I.

_Tuesday Night, November 3rd_.

Theories! What is the good of theories? They are the scourges that lash

our minds in modern days, lash them into confusion, perplexity, despair.

I have never been troubled by them before. Why should I be troubled by

them now? And the absurdity of Professor Black’s is surely obvious. A

child would laugh at it. Yes, a child! I have never been a diary writer.

I have never been able to understand the amusement of sitting down

late at night and scrawling minutely in some hidden book every paltry

incident of one’s paltry days. People say it is so interesting to read

the entries years afterwards. To read, as a man, the _menu_ that I ate

through as a boy, the love-story that I was actor in, the tragedy that I

brought about, the debt that I have never paid--how could it profit me?

To keep a diary has always seemed to me merely an addition to the ills

of life. Yet now I have a hidden book, like the rest of the world, and I

am scrawling in it to-day. Yes, but for a reason.

I want to make things clear to myself, and I find, as others, that

my mind works more easily with the assistance of the pen. The actual

tracing of words on paper dispels the clouds that cluster round my

thoughts. I shall recall events to set my mind at ease, to prove to

myself how absurd a man who could believe in Professor Black would

be. “Little Dry-as-dust” I used to call him ‘Dry’? He is full of wild

romance, rubbish that a school-girl would be ashamed to believe in. Yet

he is abnormally clever; his record proves that. Still, clever men are

the first to be led astray, they say. It is the searcher who follows the

wandering light. What he says can’t be true. When I have filled these

pages, and read what I have written dispassionately, as one of the

outside public might read, I shall have done, once for all, with the

ridiculous fancies that are beginning to make my life a burden. To put

my thoughts in order will make a music. The evil spirit within me will

sleep, will die. I shall be cured. It must be so--it shall be so.

To go back to the beginning. Ah! what a long time ago that seems! As a

child I was cruel. Most boys are cruel, I think. My school companions

were a merciless set--merciless to one another, to their masters when

they had a chance, to animals, to birds. The desire to torture was

in nearly all of them. They loved to bully, and if they bullied only

mildly, it was from fear, not from love. They did not wish their

boomerang to return and slay them. If a boy were deformed, they twitted

him. If a master were kind, or gentle, or shy, they made his life as

intolerable as they could. If an animal or a bird came into their power,

they had no pity. I was like the rest; indeed, I think that I was worse.

Cruelty is horrible. I have enough imagination to do more than know

that--to feel it.

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women

brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is

lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the

torturer.

As a child I was cruel by nature, by instinct. I was a handsome,

well-bred, gentlemanlike, gentle-looking little brute. My parents adored

me, and I was good to them. They were so kind to me that I was almost

fond of them. Why not? It seemed to me as politic to be fond of them as

of anyone else. I did what I pleased, but I did not always let them

know it; so I pleased them. The wise child will take care to foster

the ignorance of its parents. My people were pretty well off, and I was

their only child; but my chief chances of future pleasure in life were

centred in my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She was immensely

rich, and she lived here. This room in which I am writing now was her

favourite sitting-room. On that hearth, before a log fire, such as is

burning at this moment, used to sit that wonderful cat of hers--that

horrible cat! Why did I ever play my childish cards to win this house,

this place? Sometimes, lately--very lately only--I have wondered, like a

fool perhaps. Yet would Professor Black say so? I remember, as a boy of

sixteen, paying my last visit here to my grandmother. It bored me very

much to come. But she was said to be near death, and death leaves great

houses vacant for others to fill. So when my mother said that I had

better come, and my father added that he thought my grandmother was

fonder of me than of my other relations, I gave up all my boyish plans

for the holidays with apparent willingness. Though almost a child, I was

not short-sighted. I knew every boy had a future as well as a present. I

gave up my plans, and came here with a smile; but in my heart I hated my

grandmother for having power, and so bending me to relinquish pleasure

for boredom. I hated her, and I came to her and kissed her, and saw her

beautiful white Persian cat sitting before the fire in this room, and

thought of the fellow who was my bosom friend, and with whom I longed

to be, shooting, or fishing, or riding. And I looked at the cat again.

I remember it began to purr when I went near to it. It sat quite still,

with its blue eyes fixed upon the fire, but when I approached it I

heard it purr complacently. I longed to kick it. The limitations of its

ridiculous life satisfied it completely. It seemed to reproduce in an

absurd, diminished way my grandmother in her white lace cap, with her

white face and hands. She sat in her chair all day and looked at the

fire. The cat sat on the hearthrug and did the same. The cat seemed to

me the animal personification of the human being who kept me chained

from all the sports and pleasures I had promised myself for the

holidays. When I went near to the cat, and heard it calmly purring at

me, I longed to do it an injury. It seemed to me as if it understood

what my grandmother did not, and was complacently triumphing at my

voluntary imprisonment with age, and laughing to itself at the pains

men--and boys--will undergo for the sake of money. Brute! I did not love

my grandmother, and she had money. I hated the cat utterly. It hadn’t a

_sou!_

This beautiful house is not old. My grandfather built it himself. He had

no love for the life of towns, I believe, but was passionately in touch

with nature, and, when a young man, he set out on a strange tour through

England. His object was to find a perfect view, and in front of that

view he intended to build himself a habitation. For nearly a year, so I

have been told, he wandered through Scotland and England, and at last

he came to this place in Cumberland, to this village, to this very spot.

Here his wanderings ceased. Standing on the terrace--then uncultivated

forest--that runs in front of these windows, he found at last what he

desired. He bought the forest. He bought the windings of the river,

the fields upon its banks, and on the extreme edge of the steep gorge

through which it runs he built the lovely dwelling that to-day is mine.

This place is no ordinary place. It is characteristic in the highest

degree. The house is wonderfully situated, with the ground falling

abruptly in front of it, the river forming almost a horseshoe round it.

The woods are lovely. The garden, curiously, almost wildly, laid out, is

like no other garden I ever saw. And the house, though not old, is full

of little surprises, curiously shaped rooms, remarkable staircases,

quaint recesses. The place is a place to remember. The house is a house

to fix itself in the memory. Nothing that had once lived here could ever

come back and forget that it had been here. Not even an animal--not even

an animal.

I wish I had never gone to that dinnerparty and met the Professor. There

was a horror coming upon me then. He has hastened its steps. He has put

my fears into shape, my vague wondering into words. Why cannot men leave

life alone? Why will they catch it by the throat and wring its secrets

from it? To respect reserve is one of the first instincts of the

gentleman; and life is full of reserve.

It is getting very late. I thought I heard a step in the house just

now. I wonder--I wonder if _she_ is asleep. I wish I knew. Day after

day passed by. My grandmother seemed to be failing, but almost

imperceptibly. She evidently loved to have me near to her. Like most old

dying people, in her mind she frantically clutched at life, that could

give to her nothing more; and I believe she grew to regard me as the

personification of all that was leaving her. My vitality warmed her. She

extended her hands to my flaming hearthfire. She seemed trying to live

in my life, and at length became afraid to let me out of her sight.

One day she said to me, in her quavering, ugly voice--old voices are so

ugly, like hideous echoes:

“Ronald, I could never die while you were in the room. So long as you

are with me, where I can touch you, I shall live.”

And she put out her white, corrugated hand, and fondled my warm boy’s

hand.

How I longed to push her hand away, and get out into the sunlight and

the air, and hear young voices, the voices of the morning, not of the

twilight, and be away from wrinkled Death, that seemed sitting on the

doorstep of that house huddled up like a beggar, waiting for the door to

be opened!

I was bored till I grew malignant. I confess it. And, feeling malignant,

I began to long more and more passionately to vent myself on someone or

something. I looked at the cat, which, as usual, was sitting before the

fire.

Animals have intuitions as keen as those of a woman, keener than those

of a man. They inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them from a

long line of ancestors who have suffered at the hands of cruel men.

They can tell by a look, by a motion, by the tone of a voice, whether

to expect from anyone kindness or malignity. The cat had purred

complacently on the first day of my arrival, and had hunched up her

white, furry back towards my hand, and had smiled with her calm,

light-blue eyes. Now, when I approached her, she seemed to gather

herself together and to make herself small. She shrank from me. There

was--as I fancied--a dawning comprehension, a dawning terror in her blue

eyes. She always sat very close to my grandmother now, as if she sought

protection, and she watched me as if she were watching for an intention

which she apprehended to grow in my mind.

And the intention came.

For, as the days went on, and my grandmother still lived, I began to

grow desperate. My holiday time was over now, but my parents wrote

telling me to stay where I was, and not to think of returning to school.

My grandmother had caused a letter to be sent to them in which she said

that she could not part from me, and added that my parents would never

have cause to regret interrupting my education for a time. “He will be

paid in full for every moment he loses,” she wrote, referring to me.

It seemed a strange taste in her to care so much for a boy, but she had

never loved women, and I was handsome, and she liked handsome faces. The

brutality in my nature was not written upon my features. I had smiling,

frank brown eyes, a lithe young figure, a gay boy’s voice. My movements

were quick, and I have always been told that my gestures were never

awkward, my demeanour was never unfinished, as is the case so often with

lads at school. Outwardly I was attractive; and the old woman, who had

married two husbands merely for their looks, delighted in feeling that

she had the power to retain me by her side at an age when most boys

avoid old people as if they were the pestilence.

And then I pretended to love her, and obeyed all her insufferably

tiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same.

My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my holidays,

was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He wrote to

me furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching me for my

selfishness and lack of affection.

Each time I received one I looked at the cat, and the cat shrank nearer

to my grandmother’s chair.

It never purred now, and nothing would induce it to leave the room where

she sat. One day the servant said to me:

“I believe the poor dumb thing knows my mistress can’t last very much

longer, sir. The way that cat looks up at her goes to my heart. Ah! them

beasts understand things as well as we do, I believe.”

I think the cat understood quite well. It did watch my grandmother in

a very strange way, gazing up into her face, as if to mark the changing

contours, the increasing lines, the down-droop of the features, that

bespoke the gradual soft approach of death. It listened to the sound of

her voice; and as, each day, the voice grew more vague, more weak and

toneless, an anxiety that made me exult dawned and deepened in its blue

eyes. Or so I thought.

I had a great deal of morbid imagination at that age, and loved to weave

a web of fancies, mostly horrible, around almost everything that entered

into my life. It pleased me to believe that the cat understood each new

intention that came into my mind, read me silently from its place

near the fire, tracked my thoughts, and was terror-stricken as they

concentrated themselves round a definite resolve, which hardened and

toughened day by day.

It pleased me to believe, do I say? I did really believe, and do believe

now, that the cat understood all, and grew haggard with fear as my

grandmother failed visibly. For it knew what the end would mean for it.

That first day of my arrival, when I saw my grandmother in her white

cap, with her white face and hands, and the big white cat sitting

near to her, I had thought there was a similarity between them. That

similarity struck me more forcibly, grew upon me, as my time in the

house grew longer, until the latter seemed almost a reproduction of

the former, and after each letter from my friend my hate for the two

increased. But my hate for my grandmother was impotent, and would always

be so. I could never repay her for the _ennui_, the furious, forced

inactivity which made my life a burden, and spurred my bad passions

while they lulled me in a terrible, enforced repose. I could repay her

favourite, the thing she had always cherished, her feline confidant,

who lived in safety under the shadow of her protection. I could wreak my

fury on that when the protection was withdrawn, as it must be at last.

It seemed to my brutal, imaginative, unfinished boy’s mind that the

murder of her pet must hurt and wound my grandmother even after she was

dead. I would make her suffer then, when she was impotent to wreak a

vengeance upon me. I would kill the cat.

The creature knew my resolve the day I made it, and had even, I should

say, anticipated it.

As I sat day after day beside my grandmother’s armchair in the dim room,

with the blinds drawn to shut out the summer sunlight, and talked to her

in a subdued and reverent voice, agreeing with all the old banalities

she uttered, all the preposterous opinions she propounded, all the

commands she laid upon me, I gazed beyond her at the cat, and the

creature was haggard with apprehension.

It knew, as I knew, that its day was coming. Sometimes I bent down and

took it up on my lap to please my grandmother, and praised its beauty

and its gentleness to her And all the time I felt its warm, furry body

trembling with horror between my hands. This pleased me, and I pretended

that I was never happy unless it was on my knees. I kept it there for

hours, stroking it so tenderly, smoothing its thick white coat, which

was always in the most perfect order, talking to it, caressing it.

And sometimes I took its head between my two hands, turned its face to

mine, and stared into its large blue eyes. Then I could read all its

agony, all its torture of apprehension: and in spite of my friend’s

letters, and the dulness of my days, I was almost happy.

The summer was deepening, the glow of the roses flushed the garden ways,

the skies were clear above Scawfell, when the end at last drew near.

My grandmother’s face was now scarcely recognizable. The eyes were sunk

deep in her head. All expression seemed to fade gradually away. Her

cheeks were no longer fine ivory white; a dull, sickening, yellow pallor

overspread them. She seldom looked at me now, but rested entombed in her

great armchair, her shrunken limbs seeming to tend downwards, as if she

were inclined to slide to the floor and die there. Her lips were thin

and dry, and moved perpetually in a silent chattering, as if her mind

were talking and her voice were already dead. The tide of life was

retreating from her body. I could almost see it visibly ebb away. The

failing waves made no sound upon the shore. Death is uncanny, like all

silent things.

Her maid wished her to stay entirely in bed, but she would get up,

muttering that she was well; and the doctor said it was useless to

hinder her. She had no specific disease. Only the years were taking

their last toll of her. So she was placed in her chair each day by the

fire, and sat there till evening, muttering with those dry lips. The

stiff folds of her silken skirts formed an angle, and there the cat

crouched hour after hour, a silent, white, waiting thing.

And the waves ebbed and ebbed away, and I waited too.

One afternoon, as I sat by my grandmother, the servant entered with

a letter for me just arrived by the post. I took it up. It was from

Willoughby, my school-friend. He said the term was over, that he had

left school, and his father had decided to send him out to America to

start in business in New York, instead of entering him at Oxford as he

had hoped. He bade me good-bye, and said he supposed we should not meet

again for years; “but,” he added, “no doubt you won’t care a straw, so

long as you get the confounded money you’re after. You’ve taught me one

of the lessons of life, young Ronald--never to believe in friendship.”

As I read the letter I set my teeth. All that was good in my nature

centred round Willoughby. He was a really fine fellow. I honestly and

truly loved him. His news gave me a bitter shock, and turned my heart to

iron and to fire. Perhaps I should never see him again; even if I did,

time would have changed him, seared him--my friend, in his wonderful

youth, with the morning in his eyes, would be no more. I hated myself in

that moment for having stayed; I hated still more her who had kept me.

For the moment I was carried out of myself. I crushed the letter up in

my burning hand. I turned fiercely round upon that yellow, enigmatic,

dying figure in the great chair. All the fury, locked within my heart

for so long, rose to the surface, and drove self-interest away. I turned

upon my grandmother with blazing eyes and trembling limbs. I opened my

mouth to utter a torrent of reproachful words, when--what was it?--what

slight change had stolen into the wrinkled, yellow face? I bent over

her. The eyes gazed at me, but so horribly! She sat so low in her chair;

she looked so fearful, so very strange. I put my fingers on her eyelids;

I drew them down over the eyeballs: they did not open again. I felt her

withered hands: they were ice. Then I knew, and I felt myself smiling. I

leaned over the dead woman. There, on the far side of her, crouched the

cat. Its white fur was all bristling; its blue eyes were dilated; on its

jaws there were flecks of foam.