“I can assure you,” said I, “that it will take a very tangible ghost to
frighten me.” And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.
“It is your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm, and
glanced at me askance.
“Eight-and-twenty years,” said I, “I have lived, and never a ghost have
I seen as yet.”
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.
“Ay,” she broke in; “and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never
seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There’s a many things to see,
when one’s still but eight-and-twenty.” She swayed her head slowly from
side to side. “A many things to see and sorrow for.”
I half-suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual
terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty
glass on the table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of
myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the
queer old mirror at the end of the room. “Well,” I said, “if I see
anything to-night, I shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the
business with an open mind.”
“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm once more.
I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the
passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man
entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He
supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade,
and his lower lip, half-averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying
yellow teeth. He made straight for an arm-chair on the opposite side of
the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the
withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the
old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes
fixed steadily on the fire.
“I said—it’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm,
when the coughing had ceased for awhile.
“It’s my own choosing,” I answered.
The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time,
and threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a
momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he
began to cough and splutter again.
“Why don’t you drink?” said the man with the withered arm, pushing the
beer towards him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful with a
shaky arm that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A
monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as
he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these
grotesque custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility,
something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from
old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel
uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their
evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.
“If,” said I, “you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will
make myself comfortable there.”
The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it
startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under
the shade; but no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one
to the other.
“If,” I said a little louder, “if you will show me to this haunted room
of yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me.”
“There’s a candle on the slab outside the door,” said the man with the
withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. “But if you go to
the red room to-night—”
(“This night of all nights!” said the old woman.)
“You go alone.”
“Very well,” I answered. “And which way do I go?”
“You go along the passage for a bit,” said he, “until you come to a
door, and through that is a spiral staircase, and half-way up that is a
landing and another door covered with baize. Go through that and down
the long corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the
steps.”
“Have I got that right?” I said, and repeated his directions. He
corrected me in one particular.
“And are you really going?” said the man with the shade, looking at me
again for the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the
face.
(“This night of all nights!” said the old woman.)
“It is what I came for,” I said, and moved towards the door. As I did
so, the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as
to be closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned and
looked at them, and saw they were all close together, dark against the
firelight, staring at me over their shoulders, with an intent expression
on their ancient faces.
“Good-night,” I said, setting the door open.
“It’s your own choosing,” said the man with the withered arm.
I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I
shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.
I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose
charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned,
old-fashioned furniture of the housekeeper’s room in which they
foregathered, affected me in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a
matter-of-fact phase. They seemed to belong to another age, an older
age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of ours, less
certain; an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond
denying. Their very existence was spectral; the cut of their clothing,
fashions born in dead brains. The ornaments and conveniences of the room
about them were ghostly—the thoughts of vanished men, which still
haunted rather than participated in the world of to-day. But with an
effort I sent such thoughts to the right-about. The long, draughty
subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my candle flared and made
the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang up and down the spiral
staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me, and one fled before
me into the darkness overhead. I came to the landing and stopped there
for a moment, listening to a rustling that I fancied I heard; then,
satisfied of the absolute silence, I pushed open the baize-covered door
and stood in the corridor.
The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in by
the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid
black shadow or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place: the
house might have been deserted on the yesterday instead of eighteen
months ago. There were candles in the sockets of the sconces, and
whatever dust had gathered on the carpets or upon the polished flooring
was distributed so evenly as to be invisible in the moonlight. I was
about to advance, and stopped abruptly. A bronze group stood upon the
landing, hidden from me by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell
with marvellous distinctness upon the white panelling, and gave me the
impression of some one crouching to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a
minute perhaps. Then, with my hand in the pocket that held my revolver,
I advanced, only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle glistening in the
moonlight. That incident for a time restored my nerve, and a porcelain
Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head rocked silently as I passed him,
scarcely startled me.
The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy
corner. I moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the
nature of the recess in which I stood before opening the door. Here it
was, thought I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that
story gave me a sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced over my
shoulder at the Ganymede in the moonlight, and opened the door of the
red room rather hastily, with my face half turned to the pallid silence
of the landing.
I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in
the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the
scene of my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the
young duke had died. Or, rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he
had opened the door and fallen headlong down the steps I had just
ascended. That had been the end of his vigil, of his gallant attempt to
conquer the ghostly tradition of the place, and never, I thought, had
apoplexy better served the ends of superstition. And there were other
and older stories that clung to the room, back to the half-credible
beginning of it all, the tale of a timid wife and the tragic end that
came to her husband’s jest of frightening her. And looking around that
large shadowy room, with its shadowy window bays, its recesses and
alcoves, one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its
black corners, its germinating darkness. My candle was a little tongue
of light in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the
room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of
light.
I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and
dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a
hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I
began to walk about the room, peering round each article of furniture,
tucking up the valances of the bed, and opening its curtains wide. I
pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of the several windows
before closing the shutters, leant forward and looked up the blackness
of the wide chimney, and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret
opening. There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of
sconces bearing candles, and on the mantel-shelf, too, were more candles
in china candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was
laid,—an unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper,—and I lit
it, to keep down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning
well, I stood round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I
had pulled up a chintz-covered armchair and a table, to form a kind of
barricade before me, and on this lay my revolver ready to hand. My
precise examination had done me good, but I still found the remoter
darkness of the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for
the imagination. The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was
no sort of comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove, at the end in
particular, had that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd
suggestion of a lurking living thing, that comes so easily in silence
and solitude. At last, to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into
it, and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I stood
that candle upon the floor of the alcove, and left it in that position.
By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although
to my reason there was no adequate cause for the condition. My mind,
however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that
nothing supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began to
string some rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, of the original legend
of the place. A few I spoke aloud, but the echoes were not pleasant. For
the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a conversation with
myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My mind reverted
to the three old and distorted people downstairs, and I tried to keep it
upon that topic. The sombre reds and blacks of the room troubled me;
even with seven candles the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove
flared in a draught, and the fire-flickering kept the shadows and
penumbra perpetually shifting and stirring. Casting about for a remedy,
I recalled the candles I had seen in the passage, and, with a slight
effort, walked out into the moonlight, carrying a candle and leaving the
door open, and presently returned with as many as ten. These I put in
various knick-knacks of china with which the room was sparsely adorned,
lit and placed where the shadows had lain deepest, some on the floor,
some in the window recesses, until at last my seventeen candles were so
arranged that not an inch of the room but had the direct light of at
least one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came, I could
warn him not to trip over them. The room was now quite brightly
illuminated. There was something very cheery and reassuring in these
little streaming flames, and snuffing them gave me an occupation, and
afforded a reassuring sense of the passage of time.
Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed
heavily upon me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove
suddenly went out, and the black shadow sprang back to its place there.
I did not see the candle go out; I simply turned and saw that the
darkness was there, as one might start and see the unexpected presence
of a stranger. “By Jove!” said I aloud; “that draught’s a strong one!”
and, taking the matches from the table, I walked across the room in a
leisurely manner to relight the corner again. My first match would not
strike, and as I succeeded with the second, something seemed to blink on
the wall before me. I turned my head involuntarily, and saw that the two
candles on the little table by the fireplace were extinguished. I rose
at once to my feet.
“Odd!” I said. “Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness?”
I walked back, relit one, and as I did so, I saw the candle in the right
sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost
immediately its companion followed it. There was no mistake about it.
The flame vanished, as if the wicks had been suddenly nipped between a
finger and a thumb, leaving the wick neither glowing nor smoking, but
black. While I stood gaping, the candle at the foot of the bed went out,
and the shadows seemed to take another step towards me.
“This won’t do!” said I, and first one and then another candle on the
mantel-shelf followed.
“What’s up?” I cried, with a queer high note getting into my voice
somehow. At that the candle on the wardrobe went out, and the one I had
relit in the alcove followed.
“Steady on!” I said. “These candles are wanted,” speaking with a
half-hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the while
for the mantel candlesticks. My hands trembled so much that twice I
missed the rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel emerged from
darkness again, two candles in the remoter end of the window were
eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit the larger mirror
candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for the moment
I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a volley there vanished
four lights at once in different corners of the room, and I struck
another match in quivering haste, and stood hesitating whither to take
it.
As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two
candles on the table. With a cry of terror, I dashed at the alcove, then
into the corner, and then into the window, relighting three, as two more
vanished by the fireplace; then, perceiving a better way, I dropped the
matches on the iron-bound deed-box in the corner, and caught up the
bedroom candlestick. With this I avoided the delay of striking matches;
but for all that the steady process of extinction went on, and the
shadows I feared and fought against returned, and crept in upon me,
first a step gained on this side of me and then on that. It was like a
ragged stormcloud sweeping out the stars. Now and then one returned for
a minute, and was lost again. I was now almost frantic with the horror
of the coming darkness, and my self-possession deserted me. I leaped,
panting and dishevelled, from candle to candle, in a vain struggle
against that remorseless advance.
I bruised myself on the thigh against the table, I sent a chair
headlong, I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my
fall. My candle rolled away from me, and I snatched another as I rose.
Abruptly this was blown out, as I swung it off the table, by the wind of
my sudden movement, and immediately the two remaining candles followed.
But there was light still in the room, a red light that staved off the
shadows from me. The fire! Of course, I could still thrust my candle
between the bars and relight it!
I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing
coals, and splashing red reflections upon the furniture, made two steps
towards the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished,
the glow vanished, the reflections rushed together and vanished, and as
I thrust the candle between the bars, darkness closed upon me like the
shutting of an eye, wrapped about me in a stifling embrace, sealed my
vision, and crushed the last vestiges of reason from my brain. The
candle fell from my hand. I flung out my arms in a vain effort to thrust
that ponderous blackness away from me, and, lifting up my voice,
screamed with all my might—once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must have
staggered to my feet. I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor,
and, with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run for the
door.
But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and struck myself
heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was
either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furniture. I
have a vague memory of battering myself thus, to and fro in the
darkness, of a cramped struggle, and of my own wild crying as I darted
to and fro, of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, a horrible
sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to
keep my footing, and then I remember no more.
I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the man
with the withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me, trying to
remember what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect. I
rolled my eyes into the corner, and saw the old woman, no longer
abstracted, pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue phial
into a glass. “Where am I?” I asked. “I seem to remember you, and yet I
cannot remember who you are.”
They told me then, and I heard of the haunted red room as one who hears
a tale. “We found you at dawn,” said he, “and there was blood on your
forehead and lips.”
It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience. “You believe
now,” said the old man, “that the room is haunted?” He spoke no longer
as one who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken
friend.
“Yes,” said I; “the room is haunted.”
“And you have seen it. And we, who have lived here all our lives, have
never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared.—Tell us, is it
truly the old earl who—”
“No,” said I; “it is not.”
“I told you so,” said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. “It is
his poor young countess who was frightened—”
“It is not,” I said. “There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of
countess in that room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far
worse—”
“Well?” they said.
“The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man,” said I; “and
that is, in all its nakedness—_Fear!_ Fear that will not have light nor
sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and
overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in
the room—”
I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to
my bandages.
Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke. “That is it,” said he. “I
knew that was it. A Power of Darkness. To put such a curse upon a woman!
It lurks there always. You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a
bright summer’s day, in the hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind
you however you face about. In the dusk it creeps along the corridor and
follows you, so that you dare not turn. There is Fear in that room of
hers—black Fear, and there will be—so long as this house of sin
endures.”
A MOTH
(GENUS UNKNOWN)
Probably you have heard of Hapley—not W. T. Hapley, the son, but the
celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of _Periplaneta Hapliia_, Hapley the
entomologist. If so, you know at least of the great feud between Hapley
and Professor Pawkins, though certain of its consequences may be new to
you. For those who have not, a word or two of explanation is necessary,
which the idle reader may go over with a glancing eye, if his indolence
so incline him.
It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really
important matters as this Hapley-Pawkins feud. Those epoch-making
controversies, again, that have convulsed the Geological Society, are, I
verily believe, almost entirely unknown outside the fellowship of that
body. I have heard men of fair general education even refer to the great
scenes at these meetings as vestry-meeting squabbles. Yet the great Hate
of the English and Scotch geologists has lasted now half a century, and
has “left deep and abundant marks upon the body of the science.” And
this Hapley-Pawkins business, though perhaps a more personal affair,
stirred passions as profound, if not profounder. Your common man has no
conception of the zeal that animates a scientific investigator, the fury
of contradiction you can arouse in him. It is the _odium theologicum_ in
a new form. There are men, for instance, who would gladly burn Professor
Ray Lankester at Smithfield for his treatment of the Mollusca in the
Encyclopædia. That fantastic extension of the Cephalopods to cover the
Pterpodos—But I wander from Hapley and Pawkins.
It began years and years ago, with a revision of the Microlepidoptera
(whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new
species created by Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied
by a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins.[2]
Pawkins, in his “Rejoinder,”[3] suggested that Hapley’s microscope was
as defective as his powers of observation, and called him an
“irresponsible meddler”—Hapley was not a professor at that time. Hapley,
in his retort,[4] spoke of “blundering collectors,” and described, as if
inadvertently, Pawkins’s revision as a “miracle of ineptitude.” It was
war to the knife. However, it would scarcely interest the reader to
detail how these two great men quarrelled, and how the split between
them widened until from the Microlepidoptera, they were at war upon
every open question in entomology. There were memorable occasions. At
times the Royal Entomological Society meetings resembled nothing so much
as the Chamber of Deputies. On the whole, I fancy Pawkins was nearer the
truth than Hapley. But Hapley was skilful with his rhetoric, had a turn
for ridicule rare in a scientific man, was endowed with vast energy, and
had a fine sense of injury in the matter of the extinguished species;
while Pawkins was a man of dull presence, prosy of speech, in shape not
unlike a water-barrel, overconscientious with testimonials, and
suspected of jobbing museum appointments. So the young men gathered
round Hapley and applauded him. It was a long struggle, vicious from the
beginning, and growing at last to pitiless antagonism. The successive
turns of fortune, now an advantage to one side and now to another—now
Hapley tormented by some success of Pawkins, and now Pawkins outshone by
Hapley—belong rather to the history of entomology than to this story.
Footnote 2:
“Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera.” _Quart. Journ.
Entomological Soc._ 1863.
Footnote 3:
“Rejoinder to certain Remarks,” &c. _Ibid._ 1864.
Footnote 4:
“Further Remarks,” &c. _Ibid._
But in 1891 Pawkins, whose health had been bad for some time, published
some work upon the “mesoblast” of the Death’s Head Moth. What the
mesoblast of the Death’s Head Moth may be, does not matter a rap in this
story. But the work was far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley an
opening he had coveted for years. He must have worked night and day to
make the most of his advantage.
In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters,—one can fancy the
man’s disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing as he went
for his antagonist,—and Pawkins made a reply, halting, ineffectual, with
painful gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was no mistaking his
will to wound Hapley, nor his incapacity to do it. But few of those who
heard him—I was absent from that meeting—realised how ill the man was.
Hapley had got his opponent down, and meant to finish him. He followed
with a simply brutal attack upon Pawkins, in the form of a paper upon
the development of moths in general, a paper showing evidence of a most
extraordinary amount of mental labour, and yet couched in a violently
controversial tone. Violent as it was, an editorial note witnesses that
it was modified. It must have covered Pawkins with shame and confusion
of face. It left no loophole; it was murderous in argument, and utterly
contemptuous in tone; an awful thing for the declining years of a man’s
career.
The world of entomologists waited breathlessly for the rejoinder from
Pawkins. He would try one, for Pawkins had always been game. But when it
came it surprised them. For the rejoinder of Pawkins was to catch the
influenza, to proceed to pneumonia, and to die.
It was perhaps as effectual a reply as he could make under the
circumstances, and largely turned the current of feeling against Hapley.
The very people who had most gleefully cheered on those gladiators
became serious at the consequence. There could be no reasonable doubt
the fret of the defeat had contributed to the death of Pawkins. There
was a limit even to scientific controversy, said serious people. Another
crushing attack was already in the press and appeared on the day before
the funeral. I don’t think Hapley exerted himself to stop it. People
remembered how Hapley had hounded down his rival, and forgot that
rival’s defects. Scathing satire reads ill over fresh mould. The thing
provoked comment in the daily papers. This it was that made me think
that you had probably heard of Hapley and this controversy. But, as I
have already remarked, scientific workers live very much in a world of
their own; half the people, I dare say, who go along Piccadilly to the
Academy every year, could not tell you where the learned societies
abide. Many even think that Research is a kind of happy-family cage in
which all kinds of men lie down together in peace.
In his private thoughts Hapley could not forgive Pawkins for dying. In
the first place, it was a mean dodge to escape the absolute
pulverisation Hapley had in hand for him, and in the second, it left
Hapley’s mind with a queer gap in it. For twenty years he had worked
hard, sometimes far into the night, and seven days a week, with
microscope, scalpel, collecting-net, and pen, and almost entirely with
reference to Pawkins. The European reputation he had won had come as an
incident in that great antipathy. He had gradually worked up to a climax
in this last controversy. It had killed Pawkins, but it had also thrown
Hapley out of gear, so to speak, and his doctor advised him to give up
work for a time, and rest. So Hapley went down into a quiet village in
Kent, and thought day and night of Pawkins, and good things it was now
impossible to say about him.
At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the preoccupation
tended. He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to
read novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the
face, and making his last speech—every sentence a beautiful opening for
Hapley. He turned to fiction—and found it had no grip on him. He read
the “Island Nights’ Entertainments” until his “sense of causation” was
shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to Kipling, and
found he “proved nothing,” besides being irreverent and vulgar. These
scientific people have their limitations. Then, unhappily, he tried
Besant’s “Inner House,” and the opening chapter set his mind upon
learned societies and Pawkins at once.
So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He soon
mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing positions,
and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical contours of the
opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and gasping
ineffectually against checkmate, and Hapley decided to give up chess.
Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be
better diversion. The best rest is change of occupation. Hapley
determined to plunge at diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes
and Halibut’s monograph sent down from London. He thought that perhaps
if he could get up a vigorous quarrel with Halibut, he might be able to
begin life afresh and forget Pawkins. And very soon he was hard at work,
in his habitual strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the
wayside pool.
It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of a
novel addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the
microscope, and the only light in the room was the brilliant little lamp
with the special form of green shade. Like all experienced
microscopists, he kept both eyes open. It is the only way to avoid
excessive fatigue. One eye was over the instrument, and bright and
distinct before that was the circular field of the microscope, across
which a brown diatom was slowly moving. With the other eye Hapley saw,
as it were, without seeing.[5] He was only dimly conscious of the brass
side of the instrument, the illuminated part of the table-cloth, a sheet
of notepaper, the foot of the lamp, and the darkened room beyond.
Footnote 5:
The reader unaccustomed to microscopes may easily understand this by
rolling a newspaper in the form of a tube and looking through it at a
book, keeping the other eye open.
Suddenly his attention drifted from one eye to the other. The
table-cloth was of the material called tapestry by shopmen, and rather
brightly coloured. The pattern was in gold, with a small amount of
crimson and pale-blue upon a greyish ground. At one point the pattern
seemed displaced, and there was a vibrating movement of the colours at
this point.
Hapley suddenly moved his head back and looked with both eyes. His mouth
fell open with astonishment.
It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion!
It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were
closed. Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when
fluttering to its present position. Strange that it should match the
table-cloth. Stranger far to him, Hapley, the great entomologist, it was
altogether unknown. There was no delusion. It was crawling slowly
towards the foot of the lamp.
“_Genus unknown_, by heavens! And in England!” said Hapley, staring.
Then he suddenly thought of Pawkins. Nothing would have maddened Pawkins
more—And Pawkins was dead!
Something about the head and body of the insect became singularly
suggestive of Pawkins, just as the chess king had been.
“Confound Pawkins!” said Hapley. “But I must catch this.” And, looking
round him for some means of capturing the moth, he rose slowly out of
his chair. Suddenly the insect rose, struck the edge of the
lamp-shade—Hapley heard the “ping”—and vanished into the shadow.
In a moment Hapley had whipped off the shade, so that the whole room was
illuminated. The thing had disappeared, but soon his practised eye
detected it upon the wall-paper near the door. He went towards it,
poising the lamp-shade for capture. Before he was within striking
distance, however, it had risen and was fluttering round the room. After
the fashion of its kind, it flew with sudden starts and turns, seeming
to vanish here and reappear there. Once Hapley struck, and missed; then
again.
The third time he hit his microscope. The instrument swayed, struck and
overturned the lamp, and fell noisily upon the floor. The lamp turned
over on the table and, very luckily, went out. Hapley was left in the
dark. With a start he felt the strange moth blunder into his face.
It was maddening. He had no lights. If he opened the door of the room
the thing would get away. In the darkness he saw Pawkins quite
distinctly laughing at him. Pawkins had ever an oily laugh. He swore
furiously and stamped his foot on the floor.
There was a timid rapping at the door.
Then it opened, perhaps a foot, and very slowly. The alarmed face of the
landlady appeared behind a pink candle flame; she wore a night-cap over
her grey hair and had some purple garment over her shoulders. “What
_was_ that fearful smash?” she said. “Has anything—” The strange moth
appeared fluttering about the chink of the door. “Shut that door!” said
Hapley, and suddenly rushed at her.
The door slammed hastily. Hapley was left alone in the dark. Then in the
pause he heard his landlady scuttle upstairs, lock her door and drag
something heavy across the room and put against it.
It became evident to Hapley that his conduct and appearance had been
strange and alarming. Confound the moth! and Pawkins! However, it was a
pity to lose the moth now. He felt his way into the hall and found the
matches, after sending his hat down upon the floor with a noise like a
drum. With the lighted candle he returned to the sitting-room. No moth
was to be seen. Yet once for a moment it seemed that the thing was
fluttering round his head. Hapley very suddenly decided to give up the
moth and go to bed. But he was excited. All night long his sleep was
broken by dreams of the moth, Pawkins, and his landlady. Twice in the
night he turned out and soused his head in cold water.
One thing was very clear to him. His landlady could not possibly
understand about the strange moth, especially as he had failed to catch
it. No one but an entomologist would understand quite how he felt. She
was probably frightened at his behaviour, and yet he failed to see how
he could explain it. He decided to say nothing further about the events
of last night. After breakfast he saw her in her garden, and decided to
go out to talk to her to reassure her. He talked to her about beans and
potatoes, bees, caterpillars, and the price of fruit. She replied in her
usual manner, but she looked at him a little suspiciously, and kept
walking as he walked, so that there was always a bed of flowers, or a
row of beans, or something of the sort, between them. After a while he
began to feel singularly irritated at this, and to conceal his vexation
went indoors and presently went out for a walk.
The moth—or butterfly, trailing an odd flavour of Pawkins with it, kept
coming into that walk, though he did his best to keep his mind off it.
Once he saw it quite distinctly, with its wings flattened out, upon the
old stone wall that runs along the west edge of the park, but going up
to it he found it was only two lumps of grey and yellow lichen. “This,”
said Hapley, “is the reverse of mimicry. Instead of a butterfly looking
like a stone, here is a stone looking like a butterfly!” Once something
hovered and fluttered round his head, but by an effort of will he drove
that impression out of his mind again.
In the afternoon Hapley called upon the Vicar, and argued with him upon
theological questions. They sat in the little arbour covered with briar,
and smoked as they wrangled. “Look at that moth!” said Hapley, suddenly,
pointing to the edge of the wooden table.
“Where?” said the Vicar.
“You don’t see a moth on the edge of the table there?” said Hapley.
“Certainly not,” said the Vicar.
Hapley was thunderstruck. He gasped. The Vicar was staring at him.
Clearly the man saw nothing. “The eye of faith is no better than the eye
of science,” said Hapley, awkwardly.
“I don’t see your point,” said the Vicar, thinking it was part of the
argument.
That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat
on the edge of the bed in his shirt-sleeves and reasoned with himself.
Was it pure hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled for
his sanity with the same silent energy he had formerly displayed against
Pawkins. So persistent is mental habit, that he felt as if it were still
a struggle with Pawkins. He was well versed in psychology. He knew that
such visual illusions do come as a result of mental strain. But the
point was, he did not only _see_ the moth, he had heard it when it
touched the edge of the lamp-shade, and afterwards when it hit against
the wall, and he had felt it strike his face in the dark.
He looked at it. It was not at all dreamlike, but perfectly clear and
solid-looking in the candlelight. He saw the hairy body, and the short,
feathery antennæ, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was
rubbed from the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being
afraid of a little insect.
His landlady had got the servant to sleep with her that night, because
she was afraid to be alone. In addition she had locked the door, and put
the chest of drawers against it. They listened and talked in whispers
after they had gone to bed, but nothing occurred to alarm them. About
eleven they had ventured to put the candle out, and had both dozed off
to sleep. They woke up with a start, and sat up in bed, listening in the
darkness.
Then they heard slippered feet going to and fro in Hapley’s room. A
chair was overturned, and there was a violent dab at the wall. Then a
china mantel ornament smashed upon the fender. Suddenly the door of the
room opened, and they heard him upon the landing. They clung to one
another, listening. He seemed to be dancing upon the staircase. Now he
would go down three or four steps quickly, then up again, then hurry
down into the hall. They heard the umbrella-stand go over, and the
fanlight break. Then the bolt shot and the chain rattled. He was opening
the door.
They hurried to the window. It was a dim grey night; an almost unbroken
sheet of watery cloud was sweeping across the moon, and the hedge and
trees in front of the house were black against the pale roadway. They
saw Hapley, looking like a ghost in his shirt and white trousers,
running to and fro in the road, and beating the air. Now he would stop,
now he would dart very rapidly at something invisible, now he would move
upon it with stealthy strides. At last he went out of sight up the road
towards the down. Then, while they argued who should go down and lock
the door, he returned. He was walking very fast, and he came straight
into the house, closed the door carefully, and went quietly up to his
bedroom. Then everything was silent.
“Mrs. Colville,” said Hapley, calling down the staircase next morning.
“I hope I did not alarm you last night.”
“You may well ask that!” said Mrs. Colville.
“The fact is, I am a sleep-walker, and the last two nights I have been
without my sleeping mixture. There is nothing to be alarmed about,
really. I am sorry I made such an ass of myself. I will go over the down
to Shoreham, and get some stuff to make me sleep soundly. I ought to
have done that yesterday.”
But half-way over the down, by the chalk-pits, the moth came upon Hapley
again. He went on, trying to keep his mind upon chess problems, but it
was no good. The thing fluttered into his face, and he struck at it with
his hat in self-defence. Then rage, the old rage—the rage he had so
often felt against Pawkins—returned once more. He went on, leaping and
striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly he trod on nothing, and fell
headlong.
There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on
the heap of flints in front of the opening of the chalk-pits, with a leg
twisted back under him. The strange moth was still fluttering round his
head. He struck at it with his hand, and turning his head saw two men
approaching him. One was the village doctor. It occurred to Hapley that
this was lucky. Then it came into his mind, with extraordinary
vividness, that no one would ever be able to see the strange moth except
himself, and that it behoved him to keep silent about it.
Late that night, however, after his broken leg was set, he was feverish
and forgot his self-restraint. He was lying flat on his bed, and he
began to run his eyes round the room to see if the moth was still about.
He tried not to do this, but it was no good. He soon caught sight of the
thing resting close to his hand, by the night-light, on the green
table-cloth. The wings quivered. With a sudden wave of anger he smote at
it with his fist, and the nurse woke up with a shriek. He had missed it.
“That moth!” he said; and then, “It was fancy. Nothing!”
All the time he could see quite clearly the insect going round the
cornice and darting across the room, and he could also see that the
nurse saw nothing of it and looked at him strangely. He must keep
himself in hand. He knew he was a lost man if he did not keep himself in
hand. But as the night waned the fever grew upon him, and the very dread
he had of seeing the moth made him see it. About five, just as the dawn
was grey, he tried to get out of bed and catch it, though his leg was
afire with pain. The nurse had to struggle with him.
On account of this, they tied him down to the bed. At this the moth grew
bolder, and once he felt it settle in his hair. Then, because he struck
out violently with his arms, they tied these also. At this the moth came
and crawled over his face, and Hapley wept, swore, screamed, prayed for
them to take it off him, unavailingly.
The doctor was a blockhead, a half-qualified general practitioner, and
quite ignorant of mental science. He simply said there was no moth. Had
he possessed the wit, he might still, perhaps, have saved Hapley from
his fate by entering into his delusion and covering his face with gauze,
as he prayed might be done. But, as I say, the doctor was a blockhead,
and until the leg was healed Hapley was kept tied to his bed, and with
the imaginary moth crawling over him. It never left him while he was
awake and it grew to a monster in his dreams. While he was awake he
longed for sleep, and from sleep he awoke screaming.
So now Hapley is spending the remainder of his days in a padded room,
worried by a moth that no one else can see. The asylum doctor calls it
hallucination; but Hapley, when he is in his easier mood, and can talk,
says it is the ghost of Pawkins, and consequently a unique specimen and
well worth the trouble of catching.