He had released my arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the
center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His
face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly
distressing. I pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten my
existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, never
for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. I
turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. I do not recall any
feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation.
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched my face and enfolded my body from
head to foot; I could feel the stir of it in my hair.
At that moment my attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed
from an upper window of the house: one of the servants, awakened by what
mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an
impulse that she was never able to name, had lit a lamp. When I turned
to look for my father he was gone, and in all the years that have passed
no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from
the realm of the unknown.
II
STATEMENT OF CASPAR GRATTAN
To-day I am said to live; to-morrow, here in this room, will lie a
senseless shape of clay that all too long was I. If anyone lift the
cloth from the face of that unpleasant thing it will be in gratification
of a mere morbid curiosity. Some, doubtless, will go further and
inquire, “Who was he?” In this writing I supply the only answer that I
am able to make—Caspar Grattan. Surely, that should be enough. The name
has served my small need for more than twenty years of a life of unknown
length. True, I gave it to myself, but lacking another I had the right.
In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it
does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which
also seem inadequate distinctions.
One day, for illustration, I was passing along a street of a city, far
from here, when I met two men in uniform, one of whom, half pausing and
looking curiously into my face, said to his companion, “That man looks
like 767.” Something in the number seemed familiar and horrible. Moved
by an uncontrollable impulse, I sprang into a side street and ran until I
fell exhausted in a country lane.
I have never forgotten that number, and always it comes to memory
attended by gibbering obscenity, peals of joyless laughter, the clang of
iron doors. So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a
number. In the register of the potter’s field I shall soon have both.
What wealth!
Of him who shall find this paper I must beg a little consideration. It
is not the history of my life; the knowledge to write that is denied me.
This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some
of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others
remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with
interspaces blank and black—witch-fires glowing still and red in a great
desolation.
Standing upon the shore of eternity, I turn for a last look landward over
the course by which I came. There are twenty years of footprints fairly
distinct, the impressions of bleeding feet. They lead through poverty
and pain, devious and unsure, as of one staggering beneath a burden—
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.
Ah, the poet’s prophecy of Me—how admirable, how dreadfully admirable!
Backward beyond the beginning of this _via dolorosa_—this epic of
suffering with episodes of sin—I see nothing clearly; it comes out of a
cloud. I know that it spans only twenty years, yet I am an old man.
One does not remember one’s birth—one has to be told. But with me it was
different; life came to me full-handed and dowered me with all my
faculties and powers. Of a previous existence I know no more than
others, for all have stammering intimations that may be memories and may
be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness was of maturity in
body and mind—a consciousness accepted without surprise or conjecture. I
merely found myself walking in a forest, half-clad, footsore, unutterably
weary and hungry. Seeing a farmhouse, I approached and asked for food,
which was given me by one who inquired my name. I did not know, yet knew
that all had names. Greatly embarrassed, I retreated, and night coming
on, lay down in the forest and slept.
The next day I entered a large town which I shall not name. Nor shall I
recount further incidents of the life that is now to end—a life of
wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of
crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime. Let
me see if I can reduce it to narrative.
I seem once to have lived near a great city, a prosperous planter,
married to a woman whom I loved and distrusted. We had, it sometimes
seems, one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise. He is at all
times a vague figure, never clearly drawn, frequently altogether out of
the picture.
One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife’s fidelity in a
vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who has acquaintance with
the literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, telling my wife
that I should be absent until the following afternoon. But I returned
before daybreak and went to the rear of the house, purposing to enter by
a door with which I had secretly so tampered that it would seem to lock,
yet not actually fasten. As I approached it, I heard it gently open and
close, and saw a man steal away into the darkness. With murder in my
heart, I sprang after him, but he had vanished without even the bad luck
of identification. Sometimes now I cannot even persuade myself that it
was a human being.
Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial with all the elemental
passions of insulted manhood, I entered the house and sprang up the
stairs to the door of my wife’s chamber. It was closed, but having
tampered with its lock also, I easily entered and despite the black
darkness soon stood by the side of her bed. My groping hands told me
that although disarranged it was unoccupied.
“She is below,” I thought, “and terrified by my entrance has evaded me in
the darkness of the hall.”
With the purpose of seeking her I turned to leave the room, but took a
wrong direction—the right one! My foot struck her, cowering in a corner
of the room. Instantly my hands were at her throat, stifling a shriek,
my knees were upon her struggling body; and there in the darkness,
without a word of accusation or reproach, I strangled her till she died!
There ends the dream. I have related it in the past tense, but the
present would be the fitter form, for again and again the somber tragedy
reenacts itself in my consciousness—over and over I lay the plan, I
suffer the confirmation, I redress the wrong. Then all is blank; and
afterward the rains beat against the grimy window-panes, or the snows
fall upon my scant attire, the wheels rattle in the squalid streets where
my life lies in poverty and mean employment. If there is ever sunshine I
do not recall it; if there are birds they do not sing.
There is another dream, another vision of the night. I stand among the
shadows in a moonlit road. I am aware of another presence, but whose I
cannot rightly determine. In the shadow of a great dwelling I catch the
gleam of white garments; then the figure of a woman confronts me in the
road—my murdered wife! There is death in the face; there are marks upon
the throat. The eyes are fixed on mine with an infinite gravity which is
not reproach, nor hate, nor menace, nor anything less terrible than
recognition. Before this awful apparition I retreat in terror—a terror
that is upon me as I write. I can no longer rightly shape the words.
See! they—
Now I am calm, but truly there is no more to tell: the incident ends
where it began—in darkness and in doubt.
Yes, I am again in control of myself: “the captain of my soul.” But that
is not respite; it is another stage and phase of expiation. My penance,
constant in degree, is mutable in kind: one of its variants is
tranquillity. After all, it is only a life-sentence. “To Hell for
life”—that is a foolish penalty: the culprit chooses the duration of his
punishment. To-day my term expires.
To each and all, the peace that was not mine.
III
STATEMENT OF THE LATE JULIA HETMAN,
THROUGH THE MEDIUM BAYROLLES
I had retired early and fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep,
from which I awoke with that indefinable sense of peril which is, I
think, a common experience in that other, earlier life. Of its unmeaning
character, too, I was entirely persuaded, yet that did not banish it. My
husband, Joel Hetman, was away from home; the servants slept in another
part of the house. But these were familiar conditions; they had never
before distressed me. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so
insupportable that conquering my reluctance to move I sat up and lit the
lamp at my bedside. Contrary to my expectation this gave me no relief;
the light seemed rather an added danger, for I reflected that it would
shine out under the door, disclosing my presence to whatever evil thing
might lurk outside. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors
of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks
in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to
spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy—the strategy of despair!
Extinguishing the lamp I pulled the bed-clothing about my head and lay
trembling and silent, unable to shriek, forgetful to pray. In this
pitiable state I must have lain for what you call hours—with us there are
no hours, there is no time.
At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They
were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way;
to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach
of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. I even
thought that I must have left the hall lamp burning and the groping of
this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and
inconsistent with my previous dread of the light, but what would you
have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it
bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. We know
this well, we who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in
eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to
ourselves and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning
for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful of them as they
of us. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the
deathless power of love or hate we break the spell—we are seen by those
whom we would warn, console, or punish. What form we seem to them to
bear we know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most
wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.
Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by what was once a
woman. You who consult us in this imperfect way—you do not understand.
You ask foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden.
Much that we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in yours.
We must communicate with you through a stammering intelligence in that
small fraction of our language that you yourselves can speak. You think
that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no world but
yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no
laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! what a thing
it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey
to apprehension and despair!
No, I did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. I heard it
go down the stairs, hurriedly, I thought, as if itself in sudden fear.
Then I rose to call for help. Hardly had my shaking hand found the
doorknob when—merciful heaven!—I heard it returning. Its footfalls as it
remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the house. I
fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. I tried to
pray. I tried to call the name of my dear husband. Then I heard the
door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when I
revived I felt a strangling clutch upon my throat—felt my arms feebly
beating against something that bore me backward—felt my tongue thrusting
itself from between my teeth! And then I passed into this life.
No, I have no knowledge of what it was. The sum of what we knew at death
is the measure of what we know afterward of all that went before. Of
this existence we know many things, but no new light falls upon any page
of that; in memory is written all of it that we can read. Here are no
heights of truth overlooking the confused landscape of that dubitable
domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow, lurk in its desolate
places, peering from brambles and thickets at its mad, malign
inhabitants. How should we have new knowledge of that fading past?
What I am about to relate happened on a night. We know when it is night,
for then you retire to your houses and we can venture from our places of
concealment to move unafraid about our old homes, to look in at the
windows, even to enter and gaze upon your faces as you sleep. I had
lingered long near the dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed to
what I am, as we do while any that we love or hate remain. Vainly I had
sought some method of manifestation, some way to make my continued
existence and my great love and poignant pity understood by my husband
and son. Always if they slept they would wake, or if in my desperation I
dared approach them when they were awake, would turn toward me the
terrible eyes of the living, frightening me by the glances that I sought
from the purpose that I held.
On this night I had searched for them without success, fearing to find
them; they were nowhere in the house, nor about the moonlit lawn. For,
although the sun is lost to us forever, the moon, full-orbed or slender,
remains to us. Sometimes it shines by night, sometimes by day, but
always it rises and sets, as in that other life.
I left the lawn and moved in the white light and silence along the road,
aimless and sorrowing. Suddenly I heard the voice of my poor husband in
exclamations of astonishment, with that of my son in reassurance and
dissuasion; and there by the shadow of a group of trees they stood—near,
so near! Their faces were toward me, the eyes of the elder man fixed
upon mine. He saw me—at last, at last, he saw me! In the consciousness
of that, my terror fled as a cruel dream. The death-spell was broken:
Love had conquered Law! Mad with exultation I shouted—I _must_ have
shouted, “He sees, he sees: he will understand!” Then, controlling
myself, I moved forward, smiling and consciously beautiful, to offer
myself to his arms, to comfort him with endearments, and, with my son’s
hand in mine, to speak words that should restore the broken bonds between
the living and the dead.
Alas! alas! his face went white with fear, his eyes were as those of a
hunted animal. He backed away from me, as I advanced, and at last turned
and fled into the wood—whither, it is not given to me to know.
To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never been able to impart a
sense of my presence. Soon he, too, must pass to this Life Invisible and
be lost to me forever.