[Illustration: THE TRANSFER]
The child first began to cry in the early afternoon--about three
o’clock, to be exact. I remember the hour, because I had been listening
with secret relief to the sound of the departing carriage. Those wheels
fading into distance down the gravel drive with Mrs. Frene, and her
daughter Gladys to whom I was governess, meant for me some hours’
welcome rest, and the June day was oppressively hot. Moreover, there
was this excitement in the little country household that had told upon
us all, but especially upon myself. This excitement, running delicately
behind all the events of the morning, was due to some mystery, and
the mystery was of course kept concealed from the governess. I had
exhausted myself with guessing and keeping on the watch. For some deep
and unexplained anxiety possessed me, so that I kept thinking of my
sister’s dictum that I was really much too sensitive to make a good
governess, and that I should have done far better as a professional
clairvoyante.
Mr. Frene, senior, ‘Uncle Frank,’ was expected for an unusual visit
from town about tea-time. That I knew. I also knew that his visit was
concerned somehow with the future welfare of little Jamie, Gladys’
seven-year-old brother. More than this, indeed, I never knew, and this
missing link makes my story in a fashion incoherent--an important bit
of the strange puzzle left out. I only gathered that the visit of
Uncle Frank was of a condescending nature, that Jamie was told he must
be upon his very best behaviour to make a good impression, and that
Jamie, who had never seen his uncle, dreaded him horribly already in
advance. Then, trailing thinly through the dying crunch of the carriage
wheels this sultry afternoon, I heard the curious little wail of the
child’s crying, with the effect, wholly unaccountable, that every nerve
in my body shot its bolt electrically, bringing me to my feet with a
tingling of unequivocal alarm. Positively, the water ran into my eyes.
I recalled his white distress that morning when told that Uncle Frank
was motoring down for tea and that he was to be ‘very nice indeed’ to
him. It had gone into me like a knife. All through the day, indeed, had
run this nightmare quality of terror and vision.
‘The man with the ’normous face?’ he had asked in a little voice of
awe, and then gone speechless from the room in tears that no amount of
soothing management could calm. That was all I saw; and what he meant
by ‘the ’normous face’ gave me only a sense of vague presentiment. But
it came as anti-climax somehow--a sudden revelation of the mystery and
excitement that pulsed beneath the quiet of the stifling summer day.
I feared for him. For of all that commonplace household I loved Jamie
best, though professionally I had nothing to do with him. He was a
high-strung, ultra-sensitive child, and it seemed to me that no one
understood him, least of all his honest, tender-hearted parents; so
that his little wailing voice brought me from my bed to the window in a
moment like a call for help.
The haze of June lay over that big garden like a blanket; the
wonderful flowers, which were Mr. Frene’s delight, hung motionless; the
lawns, so soft and thick, cushioned all other sounds; only the limes
and huge clumps of guelder roses hummed with bees. Through this muted
atmosphere of heat and haze the sound of the child’s crying floated
faintly to my ears--from a distance. Indeed, I wonder now that I heard
it at all, for the next moment I saw him down beyond the garden,
standing in his white sailor suit alone, two hundred yards away. He
was down by the ugly patch where nothing grew--the Forbidden Corner.
A faintness then came over me at once, a faintness as of death, when
I saw him _there_ of all places--where he never was allowed to go,
and where, moreover, he was usually too terrified to go. To see him
standing solitary in that singular spot, above all to hear him crying
there, bereft me momentarily of the power to act. Then, before I could
recover my composure sufficiently to call him in, Mr. Frene came round
the corner from the Lower Farm with the dogs, and, seeing his son,
performed that office for me. In his loud, good-natured, hearty voice
he called him, and Jamie turned and ran as though some spell had broken
just in time--ran into the open arms of his fond but uncomprehending
father, who carried him indoors on his shoulder, while asking ‘what all
this hubbub was about?’ And, at their heels, the tail-less sheep-dogs
followed, barking loudly, and performing what Jamie called their
‘Gravel Dance,’ because they ploughed up the moist, rolled gravel with
their feet.
I stepped back swiftly from the window lest I should be seen. Had I
witnessed the saving of the child from fire or drowning the relief
could hardly have been greater. Only Mr. Frene, I felt sure, would not
say and do the right thing quite. He would protect the boy from his own
vain imaginings, yet not with the explanation that could really heal.
They disappeared behind the rose trees, making for the house. I saw no
more till later, when Mr. Frene, senior, arrived.
* * * * *
To describe the ugly patch as ‘singular’ is hard to justify, perhaps,
yet some such word is what the entire family sought, though never--oh,
never!--used. To Jamie and myself, though equally we never mentioned
it, that treeless, flowerless spot was more than singular. It stood
at the far end of the magnificent rose garden, a bald, sore place,
where the black earth showed uglily in winter, almost like a piece of
dangerous bog, and in summer baked and cracked with fissures where
green lizards shot their fire in passing. In contrast to the rich
luxuriance of the whole amazing garden it was like a glimpse of death
amid life, a centre of disease that cried for healing lest it spread.
But it never did spread. Behind it stood the thick wood of silver
birches and, glimmering beyond, the orchard meadow, where the lambs
played.
The gardeners had a very simple explanation of its barrenness--that the
water all drained off it owing to the lie of the slopes immediately
about it, holding no remnant to keep the soil alive. I cannot say. It
was Jamie--Jamie who felt its spell and haunted it, who spent whole
hours there, even while afraid, and for whom it was finally labelled
‘strictly out of bounds’ because it stimulated his already big
imagination, not wisely but too darkly--it was Jamie who buried ogres
there and heard it crying in an earthy voice, swore that it shook its
surface sometimes while he watched it, and secretly gave it food in
the form of birds or mice or rabbits he found dead upon his wanderings.
And it was Jamie who put so extraordinarily into words the _feeling_
that the horrid spot had given me from the moment I first saw it.
‘It’s bad, Miss Gould,’ he told me.
‘But, Jamie, nothing in Nature is bad--exactly; only different from the
rest sometimes.’
‘Miss Gould, if you please, then it’s empty. It’s not fed. It’s dying
because it can’t get the food it wants.’
And when I stared into the little pale face where the eyes shone so
dark and wonderful, seeking within myself for the right thing to say to
him, he added, with an emphasis and conviction that made me suddenly
turn cold: ‘Miss Gould’--he always used my name like this in all his
sentences--‘it’s hungry, don’t you see? But _I_ know what would make it
feel all right.’
Only the conviction of an earnest child, perhaps, could have made so
outrageous a suggestion worth listening to for an instant; but for me,
who felt that things an imaginative child believed were important,
it came with a vast disquieting shock of reality. Jamie, in this
exaggerated way, had caught at the edge of a shocking fact--a hint of
dark, undiscovered truth had leaped into that sensitive imagination.
Why there lay horror in the words I cannot say, but I think some power
of darkness trooped across the suggestion of that sentence at the
end, ‘I know what would make it feel all right.’ I remember that I
shrank from asking explanation. Small groups of other words, veiled
fortunately by his silence, gave life to an unspeakable possibility
that hitherto had lain at the back of my own consciousness. The way
it sprang to life proves, I think, that my mind already contained it.
The blood rushed from my heart as I listened. I remember that my knees
shook. Jamie’s idea was--had been all along--my own as well.
And now, as I lay down on my bed and thought about it all, I understood
why the coming of his uncle involved somehow an experience that wrapped
terror at its heart. With a sense of nightmare certainty that left me
too weak to resist the preposterous idea, too shocked, indeed, to argue
or reason it away, this certainty came with its full, black blast of
conviction; and the only way I can put it into words, since nightmare
horror really is not properly tellable at all, seems this: that there
_was_ something missing in that dying patch of garden; something
lacking that it ever searched for; something, once found and taken,
that would turn it rich and living as the rest; more--that there _was_
some living person who could do this for it. Mr. Frene, senior, in a
word, ‘Uncle Frank,’ was this person who out of his abundant life could
supply the lack--unwittingly.
For this connection between the dying, empty patch and the person of
this vigorous, wealthy, and successful man had already lodged itself in
my subconsciousness before I was aware of it. Clearly it must have lain
there all along, though hidden. Jamie’s words, his sudden pallor, his
vibrating emotion of fearful anticipation had developed the plate, but
it was his weeping alone there in the Forbidden Corner that had printed
it. The photograph shone framed before me in the air. I hid my eyes.
But for the redness--the charm of my face goes to pieces unless my eyes
are clear--I could have cried. Jamie’s words that morning about the
‘’normous face’ came back upon me like a battering-ram.
Mr. Frene, senior, had been so frequently the subject of conversation
in the family since I came, I had so often heard him discussed,
and had then read so much about him in the papers--his energy, his
philanthropy, his success with everything he laid his hand to--that
a picture of the man had grown complete within me. I knew him as he
was--within; or, as my sister would have said--clairvoyantly. And the
only time I saw him (when I took Gladys to a meeting where he was
chairman, and later _felt_ his atmosphere and presence while for a
moment he patronisingly spoke with her) had justified the portrait I
had drawn. The rest, you may say, was a woman’s wild imagining; but I
think rather it was that kind of divining intuition which women share
with children. If souls could be made visible, I would stake my life
upon the truth and accuracy of my portrait.
For this Mr. Frene was a man who drooped alone, but grew vital in a
crowd--because he used their vitality. He was a supreme, unconscious
artist in the science of taking the fruits of others’ work and
living--for his own advantage. He vampired, unknowingly no doubt,
every one with whom he came in contact; left them exhausted, tired,
listless. Others fed him, so that while in a full room he shone, alone
by himself and with no life to draw upon he languished and declined. In
the man’s immediate neighbourhood you felt his presence draining you;
he took your ideas, your strength, your very words, and later used them
for his own benefit and aggrandisement. Not evilly, of course; the
man was good enough; but you felt that he was dangerous owing to the
facile way he absorbed into himself all loose vitality that was to be
had. His eyes and voice and presence devitalised you. Life, it seemed,
not highly organised enough to resist, must shrink from his too near
approach and hide away for fear of being appropriated, for fear, that
is, of--death.
Jamie, unknowingly, put in the finishing touch to my unconscious
portrait. The man carried about with him some silent, compelling trick
of drawing out all your reserves--then swiftly pocketing them. At first
you would be conscious of taut resistance; this would slowly shade
off into weariness; the will would become flaccid; then you either
moved away or yielded--agreed to all he said with a sense of weakness
pressing ever closer upon the edges of collapse. With a male antagonist
it might be different, but even then the effort of resistance would
generate force that _he_ absorbed and not the other. He never gave out.
Some instinct taught him how to protect himself from that. To human
beings, I mean, he never gave out. This time it was a very different
matter. He had no more chance than a fly before the wheels of a
huge--what Jamie used to call--‘attraction’ engine.
So this was how I saw him--a great human sponge, crammed and soaked
with the life, or proceeds of life, absorbed from others--stolen. My
idea of a human vampire was satisfied. He went about carrying these
accumulations of the life of others. In this sense his ‘life’ was not
really his own. For the same reason, I think, it was not so fully under
his control as he imagined.
* * * * *
And in another hour this man would be here. I went to the window.
My eye wandered to the empty patch, dull black there amid the rich
luxuriance of the garden flowers. It struck me as a hideous bit of
emptiness yawning to be filled and nourished. The idea of Jamie
playing round its bare edge was loathsome. I watched the big summer
clouds above, the stillness of the afternoon, the haze. The silence
of the overheated garden was oppressive. I had never felt a day so
stifling, motionless. It lay there waiting. The household, too, was
waiting--waiting for the coming of Mr. Frene from London in his big
motor-car.
And I shall never forget the sensation of icy shrinking and distress
with which I heard the rumble of the car. He had arrived. Tea was
all ready on the lawn beneath the lime trees, and Mrs. Frene and
Gladys, back from their drive, were sitting in wicker chairs. Mr.
Frene, junior, was in the hall to meet his brother, but Jamie, as I
learned afterwards, had shown such hysterical alarm, offered such bold
resistance, that it had been deemed wiser to keep him in his room.
Perhaps, after all, his presence might not be necessary. The visit
clearly had to do with something on the uglier side of life--money,
settlements, or what not; I never knew exactly; only that his parents
were anxious, and that Uncle Frank had to be propitiated. It does not
matter. That has nothing to do with the affair. What has to do with
it--or I should not be telling the story--is that Mrs. Frene sent for
me to come down ‘in my nice white dress, if I didn’t mind,’ and that I
was terrified, yet pleased, because it meant that a pretty face would
be considered a welcome addition to the visitor’s landscape. Also, most
odd it was, I felt my presence was somehow inevitable, that in some
way it was intended that I should witness what I did witness. And the
instant I came upon the lawn--I hesitate to set it down, it sounds so
foolish, disconnected--I could have sworn, as my eyes met his, that
a kind of sudden darkness came, taking the summer brilliance out of
everything, and that it was caused by troops of small black horses that
raced about us from his person--to attack.
After a first momentary approving glance he took no further notice of
me. The tea and talk went smoothly; I helped to pass the plates and
cups, filling in pauses with little under-talk to Gladys. Jamie was
never mentioned. Outwardly all seemed well, but inwardly everything was
awful--skirting the edge of things unspeakable, and so charged with
danger that I could not keep my voice from trembling when I spoke.
I watched his hard, bleak face; I noticed how thin he was, and the
curious, oily brightness of his steady eyes. They did not glitter,
but they drew you with a sort of soft, creamy shine like Eastern
eyes. And everything he said or did announced what I may dare to
call the _suction_ of his presence. His nature achieved this result
automatically. He dominated us all, yet so gently that until it was
accomplished no one noticed it.
Before five minutes had passed, however, I was aware of one thing only.
My mind focussed exclusively upon it, and so vividly that I marvelled
the others did not scream, or run, or do something violent to prevent
it. And it was this: that, separated merely by some dozen yards or so,
this man, vibrating with the acquired vitality of others, stood within
easy reach or that spot of yawning emptiness, waiting and eager to be
filled. Earth scented her prey.
These two active ‘centres’ were within fighting distance; he so thin,
so hard, so keen, yet really spreading large with the loose ‘surround’
of others’ life he had appropriated, so practised and triumphant; that
other so patient, deep, with so mighty a draw of the whole earth behind
it, and--ugh!--so obviously aware that its opportunity at last had come.
I saw it all as plainly as though I watched two great animals prepare
for battle, both unconsciously; yet in some inexplicable way I saw
it, of course, within me, and not externally. The conflict would be
hideously unequal. Each side had already sent out emissaries, how
long before I could not tell, for the first evidence _he_ gave that
something was going wrong with him was when his voice grew suddenly
confused, he missed his words, and his lips trembled a moment and
turned flabby. The next second his face betrayed that singular and
horrid change, growing somehow loose about the bones of the cheek, and
larger, so that I remembered Jamie’s miserable phrase. The emissaries
of the two kingdoms, the human and the vegetable, had met, I make it
out, in that very second. For the first time in his long career of
battening on others, Mr. Frene found himself pitted against a vaster
kingdom than he knew and, so finding, shook inwardly in that little
part that was his definite actual self. He felt the huge disaster
coming.
‘Yes, John,’ he was saying, in his drawling, self-congratulating voice,
‘Sir George gave me that car--gave it to me as a present. Wasn’t
it char----?’ and then broke off abruptly, stammered, drew breath,
stood up, and looked uneasily about him. For a second there was a
gaping pause. It was like the click which starts some huge machinery
moving--that instant’s pause before it actually starts. The whole
thing, indeed, then went with the rapidity of machinery running down
and beyond control. I thought of a giant dynamo working silently and
invisible.
‘What’s that?’ he cried, in a soft voice charged with alarm. ‘What’s
that horrid place? And some one’s crying there--who is it?’
He pointed to the empty patch. Then, before any one could answer, he
started across the lawn towards it, going every minute faster. Before
any one could move he stood upon the edge. He leaned over--peering down
into it.
It seemed a few hours passed, but really they were seconds, for time is
measured by the quality and not the quantity of sensations it contains.
I saw it all with merciless, photographic detail, sharply etched amid
the general confusion. Each side was intensely active, but only one
side, the human, exerted _all_ its force--in resistance. The other
merely stretched out a feeler, as it were, from its vast, potential
strength; no more was necessary. It was such a soft and easy victory.
Oh, it was rather pitiful! There was no bluster or great effort, on
one side at least. Close by his side I witnessed it, for I, it seemed,
alone had moved and followed him. No one else stirred, though Mrs.
Frene clattered noisily with the cups, making some sudden impulsive
gesture with her hands, and Gladys, I remember, gave a cry--it was like
a little scream--‘Oh, mother, it’s the heat, isn’t it?’ Mr. Frene, her
father, was speechless, pale as ashes.
But the instant I reached his side, it became clear what had drawn
me there thus instinctively. Upon the other side, among the silver
birches, stood little Jamie. He was watching. I experienced--for
him--one of those moments that shake the heart; a liquid fear ran all
over me, the more effective because unintelligible really. Yet I felt
that if I could know all, and what lay actually behind, my fear would
be more than justified; that the thing _was_ awful, full of awe.
And then it happened--a truly wicked sight--like watching a universe in
action, yet all contained within a small square foot of space. I think
he understood vaguely that if some one could only take his place he
might be saved, and that was why, discerning instinctively the easiest
substitute within reach, he saw the child and called aloud to him
across the empty patch, ‘James, my boy, come here!’
His voice was like a thin report, but somehow flat and lifeless, as
when a rifle misses fire, sharp, yet weak; it had no ‘crack’ in it. It
was really supplication. And, with amazement, I heard my own ring out
imperious and strong, though I was not conscious of saying it, ‘Jamie,
don’t move. Stay where you are!’ But Jamie, the little child, obeyed
neither of us. Moving up nearer to the edge, he stood there--laughing!
I heard that laughter, but could have sworn it did not come from him.
The empty, yawning patch gave out that sound.
Mr. Frene turned sideways, throwing up his arms. I saw his hard,
bleak face grow somehow wider, spread through the air, and downwards.
A similar thing, I saw, was happening at the same time to his
entire person, for it drew out into the atmosphere in a stream of
movement. The face for a second made me think of those toys of
green india-rubber that children pull. It grew enormous. But this
was an external impression only. What actually happened, I clearly
understood, was that all this vitality and life he had transferred from
others to himself for years was now in turn being taken from him and
transferred--elsewhere.
One moment on the edge he wobbled horribly, then with that queer
sideways motion, rapid yet ungainly, he stepped forward into the
middle of the patch and fell heavily upon his face. His eyes, as he
dropped, faded shockingly, and across the countenance was written
plainly what I can only call an expression of destruction. He looked
utterly destroyed. I caught a sound--from Jamie?--but this time not of
laughter. It was like a gulp; it was deep and muffled and it dipped
away into the earth. Again I thought of a troop of small black horses
galloping away down a subterranean passage beneath my feet--plunging
into the depths--their tramping growing fainter and fainter into buried
distance. In my nostrils was a pungent smell of earth.
* * * * *
And then--all passed. I came back into myself. Mr. Frene, junior, was
lifting his brother’s head from the lawn where he had fallen from
the heat, close beside the tea-table. He had never really moved from
there. And Jamie, I learned afterwards, had been the whole time asleep
upon his bed upstairs, worn out with his crying and unreasoning alarm.
Gladys came running out with cold water, sponge and towel, brandy
too--all kinds of things. ‘Mother, it _was_ the heat, wasn’t it?’ I
heard her whisper, but I did not catch Mrs. Frene’s reply. From her
face it struck me that she was bordering on collapse herself. Then the
butler followed, and they just picked him up and carried him into the
house. He recovered even before the doctor came.
But the queer thing to me is that I was convinced the others all had
seen what I saw, only that no one said a word about it; and to this day
no one _has_ said a word. And that was, perhaps, the most horrid part
of all.
From that day to this I have scarcely heard a mention of Mr. Frene,
senior. It seemed as if he dropped suddenly out of life. The papers
never mentioned him. His activities ceased, as it were. His after-life,
at any rate, became singularly ineffective. Certainly he achieved
nothing worth public mention. But it may be only that, having left the
employ of Mrs. Frene, there was no particular occasion for me to hear
anything.
The after-life of that empty patch of garden, however, was quite
otherwise. Nothing, so far as I know, was done to it by gardeners, or
in the way of draining it or bringing in new earth, but even before I
left in the following summer it had changed. It lay untouched, full of
great, luscious, driving weeds and creepers, very strong, full-fed, and
bursting thick with life.