with my legs and leaped forward at it through the air. Horrors! It was
closer to me than I knew, and I plunged full into it, and the arm with
the knife missed the rope and cut deeply into some substance that was
soft and yielding. But, as I dropped past it, the thing had time to turn
half its width so that it swung round and faced me--and I could have
sworn as I rushed past it through the air, that it had the features of
Shorthouse.
The shock of this brought the vile nightmare to an abrupt end, and I
woke up a second time on the soft hay-bed to find that the grey dawn was
stealing in, and that I was exceedingly cold. After all I had failed to
keep awake, and my sleep, since it was growing light, must have lasted
at least an hour. A whole hour off my guard!
There was no sound from Shorthouse, to whom, of course, my first
thoughts turned; probably his flow of words had ceased long ago, and he
too had yielded to the persuasions of the seductive god. I turned to
wake him and get the comfort of companionship for the horror of my
dream, when to my utter dismay I saw that the place where he had been
was vacant. He was no longer beside me.
It had been no little shock before to discover that the ally in whom lay
all my faith and dependence was really frightened, but it is quite
impossible to describe the sensations I experienced when I realised he
had gone altogether and that I was alone in the barn. For a minute or
two my head swam and I felt a prey to a helpless terror. The dream, too,
still seemed half real, so vivid had it been! I was thoroughly
frightened--hot and cold by turns--and I clutched the hay at my side in
handfuls, and for some moments had no idea in the world what I should
do.
This time, at least, I was unmistakably awake, and I made a great effort
to collect myself and face the meaning of the disappearance of my
companion. In this I succeeded so far that I decided upon a thorough
search of the barn, inside and outside. It was a dreadful undertaking,
and I did not feel at all sure of being able to bring it to a
conclusion, but I knew pretty well that unless something was done at
once, I should simply collapse.
But, when I tried to move, I found that the cold, and fear, and I know
not what else unholy besides, combined to make it almost impossible. I
suddenly realised that a tour of inspection, during the whole of which
my back would be open to attack, was not to be thought of. My will was
not equal to it. Anything might spring upon me any moment from the dark
corners, and the growing light was just enough to reveal every movement
I made to any who might be watching. For, even then, and while I was
still half dazed and stupid, I knew perfectly well that someone was
watching me all the time with the utmost intentness. I had not merely
awakened; I had _been_ awakened.
I decided to try another plan; I called to him. My voice had a thin weak
sound, far away and quite unreal, and there was no answer to it. Hark,
though! There was something that might have been a very faint voice near
me!
I called again, this time with greater distinctness, "Shorthouse, where
are you? can you hear me?"
There certainly was a sound, but it was not a voice. Something was
moving. It was someone shuffling along, and it seemed to be outside the
barn. I was afraid to call again, and the sound continued. It was an
ordinary sound enough, no doubt, but it came to me just then as
something unusual and unpleasant. Ordinary sounds remain ordinary only
so long as one is not listening to them; under the influence of intense
listening they become unusual, portentous, and therefore extraordinary.
So, this common sound came to me as something uncommon, disagreeable. It
conveyed, too, an impression of stealth. And with it there was another,
a slighter sound.
Just at this minute the wind bore faintly over the field the sound of
the stable clock, a mile away. It was three o'clock; the hour when
life's pulses beat lowest; when poor souls lying between life and death
find it hardest to resist. Vividly I remember this thought crashing
through my brain with a sound of thunder, and I realised that the strain
on my nerves was nearing the limit, and that something would have to be
done at once if I was to reclaim my self-control at all.
When thinking over afterwards the events of this dreadful night, it has
always seemed strange to me that my second nightmare, so vivid in its
terror and its nearness, should have furnished me with no inkling of
what was really going on all this while; and that I should not have been
able to put two and two together, or have discovered sooner than I did
_what_ this sound was and _where_ it came from. I can well believe that
the vile scheming which lay behind the whole experience found it an easy
trifle to direct my hearing amiss; though, of course, it may equally
well have been due to the confused condition of my mind at the time and
to the general nervous tension under which I was undoubtedly suffering.
But, whatever the cause for my stupidity at first in failing to trace
the sound to its proper source, I can only say here that it was with a
shock of unexampled horror that my eye suddenly glanced upwards and
caught sight of the figure moving in the shadows above my head among the
rafters. Up to this moment I had thought that it was somebody outside
the barn, crawling round the walls till it came to a door; and the rush
of horror that froze my heart when I looked up and saw that it was
Shorthouse creeping stealthily along a beam, is something altogether
beyond the power of words to describe.
He was staring intently down upon me, and I knew at once that it was he
who had been watching me.
This point was, I think, for me the climax of feeling in the whole
experience; I was incapable of any further sensation--that is any
further sensation in the same direction. But here the abominable
character of the affair showed itself most plainly, for it suddenly
presented an entirely new aspect to me. The light fell on the picture
from a new angle, and galvanised me into a fresh ability to feel when I
thought a merciful numbness had supervened. It may not sound a great
deal in the printed letter, but it came to me almost as if it had been
an extension of consciousness, for the Hand that held the pencil
suddenly touched in with ghastly effect of contrast the element of the
ludicrous. Nothing could have been worse just then. Shorthouse, the
masterful spirit, so intrepid in the affairs of ordinary life, whose
power increased rather than lessened in the face of danger--this man,
creeping on hands and knees along a rafter in a barn at three o'clock in
the morning, watching me all the time as a cat watches a mouse! Yes, it
was distinctly ludicrous, and while it gave me a measure with which to
gauge the dread emotion that caused his aberration, it stirred
somewhere deep in my interior the strings of an empty laughter.
One of those moments then came to me that are said to come sometimes
under the stress of great emotion, when in an instant the mind grows
dazzlingly clear. An abnormal lucidity took the place of my confusion of
thought, and I suddenly understood that the two dreams which I had taken
for nightmares must really have been sent me, and that I had been
allowed for one moment to look over the edge of what was to come; the
Good was helping, even when the Evil was most determined to destroy.
I saw it all clearly now. Shorthouse had overrated his strength. The
terror inspired by his first visit to the barn (when he had failed) had
roused the man's whole nature to win, and he had brought me to divert
the deadly stream of evil. That he had again underrated the power
against him was apparent as soon as he entered the barn, and his wild
talk, and refusal to admit what he felt, were due to this desire not to
acknowledge the insidious fear that was growing in his heart. But, at
length, it had become too strong. He had left my side in my sleep--had
been overcome himself, perhaps, first in _his_ sleep, by the dreadful
impulse. He knew that I should interfere, and with every movement he
made, he watched me steadily, for the mania was upon him and he was
_determined to hang himself_. He pretended not to hear me calling, and I
knew that anything coming between him and his purpose would meet the
full force of his fury--the fury of a maniac, of one, for the time
being, truly possessed.
For a minute or two I sat there and stared. I saw then for the first
time that there was a bit of rope trailing after him, and that this was
what made the rustling sound I had noticed. Shorthouse, too, had come to
a stop. His body lay along the rafter like a crouching animal. He was
looking hard at me. That whitish patch was his face.
I can lay claim to no courage in the matter, for I must confess that in
one sense I was frightened almost beyond control. But at the same time
the necessity for decided action, if I was to save his life, came to me
with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment,
Shorthouse was only a _man_; it was flesh and blood I had to contend
with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen
him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls
about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my
mind with the most wholesome effect.
Then I dashed across the floor of the barn and leaped upon the hay bales
as a preliminary to climbing up the sides to the first rafter. It was
far more difficult than in my dream. Twice I slipped back into the hay,
and as I scrambled up for the third time I saw that Shorthouse, who thus
far had made no sound or movement, was now busily doing something with
his hands upon the beam. He was at its further end, and there must have
been fully fifteen feet between us. Yet I saw plainly what he was doing;
he was fastening the rope to the rafter. _The other end, I saw, was
already round his neck!_
This gave me at once the necessary strength, and in a second I had swung
myself on to a beam, crying aloud with all the authority I could put
into my voice--
"You fool, man! What in the world are you trying to do? Come down at
once!"
My energetic actions and words combined had an immediate effect upon him
for which I blessed Heaven; for he looked up from his horrid task,
stared hard at me for a second or two, and then came wriggling along
like a great cat to intercept me. He came by a series of leaps and
bounds and at an astonishing pace, and the way he moved somehow inspired
me with a fresh horror, for it did not seem the natural movement of a
human being at all, but more, as I have said, like that of some lithe
wild animal.
He was close upon me. I had no clear idea of what exactly I meant to do.
I could see his face plainly now; he was grinning cruelly; the eyes were
positively luminous, and the menacing expression of the mouth was most
distressing to look upon. Otherwise it was the face of a chalk man,
white and dead, with all the semblance of the living human drawn out of
it. Between his teeth he held my clasp knife, which he must have taken
from me in my sleep, and with a flash I recalled his anxiety to know
exactly which pocket it was in.
"Drop that knife!" I shouted at him, "and drop after it yourself--"
"Don't you dare to stop me!" he hissed, the breath coming between his
lips across the knife that he held in his teeth. "Nothing in the world
can stop me now--I have promised--and I must do it. I can't hold out any
longer."
"Then drop the knife and I'll help you," I shouted back in his face. "I
promise--"
"No use," he cried, laughing a little, "I must do it and you can't stop
me."
I heard a sound of laughter, too, somewhere in the air behind me. The
next second Shorthouse came at me with a single bound.
To this day I cannot quite tell how it happened. It is still a wild
confusion and a fever of horror in my mind, but from somewhere I drew
more than my usual allowance of strength, and before he could well have
realised what I meant to do, I had his throat between my fingers. He
opened his teeth and the knife dropped at once, for I gave him a squeeze
he need never forget. Before, my muscles had felt like so much soaked
paper; now they recovered their natural strength, and more besides. I
managed to work ourselves along the rafter until the hay was beneath us,
and then, completely exhausted, I let go my hold and we swung round
together and dropped on to the hay, he clawing at me in the air even as
we fell.
The struggle that began by my fighting for his life ended in a wild
effort to save my own, for Shorthouse was quite beside himself, and had
no idea what he was doing. Indeed, he has always averred that he
remembers nothing of the entire night's experiences after the time when
he first woke me from sleep. A sort of deadly mist settled over him, he
declares, and he lost all sense of his own identity. The rest was a
blank until he came to his senses under a mass of hay with me on the top
of him.
It was the hay that saved us, first by breaking the fall and then by
impeding his movements so that I was able to prevent his choking me to
death.
THE WOOD OF THE DEAD
One summer, in my wanderings with a knapsack, I was at luncheon in the
room of a wayside inn in the western country, when the door opened and
there entered an old rustic, who crossed close to my end of the table
and sat himself down very quietly in the seat by the bow window. We
exchanged glances, or, properly speaking, nods, for at the moment I did
not actually raise my eyes to his face, so concerned was I with the
important business of satisfying an appetite gained by tramping twelve
miles over a difficult country.
The fine warm rain of seven o'clock, which had since risen in a kind of
luminous mist about the tree tops, now floated far overhead in a deep
blue sky, and the day was settling down into a blaze of golden light. It
was one of those days peculiar to Somerset and North Devon, when the
orchards shine and the meadows seem to add a radiance of their own, so
brilliantly soft are the colourings of grass and foliage.
The inn-keeper's daughter, a little maiden with a simple country
loveliness, presently entered with a foaming pewter mug, enquired after
my welfare, and went out again. Apparently she had not noticed the old
man sitting in the settle by the bow window, nor had he, for his part,
so much as once turned his head in our direction.
Under ordinary circumstances I should probably have given no thought to
this other occupant of the room; but the fact that it was supposed to be
reserved for my private use, and the singular thing that he sat looking
aimlessly out of the window, with no attempt to engage me in
conversation, drew my eyes more than once somewhat curiously upon him,
and I soon caught myself wondering why he sat there so silently, and
always with averted head.
He was, I saw, a rather bent old man in rustic dress, and the skin of
his face was wrinkled like that of an apple; corduroy trousers were
caught up with a string below the knee, and he wore a sort of brown
fustian jacket that was very much faded. His thin hand rested upon a
stoutish stick. He wore no hat and carried none, and I noticed that his
head, covered with silvery hair, was finely shaped and gave the
impression of something noble.
Though rather piqued by his studied disregard of my presence, I came to
the conclusion that he probably had something to do with the little
hostel and had a perfect right to use this room with freedom, and I
finished my luncheon without breaking the silence and then took the
settle opposite to smoke a pipe before going on my way.
Through the open window came the scents of the blossoming fruit trees;
the orchard was drenched in sunshine and the branches danced lazily in
the breeze; the grass below fairly shone with white and yellow daisies,
and the red roses climbing in profusion over the casement mingled their
perfume with the sweetly penetrating odour of the sea.
It was a place to dawdle in, to lie and dream away a whole afternoon,
watching the sleepy butterflies and listening to the chorus of birds
which seemed to fill every corner of the sky. Indeed, I was already
debating in my mind whether to linger and enjoy it all instead of taking
the strenuous pathway over the hills, when the old rustic in the settle
opposite suddenly turned his face towards me for the first time and
began to speak.
His voice had a quiet dreamy note in it that was quite in harmony with
the day and the scene, but it sounded far away, I thought, almost as
though it came to me from outside where the shadows were weaving their
eternal tissue of dreams upon the garden floor. Moreover, there was no
trace in it of the rough quality one might naturally have expected, and,
now that I saw the full face of the speaker for the first time, I noted
with something like a start that the deep, gentle eyes seemed far more
in keeping with the timbre of the voice than with the rough and very
countrified appearance of the clothes and manner. His voice set pleasant
waves of sound in motion towards me, and the actual words, if I remember
rightly, were--
"You are a stranger in these parts?" or "Is not this part of the country
strange to you?"
There was no "sir," nor any outward and visible sign of the deference
usually paid by real country folk to the town-bred visitor, but in its
place a gentleness, almost a sweetness, of polite sympathy that was far
more of a compliment than either.
I answered that I was wandering on foot through a part of the country
that was wholly new to me, and that I was surprised not to find a place
of such idyllic loveliness marked upon my map.
"I have lived here all my life," he said, with a sigh, "and am never
tired of coming back to it again."
"Then you no longer live in the immediate neighbourhood?"
"I have moved," he answered briefly, adding after a pause in which his
eyes seemed to wander wistfully to the wealth of blossoms beyond the
window; "but I am almost sorry, for nowhere else have I found the
sunshine lie so warmly, the flowers smell so sweetly, or the winds and
streams make such tender music. . . ."
His voice died away into a thin stream of sound that lost itself in the
rustle of the rose-leaves climbing in at the window, for he turned his
head away from me as he spoke and looked out into the garden. But it was
impossible to conceal my surprise, and I raised my eyes in frank
astonishment on hearing so poetic an utterance from such a figure of a
man, though at the same time realising that it was not in the least
inappropriate, and that, in fact, no other sort of expression could have
properly been expected from him.
"I am sure you are right," I answered at length, when it was clear he
had ceased speaking; "or there is something of enchantment here--of real
fairy-like enchantment--that makes me think of the visions of childhood
days, before one knew anything of--of--"
I had been oddly drawn into his vein of speech, some inner force
compelling me. But here the spell passed and I could not catch the
thoughts that had a moment before opened a long vista before my inner
vision.
"To tell you the truth," I concluded lamely, "the place fascinates me
and I am in two minds about going further--"
Even at this stage I remember thinking it odd that I should be talking
like this with a stranger whom I met in a country inn, for it has always
been one of my failings that to strangers my manner is brief to
surliness. It was as though we were figures meeting in a dream, speaking
without sound, obeying laws not operative in the everyday working world,
and about to play with a new scale of space and time perhaps. But my
astonishment passed quickly into an entirely different feeling when I
became aware that the old man opposite had turned his head from the
window again, and was regarding me with eyes so bright they seemed
almost to shine with an inner flame. His gaze was fixed upon my face
with an intense ardour, and his whole manner had suddenly become alert
and concentrated. There was something about him I now felt for the first
time that made little thrills of excitement run up and down my back. I
met his look squarely, but with an inward tremor.
"Stay, then, a little while longer," he said in a much lower and deeper
voice than before; "stay, and I will teach you something of the purpose
of my coming."
He stopped abruptly. I was conscious of a decided shiver.
"You have a special purpose then--in coming back?" I asked, hardly
knowing what I was saying.
"To call away someone," he went on in the same thrilling voice, "someone
who is not quite ready to come, but who is needed elsewhere for a
worthier purpose." There was a sadness in his manner that mystified me
more than ever.
"You mean--?" I began, with an unaccountable access of trembling.
"I have come for someone who must soon move, even as I have moved."
He looked me through and through with a dreadfully piercing gaze, but I
met his eyes with a full straight stare, trembling though I was, and I
was aware that something stirred within me that had never stirred
before, though for the life of me I could not have put a name to it, or
have analysed its nature. Something lifted and rolled away. For one
single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist
actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was _I_ who moved
to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.
The old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of
a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a
dull, limited kingdom.
"Come to-night," I heard the old man say, "come to me to-night into the
Wood of the Dead. Come at midnight--"
Involuntarily I clutched the arm of the settle for support, for I then
felt that I was speaking with someone who knew more of the real things
that are and will be, than I could ever know while in the body, working
through the ordinary channels of sense--and this curious half-promise of
a partial lifting of the veil had its undeniable effect upon me.
The breeze from the sea had died away outside, and the blossoms were
still. A yellow butterfly floated lazily past the window. The song of
the birds hushed--I smelt the sea--I smelt the perfume of heated summer
air rising from fields and flowers, the ineffable scents of June and of
the long days of the year--and with it, from countless green meadows
beyond, came the hum of myriad summer life, children's voices, sweet
pipings, and the sound of water falling.
I knew myself to be on the threshold of a new order of experience--of an
ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning
towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a
moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and
to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for
less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the
same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past
and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that
pleasure and pain are one and the same force, for the joy I had just
experienced included also all the pain I ever had felt, or ever could
feel. . . .
The sunshine grew to dazzling radiance, faded, passed away. The shadows
paused in their dance upon the grass, deepened a moment, and then melted
into air. The flowers of the fruit trees laughed with their little
silvery laughter as the wind sighed over their radiant eyes the old,
old tale of its personal love. Once or twice a voice called my name. A
wonderful sensation of lightness and power began to steal over me.
Suddenly the door opened and the inn-keeper's daughter came in. By all
ordinary standards, her's was a charming country loveliness, born of the
stars and wild-flowers, of moonlight shining through autumn mists upon
the river and the fields; yet, by contrast with the higher order of
beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost
ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and
insipid her whole presentment.
For a moment she stood between me and the occupant of the window seat
while I counted out the small change for my meal and for her services;
but when, an instant later, she moved aside, I saw that the settle was
empty and that there was no longer anyone in the room but our two
selves.