainter, fading away, it seemed, into distance that somehow was
appalling.... The grove, however, was empty of all but the sighing wind;
the snow unbroken by any tread. The moon threw inky shadows; the cold
bit; it was a terror of ice and death and this awful singing cry....
“But why _pray_?” screamed the girl, distracted, frantic with her
bewildered terror. “Why _pray_? Let us _do_ something to help--_do_
something ...!” She swung round in a circle, nearly falling to the
ground. Suddenly she perceived that the old man had dropped to his knees
in the snow beside her and was--praying.
“Because the forces of prayer, of thought, of the will to help, alone
can reach and succour him where he now is,” was all the answer she got.
And a moment later both figures were kneeling in the snow, praying, so
to speak, their very heart’s life out....
The search may be imagined--the steps taken by police, friends,
newspapers, by the whole country in fact.... But the most curious part
of this queer “Higher Space” adventure is the end of it--at least, the
“end” so far as at present known. For after three weeks, when the winds
of March were a-roar about the land, there crept over the fields towards
the house the small dark figure of a man. He was thin, pallid as a
ghost, worn and fearfully emaciated, but upon his face and in his eyes
were traces of an astonishing radiance--a glory unlike anything ever
seen.... It may, of course, have been deliberate, or it may have been a
genuine loss of memory only; none could say--least of all the girl whom
his return snatched from the gates of death; but, at any rate, what had
come to pass during the interval of his amazing disappearance he has
never yet been able to reveal.
“And you must never ask me,” he would say to her--and repeat even after
his complete and speedy restoration to bodily health--“for I simply
cannot tell. I know no language, you see, that could express it. I was
near you all the time. But I was also--elsewhere and otherwise....”
XIX
YOU _MAY_ TELEPHONE FROM HERE
She sent the servant to bed at half-past ten, and sat up in the flat
alone. “I’ll let my cousin in,” she explained; “she may be rather late.”
She read, knitted, began a letter, poked the fire, and examined her
husband’s photographs on the mantelpiece; but most of the time she
looked about her nervously, sometimes going to the door to listen,
sometimes lifting the corner of the blind to look out upon the lights of
North Kensington struggling with the blackness. The fog was thicker than
ever. A rumble of traffic feeling its way floated up to her from below.
But at last the door-bell rang sharply, and she ran to let in the cousin
who had promised to spend the two nights with her during her husband’s
absence in Paris. They kissed. Both began talking at once.
“I thought you were _never_ coming, Sybil----!”
“The play was out late--and the fog’s bad. I sent on my box this
afternoon on purpose.”
“It came safely; and your room’s quite ready. I do hope you’ll manage
all right without a maid. Oh, I’m _so_ glad you’ve come, though!”
“Foolish little country mouse!”
“Oh, it’s not that so much, though I admit that London still terrifies
me at night rather; but you know this is the first time he’s been
away--and I suppose----”
“I know, dear; I understand perfectly.” The cousin was brisk and
cheerful. “You feel lonely, of course.” They kissed again. “Just unhook
me, will you?” she added, “and I’ll get into my dressing-gown, and then
we’ll be cosy over the fire.”
“I saw him off at Victoria at 8.45,” said the little wife when the
operation was over.
“Newhaven and Dieppe?”
“Yes. He gets to Paris at seven in the morning. He promised to telephone
the first thing.”
“You expensive little monkey!”
“Why?”
“It’s ten shillings for three minutes, or something like that, and you
have to go to the G.P.O. or the Mansion House or some such place, I
believe.”
“But I thought it was the usual long-distance thing direct here to the
flat. He never told me all that.”
“Probably you didn’t give him the chance!”
They laughed, and went on chatting, with feet on the fender and skirts
tucked up. The cousin lit her second cigarette. It was after midnight.
“I’m afraid I’m not the least bit sleepy,” said the wife apologetically.
“Nor am I, dear. For once the play excited me.” She began to describe it
vigorously. Half-way through the recital the telephone sounded in the
hall. It tinkled faintly, but gave no proper ring.
The other started. “There it is again! It’s always doing that--ever
since Harry put it in a week ago. I don’t quite like it.” She spoke in a
hushed voice.
The cousin looked at her curiously. “Oh, you mustn’t mind that,” she
laughed with a reassuring manner. “It’s a little way they have when the
line gets out of order. You’re not used to playing the telephone game
yet. You should call up the Exchange and complain. Always complain, you
know, in this world if you want----”
“There it goes again,” interrupted her friend nervously. “Oh, I do wish
it would stop. It’s so like someone standing out there in the hall and
trying to talk----”
The cousin jumped up. They went into the hall together, and the
experienced one briskly rang up the Exchange and asked if there was
anybody trying to “get through.” With fine indignation she complained
that no one in the flat could sleep for the noise. After a brief
conversation she turned, receiver in hand, to her companion.
“The operator says he’s very sorry, but your line’s a bit troublesome
to-night for some reason. Got mixed, or something. He can’t understand
it. Advises you to leave the receiver unhooked till the morning. Then it
can’t possibly ring, you see!”
They left the receiver swinging, and went back to the fire.
“I’m sorry I’m such a timid donkey,” the wife said, laughing a little;
“but I’m not used to it yet. There was no telephone at the farm, you
know.” She turned with a sudden start, as though she heard the bell
again. “And to-night,” she added in a lower voice, though with an
obvious effort at self-control, “for some reason or other I feel
uncomfortable, rather--excited, queer, I think.”
“How? Queer?”
“I don’t know exactly; almost as if there was someone else in the
flat--someone besides ourselves and the servant, I mean.”
The cousin moved abruptly. She switched on the electric lights in the
wall beside her.
“Yes; but it’s only imagination, _really_,” she said with decision.
“It’s natural enough. It’s the fog and the strangeness of London after
the loneliness of your farm-life, and your husband being away, and--and
all that. Once you analyse these queer feelings they always go----”
“Hark!” exclaimed the wife under her breath. “Wasn’t that a step in the
passage?” She sat bolt upright, her face pale, her eyes very bright.
They listened a moment. The night was utterly still about them.
“Rubbish!” cried the cousin loudly. “It was my foot knocking the fender;
like this--look!” She repeated the sound vigorously.
“I do believe it was,” the other said, only half convinced. “But it is
queer. You know I feel exactly as though someone had come into the
flat--quite recently, since _you_ came, I mean--just before that
tinkling began, in fact.”
“Come, come,” laughed the cousin, “you’ll give us both the jumps. At one
o’clock in the morning it’s easy to imagine anything. You’ll be hearing
elephants on the stairs next!” She looked sharply about her. “Let’s brew
our chocolate and get to bed,” she added. “We shall sleep like tops.”
“One o’clock already! Then Harry’s half-way across by now,” said the
wife, smiling at her friend’s language. “But I’m _so_ glad, oh, _so_
glad, you’re here,” she added; “and I think it’s most awfully sweet of
you to give up a comfy big house....” They kissed again and laughed.
Soon afterwards, having scalded their throats with hot chocolate, they
went to bed.
“It simply _can’t_ ring now!” remarked the cousin triumphantly as they
passed the receiver dangling in mid-air.
“That’s a relief,” her friend said. “I feel less nervous. Really, I’m
too ashamed of myself for anything.”
“Fog’s clearing, too,” Sybil added, peering for a moment through the
narrow window by the front door.
An hour later the little flat was still as the grave. No sound of
traffic was heard. Even the tinkling of the telephone seemed a whole
twenty-four hours away, when suddenly--it began again: first with little
soft tentative noises, very faint, troubled, hurried, buried almost out
of hearing inside the box; then louder and louder, with sharp
jerks--finally with a challenging and alarming peal. And the wife, who
had kept her door open, without pretence of sleep, heard it from the
very beginning. In a moment she found herself in the passage, and Sybil,
wakened by her cry, was at her heels. They turned up the lights and
stood facing one another. The hall smelt--as things only smell at
night--cold, musty....
“What’s the matter? You frightened me. I heard you scream----!”
“The telephone’s ringing again--violently,” the wife whispered, pale to
the lips. “Don’t you hear it? This time there’s someone
there--_really_!”