I
When Vernon was a very little boy he was the sleepiest of mortals, but
in the spring he had seasons of bad dreams, and breakfast became an idle
meal. Mrs Ganthony, greatly concerned, sent for Dr Moreton from Axby,
and homely remedies were prescribed.
"It is the spring fever," said the old man. "It gives the gout to me and
nightmares to this baby; it brings lads and lasses together, and
scatters young men about the world. An antique complaint, Mrs Ganthony.
But it will right itself, never fear. _Ver non semper viret._" Chuckling
at his ancient joke, the doctor mounted his horse, leaving the nurse
only half comforted. "What fidgets me," she told the housekeeper, "is
the way his lordship holds his tongue. For usual he'll shout as lusty as
a whelp. But now I finds him in the morning with his eyes like moons
and his skin white and shiny, and never a cheep has he given the whole
blessed night, with me laying next door, and it open, and a light
sleeper at all times, Mrs Wace, ma'am."
Every year the dreams came, generally--for his springs were spent at
Severns--in the big new night-nursery at the top of the west wing, which
his parents had built not long before their death. It had three windows
looking over the moorish flats which run up to the Lancashire fells, and
from one window, by craning your neck, you could catch a glimpse of the
sea. It was all hung, too, with a Chinese paper whereon pink and green
parrots squatted in wonderful blue trees, and there seemed generally to
be a wood fire burning. Vernon's recollections of his childish nightmare
are hazy. He always found himself in a room different from the nursery
and bigger, but with the same smell of wood smoke. People came and went,
such as his nurse, the butler, Simon the head-keeper, Uncle Appleby his
guardian, Cousin Jennifer, the old woman who sold oranges in Axby, and a
host of others. Nobody hindered them from going away, and they seemed to
be pleading with him to come too. There was danger in the place;
something was going to happen in that big room, and if by that time he
was not gone there would be mischief. But it was quite clear to him that
he could not go. He must stop there, with the wood smoke in his
nostrils, and await the advent of a terrible Something. But he was never
quite sure of the nature of the compulsion. He had a notion that if he
made a rush for the door at Uncle Appleby's heels he would be allowed to
escape, but that somehow he would be behaving badly. Anyhow, the place
put him into a sweat of fright, and Mrs Ganthony looked darkly at him in
the morning.
Vernon was nine before this odd spring dream began to take definite
shape--at least he thinks he must have been about that age. The
dream-stage was emptying. There was nobody in the room now but himself,
and he saw its details a little more clearly. It was not any apartment
in the modern magnificence of Severns. Rather it looked like one of the
big old panelled chambers which the boy remembered from visits to
Midland country houses, where he had arrived after dark and had been put
to sleep in a great bed in a place lit with dancing firelight. In the
morning it had looked only an ordinary big room, but at that hour of the
evening it had seemed an enchanted citadel. The dreamroom was not
unlike these, for there was the scent of a wood fire and there were
dancing shadows, but he could not see clearly the walls or the ceiling,
and there was no bed. In one corner was a door which led to the outer
world, and through this he knew that he might on no account pass.
Another door faced him, and he knew that he had only to turn the handle
and enter it. But he did not want to, for he understood quite clearly
what was beyond. There was another room like the first one, but he knew
nothing about it, except that opposite the entrance another door led out
of it. Beyond was a third chamber, and so on interminably. There seemed
to the boy no end to this fantastic suite. He thought of it as a great
snake of masonry, winding up hill and down dale away to the fells or the
sea. Yes, but there was an end. Somewhere far away in one of the rooms
was a terror waiting on him, or, as he feared, coming towards him. Even
now it might be flitting from room to room, every minute bringing its
soft tread nearer to the chamber of the wood fire.
About this time of life the dream was an unmitigated horror. Once it
came while he was ill with a childish fever, and it sent his
temperature up to a point which brought Dr Moreton galloping from Axby.
In his waking hours he did not, as a rule, remember it clearly; but
during the fever, asleep and awake, that sinuous building, one room
thick, with each room opening from the other, was never away from his
thoughts. It fretted him to think that outside were the cheerful moors
where he hunted for plovers' eggs, and that only a thin wall of stone
kept him from pleasant homely things. The thought used to comfort him
for a moment when he was awake, but in the dream it never came near him.
Asleep, the whole world seemed one suite of rooms, and he, a forlorn
little prisoner, doomed to wait grimly on the slow coming through the
many doors of a Fear which transcended word and thought.
He was a silent, self-absorbed boy, and though the fact of his
nightmares was patent to the little household, the details remained
locked in his heart. Not even to Uncle Appleby would he tell them when
that gentleman, hurriedly kind, came down to visit his convalescent
ward. His illness made Vernon grow, and he shot up into a lanky, leggy
boy--weakly, too, till the hills tautened his sinews again. His Greek
blood--his grandmother had been a Karolides--had given him a face
curiously like the young Byron, with a finely-cut brow and nostrils, and
hauteur in the full lips. But Vernon had no Byronic pallor, for his
upland home kept him sunburnt and weather-beaten, and below his straight
Greek brows shone a pair of grey and steadfast and very English eyes.
He was about fifteen--so he thinks--when he made the great discovery.
The dream had become almost a custom now. It came in April at Severns
during the Easter holidays--a night's discomfort (it was now scarcely
more) in the rush and glory of the spring fishing. There was a moment of
the old wild heart-fluttering; but a boy's fancy is quickly dulled, and
the endless corridors were now more of a prison than a witch's
ante-chamber. By this time, with the help of his diary, he had fixed the
date of the dream: it came regularly on the night of the first Monday of
April. Now the year I speak of he had been on a long expedition into the
hills, and had stridden homewards at a steady four miles an hour among
the gleams and shadows of an April twilight. He was alone at Severns, so
he had his supper in the big library, where afterwards he sat watching
the leaping flames in the open stone hearth. He was very weary, and
sleep fell upon him in his chair. He found himself in the wood-smoke
chamber, and before him the door leading to the unknown. But it was no
indefinite fear that lay beyond. He knew clearly--though how he knew he
could not tell--that each year the Something came one room nearer, and
was even now but ten rooms off. In ten years his own door would open,
and then----
He woke in the small hours, chilled and mazed, but with a curious new
assurance in his heart. Hitherto the nightmare had left him in gross
terror, unable to endure the prospect of its recurrence, till the kindly
forgetfulness of youth had soothed him. But now, though his nerves were
tense with fright, he perceived that there was a limit to the mystery.
Some day it must declare itself, and fight on equal terms. As he thought
over the matter in the next few days he had the sense of being
forewarned and prepared for some great test of courage. The notion
exhilarated as much as it frightened him. Late at night, or on soft
dripping days, or at any moment of lessened vitality, he would bitterly
wish that he had been born an ordinary mortal. But on a keen morning of
frost, when he rubbed himself warm after a cold tub, or at high noon of
summer, the adventure of the dream almost pleased him. Unconsciously he
braced himself to a harder discipline. His fitness, moral and physical,
became his chief interest, for reasons which would have been
unintelligible to his friends and more so to his masters. He passed
through school an aloof and splendid figure, magnificently athletic,
with a brain as well as a perfect body--a good fellow in everybody's
opinion, but a grave one. He had no intimates, and never shared the
secret of the spring dream. For some reason which he could not tell, he
would have burned his hand off rather than breathe a hint of it. Pure
terror absolves from all conventions and demands a confidant, so terror,
I think, must have largely departed from the nightmare as he grew older.
Fear, indeed, remained, and awe and disquiet, but these are human
things, whereas terror is of hell.
Had he told any one, he would no doubt have become self-conscious and
felt acutely his difference from other people. As it was, he was an
ordinary schoolboy, much beloved, and, except at odd moments, unaware of
any brooding destiny. As he grew up and his ambition awoke, the moments
when he remembered the dream were apt to be disagreeable, for a boy's
ambitions are strictly conventional and his soul revolts at the
abnormal. By the time he was ready for the University he wanted above
all things to run the mile a second faster than any one else, and had
vague hopes of exploring wild countries. For most of the year he lived
with these hopes and was happy; then came April, and for a short season
he was groping in dark places. Before and after each dream he was in a
mood of exasperation; but when it came he plunged into a different
atmosphere, and felt the quiver of fear and the quick thrill of
expectation. One year, in the unsettled moods of nineteen, he made an
attempt to avoid it. He and three others were on a walking tour in
Brittany in gusty spring weather, and came late one evening to an inn by
an estuary where seagulls clattered about the windows. Youth-like they
ordered a great and foolish feast, and sat all night round a bowl of
punch, while school songs and "John Peel" contended with the dirling of
the gale. At daylight they took the road again, without having closed an
eye, and Vernon told himself that he was rid of his incubus. He wondered
at the time why he was not more cheerful. Next April he was at Severns,
reading hard, and on the first Monday of the month he went to bed with
scarcely a thought of what that night used to mean. The dream did not
fail him. Once more he was in the chamber with the wood fire; once again
he was peering at the door and wondering with tremulous heart what lay
beyond. For the Something had come nearer by two rooms, and was now only
five doors away. He wrote in his diary at that time some lines from
Keats' 'Indian Maid's Song':--
"I would deceive her,
And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind."
And there is a mark of exclamation against the "she," as if he found
some irony in it.
From that day the boy in him died. The dream would not suffer itself to
be forgotten. It moulded his character and determined his plans like the
vow of the young Hannibal at the altar. He had forgotten now either to
fear or to hope; the thing was part of him, like his vigorous young
body, his slow kindliness, his patient courage. He left Oxford at
twenty-two with a prodigious reputation which his remarkable athletic
record by no means explained. All men liked him, but no one knew him; he
had a thousand acquaintances and a hundred friends, but no comrade.
There was a sense of brooding power about him which attracted and
repelled his little world. No one forecast any special career for him;
indeed, it seemed almost disrespectful to condescend upon such details.
It was not what Vernon would do that fired the imagination of his
fellows, but what they dimly conceived that he already was. I remember
my first sight of him about that time, a tall young man in the corner of
a club smoking-room, with a head like Apollo's and eyes which received
much but gave nothing. I guessed at once that he had foreign blood in
him, not from any oddness of colouring or feature but from his silken
reserve. We of the North are angular in our silences; we have not
learned the art of gracious reticence.
His twenty-third April was spent in a hut on the Line, somewhere between
the sources of the Congo and the Nile, in the trans-African expedition
when Waldemar found the new variety of okapi. The following April I was
in his company in a tent far up on the shoulder of a Kashmir mountain.
On the first Monday of the month we had had a heavy day after ovis, and
that night I was asleep almost before my weary limbs were tucked into my
kaross. I knew nothing of Vernon's dream, but next morning I remember
that I remarked a certain heaviness of eye, and wondered idly if the
frame of this Greek divinity was as tough as it was shapely.