II

“OH, of course they’re not show ghosts--a collector wouldn’t think

anything of them ... Don’t let me raise your hopes ... their one merit

is their numerical strength: the exceptional fact of their being _two_.

But, as against this, I’m bound to admit that at any moment I

could probably have exorcised them both by asking my doctor for a

prescription, or my oculist for a pair of spectacles. Only, as I

never could make up my mind whether to go to the doctor or the

oculist--whether I was afflicted by an optical or a digestive

delusion--I left them to pursue their interesting double life, though at

times they made mine exceedingly comfortable ...

“Yes--uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable! But it

was part of my stupid pride, when the thing began, not to admit that I

could be disturbed by the trifling matter of seeing two--

“And then I’d no reason, really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I knew

I was simply bored--horribly bored. But it was part of my boredom--I

remember--that I was feeling so uncommonly well, and didn’t know how

on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come back from a long

journey--down in South America and Mexico--and had settled down for the

winter near New York, with an old aunt who had known Washington Irving

and corresponded with N. P. Willis. She lived, not far from Irvington,

in a damp Gothic villa, overhung by Norway spruces, and looking exactly

like a memorial emblem done in hair. Her personal appearance was in

keeping with this image, and her own hair--of which there was little

left--might have been sacrificed to the manufacture of the emblem.

“I had just reached the end of an agitated year, with considerable

arrears to make up in money and emotion; and theoretically it seemed as

though my aunt’s mild hospitality would be as beneficial to my nerves as

to my purse. But the deuce of it was that as soon as I felt myself safe

and sheltered my energy began to revive; and how was I to work it off

inside of a memorial emblem? I had, at that time, the agreeable illusion

that sustained intellectual effort could engage a man’s whole activity;

and I decided to write a great book--I forget about what. My aunt,

impressed by my plan, gave up to me her Gothic library, filled with

classics in black cloth and daguerrotypes of faded celebrities; and I

sat down at my desk to make myself a place among their number. And to

facilitate my task she lent me a cousin to copy my manuscript.

“The cousin was a nice girl, and I had an idea that a nice girl was just

what I needed to restore my faith in human nature, and principally

in myself. She was neither beautiful nor intelligent--poor Alice

Nowell!--but it interested me to see any woman content to be so

uninteresting, and I wanted to find out the secret of her content. In

doing this I handled it rather rashly, and put it out of joint--oh, just

for a moment! There’s no fatuity in telling you this, for the poor girl

had never seen any one but cousins ...

“Well, I was sorry for what I’d done, of course, and confoundedly

bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the

house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down to

the library to fetch a book she’d mislaid, like any artless heroine on

the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered, and it suddenly

occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly thick and pretty,

would look exactly like my aunt’s when she grew older. I was glad I had

noticed this, for it made it easier for me to do what was right; and

when I had found the book she hadn’t lost I told her I was leaving for

Europe that week.

“Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once what

I meant. She didn’t take it in the least as I’d expected--it would have

been easier if she had. She held her book very tight, and turned away a

moment to wind up the lamp on my desk--it had a ground glass shade with

vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I remember. Then she came

back, held out her hand, and said: ‘Good-bye.’ And as she said it she

looked straight at me and kissed me. I had never felt anything as fresh

and shy and brave as her kiss. It was worse than any reproach, and it

made me ashamed to deserve a reproach from her. I said to myself: ‘I’ll

marry her, and when my aunt dies she’ll leave us this house, and I’ll

sit here at the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over

there with her embroidery and look at me as she’s looking now. And life

will go on like that for any number of years.’ The prospect frightened

me a little, but at the time it didn’t frighten me as much as doing

anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on my

finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with me.

“You’ll wonder why I’m enlarging on this familiar incident. It’s because

the evening on which it took place was the very evening on which I

first saw the queer sight I’ve spoken of. Being at that time an ardent

believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect I naturally

tried to trace some kind of link between what had just happened to me in

my aunt’s library, and what was to happen a few hours later on the same

night; and so the coincidence between the two events always remained in

my mind.

“I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under the

weight of the first good action I had ever consciously committed; and

young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation. Don’t imagine from

this that I had hitherto been an instrument of destruction. I had been

merely a harmless young man, who had followed his bent and declined all

collaboration with Providence. Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote

the moral order of the world, and I felt a good deal like the trustful

spectator who has given his gold watch to the conjurer, and doesn’t know

in what shape he’ll get it back when the trick is over ... Still, a

glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I

undressed that when I’d got used to being good it probably wouldn’t make

me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in bed, and

had blown out my candle, I felt that I really _was_ getting used to it,

and that, as far as I’d got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of

my aunt’s very softest wool mattresses.

“I closed my eyes on this image, and when I opened them it must have

been a good deal later, for my room had grown cold, and the night was

intensely still. I was waked suddenly by the feeling we all know--the

feeling that there was something near me that hadn’t been there when I

fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness. The room

was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague

glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me.

I couldn’t see the face attached to them--on account of the darkness,

I imagined--but as I looked the eyes grew more and more distinct: they

gave out a light of their own.

“The sensation of being thus gazed at was far from pleasant, and you

might suppose that my first impulse would have been to jump out of bed

and hurl myself on the invisible figure attached to the eyes. But it

wasn’t--my impulse was simply to lie still ... I can’t say whether

this was due to an immediate sense of the uncanny nature of the

apparition--to the certainty that if I did jump out of bed I should

hurl myself on nothing--or merely to the benumbing effect of the eyes

themselves. They were the very worst eyes I’ve ever seen: a man’s

eyes--but what a man! My first thought was that he must be frightfully

old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the

eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped

a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and

between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes,

the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim about the

pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish.

“But the age of the eyes was not the most unpleasant thing about them.

What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security. I don’t

know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to belong to a man

who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside

the danger lines. They were not the eyes of a coward, but of some one

much too clever to take risks; and my gorge rose at their look of base

astuteness. Yet even that wasn’t the worst; for as we continued to scan

each other I saw in them a tinge of faint derision, and felt myself to

be its object.

“At that I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me out of bed

and pitched me straight on the unseen figure at its foot. But of course

there wasn’t any figure there, and my fists struck at emptiness. Ashamed

and cold, I groped about for a match and lit the candles. The room

looked just as usual--as I had known it would; and I crawled back to

bed, and blew out the lights.

“As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now

applied myself to explaining them on scientific principles. At first

I thought the illusion might have been caused by the glow of the last

embers in the chimney; but the fire-place was on the other side of my

bed, and so placed that the fire could not possibly be reflected in my

toilet glass, which was the only mirror in the room. Then it occurred

to me that I might have been tricked by the reflection of the embers in

some polished bit of wood or metal; and though I couldn’t discover any

object of the sort in my line of vision, I got up again, groped my way

to the hearth, and covered what was left of the fire. But as soon as I

was back in bed the eyes were back at its foot.

“They were an hallucination, then: that was plain. But the fact

that they were not due to any external dupery didn’t make them a

bit pleasanter to see. For if they were a projection of my inner

consciousness, what the deuce was the matter with that organ? I had gone

deeply enough into the mystery of morbid pathological states to picture

the conditions under which an exploring mind might lay itself open to

such a midnight admonition; but I couldn’t fit it to my present case.

I had never felt more normal, mentally and physically; and the only

unusual fact in my situation--that of having assured the happiness of an

amiable girl--did not seem of a kind to summon unclean spirits about my

pillow. But there were the eyes still looking at me ...

“I shut mine, and tried to evoke a vision of Alice Nowell’s. They were

not remarkable eyes, but they were as wholesome as fresh water, and if

she had had more imagination--or longer lashes--their expression might

have been interesting. As it was, they did not prove very efficacious,

and in a few moments I perceived that they had mysteriously changed into

the eyes at the foot of the bed. It exasperated me more to feel these

glaring at me through my shut lids than to see them, and I opened my

eyes again and looked straight into their hateful stare ...

“And so it went on all night. I can’t tell you what that night was, nor

how long it lasted. Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide awake,

and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened ‘em you’d

see something you dreaded and loathed? It sounds easy, but it’s devilish

hard. Those eyes hung there and drew me. I had the _vertige de l’abime_,

and their red lids were the edge of my abyss. ... I had known nervous

hours before: hours when I’d felt the wind of danger in my neck; but

never this kind of strain. It wasn’t that the eyes were so awful; they

hadn’t the majesty of the powers of darkness. But they had--how shall

I say?--a physical effect that was the equivalent of a bad smell: their

look left a smear like a snail’s. And I didn’t see what business they

had with me, anyhow--and I stared and stared, trying to find out ...

“I don’t know what effect they were trying to produce; but the effect

they _did_ produce was that of making me pack my portmanteau and bolt to

town early the next morning. I left a note for my aunt, explaining that

I was ill and had gone to see my doctor; and as a matter of fact I did

feel uncommonly ill--the night seemed to have pumped all the blood out

of me. But when I reached town I didn’t go to the doctor’s. I went to

a friend’s rooms, and threw myself on a bed, and slept for ten heavenly

hours. When I woke it was the middle of the night, and I turned cold

at the thought of what might be waiting for me. I sat up, shaking,

and stared into the darkness; but there wasn’t a break in its blessed

surface, and when I saw that the eyes were not there I dropped back into

another long sleep.

“I had left no word for Alice when I fled, because I meant to go back

the next morning. But the next morning I was too exhausted to stir. As

the day went on the exhaustion increased, instead of wearing off like

the lassitude left by an ordinary night of insomnia: the effect of the

eyes seemed to be cumulative, and the thought of seeing them again grew

intolerable. For two days I struggled with my dread; but on the third

evening I pulled myself together and decided to go back the next

morning. I felt a good deal happier as soon as I’d decided, for I knew

that my abrupt disappearance, and the strangeness of my not writing,

must have been very painful for poor Alice. That night I went to bed

with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once; but in the middle of the

night I woke, and there were the eyes ...

“Well, I simply couldn’t face them; and instead of going back to my

aunt’s I bundled a few things into a trunk and jumped onto the first

steamer for England. I was so dead tired when I got on board that I

crawled straight into my berth, and slept most of the way over; and I

can’t tell you the bliss it was to wake from those long stretches of

dreamless sleep and look fearlessly into the darkness, _knowing_ that I

shouldn’t see the eyes ...

“I stayed abroad for a year, and then I stayed for another; and during

that time I never had a glimpse of them. That was enough reason for

prolonging my stay if I’d been on a desert island. Another was, of

course, that I had perfectly come to see, on the voyage over, the folly,

complete impossibility, of my marrying Alice Nowell. The fact that I had

been so slow in making this discovery annoyed me, and made me want to

avoid explanations. The bliss of escaping at one stroke from the eyes,

and from this other embarrassment, gave my freedom an extraordinary

zest; and the longer I savoured it the better I liked its taste.

“The eyes had burned such a hole in my consciousness that for a long

time I went on puzzling over the nature of the apparition, and wondering

nervously if it would ever come back. But as time passed I lost this

dread, and retained only the precision of the image. Then that faded in

its turn.

“The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I

believe, to write another great book--a definitive work on Etruscan

influences in Italian art. At any rate, I’d found some pretext of the

kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza di Spagna and dabbling

about indefinitely in the Forum; and there, one morning, a charming

youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light, slender and

smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar--one

to Antinous, say--but he’d come instead from New York, with a letter (of

all people) from Alice Nowell. The letter--the first I’d had from her

since our break--was simply a line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert

Noyes, and appealing to me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that

he ‘had talent,’ and ‘wanted to write’; and, an obdurate family having

insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry,

Alice had intervened to win him six months’ respite, during which he was

to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability

to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me

first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval ‘ordeal.’ Then I was

touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some

service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was

a beautiful embodiment of my chance.

“Well, I imagine it’s safe to lay down the general principle that

predestined geniuses don’t, as a rule, appear before one in the spring

sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods. At any

rate, poor Noyes wasn’t a predestined genius. But he _was_ beautiful to

see, and charming as a comrade too. It was only when he began to talk

literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the symptoms so well--the

things he had ‘in him,’ and the things outside him that impinged!

There’s the real test, after all. It was always--punctually, inevitably,

with the inexorableness of a mechanical law--it was _always_ the wrong

thing that struck him. I grew to find a certain grim fascination

in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he’d select; and I

acquired an astonishing skill at the game ...

“The worst of it was that his _betise_ wasn’t of the too obvious sort.

Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at

dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the microscope,

fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent,

something that he could make ‘do’ and be happy on; and wasn’t that,

after all, what I was concerned with? He was so charming--he continued

to be so charming--that he called forth all my charity in support of

this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was

a chance for him ...

“Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the

more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural

grace--it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so

gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth

would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless

animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head

the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that

it was simply protective mimicry--an instinctive ruse to get away

from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn’t--dear

lad!--believe in himself. There wasn’t a trace of hypocrisy in his

composition. He was sure that his ‘call’ was irresistible, while to me

it was the saving grace of his situation that it _wasn’t_, and that a

little money, a little leisure, a little pleasure would have turned

him into an inoffensive idler. Unluckily, however, there was no hope of

money, and with the grim alternative of the office desk before him he

couldn’t postpone his attempt at literature. The stuff he turned out

was deplorable, and I see now that I knew it from the first. Still, the

absurdity of deciding a man’s whole future on a first trial seemed to

justify me in withholding my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging

him a little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth

to flower.

“At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the point

of getting his term of probation extended. When I left Rome he went with

me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and Venice. I

said to myself: ‘If he has anything in him, it will come out now; and it

_did_. He was never more enchanting and enchanted. There were moments

of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring sound seemed actually

to pass into his face--but only to issue forth in a shallow flood of the

palest ink ...

“Well the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no hand

but mine to do it. We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to stay

with me, not wanting him to be alone in his dismal _pension_ when he had

to face the necessity of renouncing his ambition. I hadn’t, of course,

relied solely on my own judgment in deciding to advise him to drop

literature. I had sent his stuff to various people--editors and

critics--and they had always sent it back with the same chilling lack of

comment. Really there was nothing on earth to say about it--

“I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I

decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell myself

that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters--but

I’d like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn’t been justified on

that plea? I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence,

and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t

be on an errand of destruction. Besides, in the last issue, who was I to

decide, even after a year’s trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?

“The more I looked at the part I’d resolved to play, the less I liked

it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his

head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil’s is now ... I’d been

going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his

future hung on my verdict--we’d tacitly agreed to that. The manuscript

lay between us, on my table--a novel, his first novel, if you

please!--and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at

me with all his life in the look.

“I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his

face and on the manuscript.

“‘The fact is, my dear Gilbert,’ I began--

“I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.

“‘Oh, look here, don’t take on so, my dear fellow! I’m not so awfully

cut up as all that!’ His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing

down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety

that drove the knife into my side.

“He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my

duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting

him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more

particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so uneasily longed to

prove my good faith and my immense desire to serve her. It really seemed

like failing her twice to fail Gilbert--

“But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that encircle

the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I might be letting

myself in for if I didn’t tell the truth. I said to myself: ‘I shall

have him for life’--and I’d never yet seen any one, man or woman, whom I

was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism

decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap

that landed me straight in Gilbert’s arms.

“‘The thing’s all right, and you’re all wrong!’ I shouted up at him; and

as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his incredulous clutch,

I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is supposed to

attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making people happy _has_

its charms--

“Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation in some

spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his emotions,

and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began to wonder what

their after-taste would be--so many of the finest don’t keep! Still, I

wasn’t sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle, even if it _did_ turn a

trifle flat.

“After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of his

eyes--his blissful eyes... Then I fell asleep, and when I woke the room

was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk--and there were _the other

eyes_ ...

“It was three years since I’d seen them, but I’d thought of them so

often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now, with

their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed they

would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them ...

As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming that made it

so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such

a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I’d seen

them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the

searchings of their infernal glare; but at this particular moment I was

really in what might have been called a state of grace; and I can’t tell

you how the fact added to their horror ...

“But it’s not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were worse.

Worse by just so much as I’d learned of life in the interval; by all the

damnable implications my wider experience read into them. I saw now

what I hadn’t seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous

gradually, which had built up their baseness coral-wise, bit by bit,

out of a series of small turpitudes slowly accumulated through the

industrious years. Yes--it came to me that what made them so bad was

that they’d grown bad so slowly ...

“There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the

little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of fat

flesh making a muddy shadow underneath--and as their filmy stare moved

with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity,

of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first

shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they

made it so clear that some day I should ... Yes, that was the worst part

of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time

they came back to me ...

“For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded me

of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over

the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to

claim their morsel of mine: since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply

wouldn’t loosen their fangs. The coincidence almost made me hate him,

poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over it a good deal,

but couldn’t find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his

association with Alice Nowell. But then the eyes had let up on me the

moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a

woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such

spirits to avenge her. That set me thinking, and I began to wonder

if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was

insidious, and I had to stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy!

he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all,

I never found out what they wanted ...”