That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my door, and before I
could answer, Frances stood beside my bed. She had switched on the light
as she came in. Her hair fell straggling over her dressing gown. Her
face was deathly pale, its expression so distraught it was almost
haggard.
The eyes were very wide. She looked almost like another woman.
She was whispering at a great pace: "Bill, Bill, wake up, quick!"
"I am awake. What is it?" I whispered too. I was startled.
"Listen!" was all she said. Her eyes stared into vacancy.
There was not a sound in the great house. The wind had dropped, and all
was still. Only the tapping seemed to continue endlessly in my brain.
The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past two.
"I heard nothing, Frances. What is it?" I rubbed my eyes; I had been
very deeply asleep.
"Listen!" she repeated very softly, holding up one finger and turning
her eyes towards the door she had left ajar. Her usual calmness had
deserted her. She was in the grip of some distressing terror.
For a full minute we held our breath and listened. Then her eyes rolled
round again and met my own, and her skin went even whiter than before.
"It woke me," she said beneath her breath, and moving a step nearer to
my bed. "It was the Noise." Even her whisper trembled.
"The Noise!" The word repeated itself dully of its own accord. I would
rather it had been anything in the world but that--earthquake, foreign
cannon, collapse of the house above our heads! "The Noise, Frances! Are
you sure?" I was playing really for a little time.
"It was like thunder. At first I thought it was thunder. But a minute
later it came again--from underground. It's appalling." She muttered the
words, her voice not properly under control.
There was a pause of perhaps a minute, and then we both spoke at once.
We said foolish, obvious things that neither of us believed in for a
second. The roof had fallen in, there were burglars downstairs, the
safes had been blown open. It was to comfort each other as children do
that we said these things; also it was to gain further time.
"There's some one in the house, of course," I heard my voice say
finally, as I sprang out of bed and hurried into dressing gown and
slippers. "Don't be alarmed. I'll go down and see," and from the drawer
I took a pistol it was my habit to carry everywhere with me. I loaded it
carefully while Frances stood stock-still beside the bed and watched. I
moved towards the open door.
"You stay here, Frances," I whispered, the beating of my heart making
the words uneven, "while I go down and make a search. Lock yourself in,
girl. Nothing can happen to you. It was downstairs, you said?"
"Underneath," she answered faintly, pointing through the floor.
She moved suddenly between me and the door.
"Listen! Hark!" she said, the eyes in her face quite fixed; "it's coming
again," and she turned her head to catch the slightest sound. I stood
there watching her, and while I watched her, shook.
But nothing stirred. From the halls below rose only the whirr and quiet
ticking of the numerous clocks. The blind by the open window behind us
flapped out a little into the room as the draught caught it.
"I'll come with you, Bill--to the next floor," she broke the silence.
"Then I'll stay with Mabel--till you come up again." The blind sank down
with a long sigh as she said it.
The question jumped to my lips before I could repress it:
"Mabel is awake. She heard it too?"
I hardly know why horror caught me at her answer. All was so vague and
terrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister house
where nothing ever happened.
"We met in the passage. She was on her way to me."
What shook in me, shook inwardly. Frances, I mean, did not see it. I had
the feeling just that the Noise was upon us, that any second it would
boom and roar about our ears. But the deep silence held. I only heard my
sister's little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question:
"Then what is Mabel doing now?"
And her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadful
tension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence.
With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplessly
at me like a child:
"She is weeping and gna--"
My expression must have stopped her. I believe I clapped both hands upon
her mouth, though when I realized things clearly again, I found they
were covering my own ears instead. It was a moment of unutterable
horror. The revulsion I felt was actually physical. It would have given
me pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the air
above my head; the sound--a definite, wholesome sound that explained
itself--would have been a positive relief. Other feelings, though, were
in me too, all over me, rushing to and fro. It was vain to seek their
disentanglement; it was impossible. I confess that I experienced, among
them, a touch of paralyzing fear--though for a moment only; it passed as
sharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the face
such as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspiration
over the entire body. Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinary
personal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury. It was,
rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking--a sympathetic shrinking--from the
agony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt for
themselves. The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in that
instant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery torture
of the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered.... It was of
incredible power. It was real. The vain, intolerable hope swept over me.
I mastered myself, though hardly knowing how, and took my sister's hand.
It was as cold as ice, as I led her firmly to the door and out into the
passage. Apparently she noticed nothing of my so near collapse, for I
caught her whisper as we went. "You are brave, Bill; splendidly brave."
The upper corridors of the great sleeping house were brightly lit; on
her way to me she had turned on every electric switch her hand could
reach; and as we passed the final flight of stairs to the floor below, I
heard a door shut softly and knew that Mabel had been listening--waiting
for us. I led my sister up to it. She knocked, and the door was opened
cautiously an inch or so. The room was pitch black. I caught no glimpse
of Mabel standing there. Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper,
"Billy, you will be careful, won't you?" and went in. I just had time to
answer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, "You'll find us
here" when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end.
But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words.
Frances--by the way she disappeared I knew it--had made a swift and
violent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang. She
leaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for,
simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was also
stopped--stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it. Yet
not in time. I heard it--a hard and horrible sound that explained both
the leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words.
I stood irresolute a moment. It was as though all the bones had been
withdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall. That sound plucked
them out, and plucked out my self-possession with them. I am not sure
that it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I half
remembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not what
they did. In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it. I
associated it with animals rather--horribly. In the history of the
world, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately today
there can be but few who know it, or would recognize it even when heard.
The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot and
burning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn between
the desire to break down the door and enter, and to run--run for my life
from a thing I dared not face.
Out of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course. Without
reflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for my
sister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had been
interrupted. I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards the
head of the stairs.
But that dreadful little sound came with me. I believe my own teeth
chattered. It seemed all over the house--in the empty halls that opened
into the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the grounds
outside the building. From the lawns and barren garden, from the ugly
terraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came a
curious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing for
deliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and dry
beseeching of hopeless spirits in prison.
That I could have taken the little sound from the bedroom where I
actually heard it, and spread it thus over the entire house and grounds,
is evidence, perhaps, of the state my nerves were in.
The wailing assuredly was in my mind alone. But the longer I hesitated,
the more difficult became my task, and, gathering up my dressing gown,
lest I should trip in the darkness, I passed slowly down the staircase
into the hail below. I carried neither candle nor matches; every switch
in room and corridor was known to me. The covering of darkness was
indeed rather comforting than otherwise, for if it prevented seeing, it
also prevented being seen. The heavy pistol, knocking against my thigh
as I moved, made me feel I was carrying a child's toy, foolishly. I
experienced in every nerve that primitive vast dread which is the Thrill
of darkness. Merely the child in me was comforted by that pistol.
The night was not entirely black; the iron bars across the glass front
door were visible, and, equally, I discerned the big, stiff wooden
chairs in the hall, the gaping fireplace, the upright pillars supporting
the staircase, the round table in the center with its books and
flower-vases, and the basket that held visitors' cards. There, too, was
the stick and umbrella stand and the shelf with railway guides,
directory, and telegraph forms. Clocks ticked everywhere with sounds
like quiet footfalls. Light fell here and there in patches from the
floor above. I stood a moment in the hall, letting my eyes grow more
accustomed to the gloom, while deciding on a plan of search. I made out
the ivy trailing outside over one of the big windows ... and then the
tall clock by the front door made a grating noise deep down inside its
body--it was the Presentation clock, large and hideous, given by the
congregation of his church--and, dreading the booming strike it seemed
to threaten, I made a quick decision. If others beside myself were about
in the night, the sound of that striking might cover their approach.
So I tiptoed to the right, where the passage led towards the dining
room. In the other direction were the morning- and drawing rooms, both
little used, and various other rooms beyond that had been his, generally
now kept locked. I thought of my sister, waiting upstairs with that
frightened woman for my return. I went quickly, yet stealthily.
And, to my surprise, the door of the dining room was open. It had been
opened. I paused on the threshold, staring about me. I think I fully
expected to see a figure blocked in the shadows against the heavy
sideboard, or looming on the other side beneath his portrait. But the
room was empty; I felt it empty. Through the wide bow-windows that gave
on to the verandah came an uncertain glimmer that even shone reflected
in the polished surface of the dinner-table, and again I perceived the
stiff outline of chairs, waiting tenantless all round it, two larger
ones with high carved backs at either end. The monkey trees on the upper
terrace, too, were visible outside against the sky, and the solemn
crests of the wellingtonias on the terraces below. The enormous clock on
the mantelpiece ticked very slowly, as though its machinery were running
down, and I made out the pale round patch that was its face. Resisting
my first inclination to turn the lights up--my hand had gone so far as
to finger the friendly knob--I crossed the room so carefully that no
single board creaked, nor a single chair, as I rested a hand upon its
back, moved on the parquet flooring. I turned neither to the right nor
left, nor did I once look back.
I went towards the long corridor filled with priceless _objets d'art_,
that led through various antechambers into the spacious music-room, and
only at the mouth of this corridor did I next halt a moment in
uncertainty. For this long corridor, lit faintly by high windows on the
left from the verandah, was very narrow, owing to the mass of shelves
and fancy tables it contained. It was not that I feared to knock over
precious things as I went, but, that, because of its ungenerous width,
there would be no room to pass another person--if I met one. And the
certainty had suddenly come upon me that somewhere in this corridor
another person at this actual moment stood. Here, somehow, amid all this
dead atmosphere of furniture and impersonal emptiness, lay the hint of a
living human presence; and with such conviction did it come upon me,
that my hand instinctively gripped the pistol in my pocket before I
could even think. Either some one had passed along this corridor just
before me, or some one lay waiting at its farther end--withdrawn or
flattened into one of the little recesses, to let me pass. It was the
person who had opened the door. And the blood ran from my heart as I
realized it.
It was not courage that sent me on, but rather a strong impulsion from
behind that made it impossible to retreat: the feeling that a throng
pressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already half
surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there
was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their
fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of
irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down
the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end,
I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the
negative emotion of fear was swamped in this vast sea of pity and
commiseration for others that surged upon me.
My senses, at least, were no whit confused; if anything, my brain
registered impressions with keener accuracy than usual. I noticed, for
instance, that the two swinging doors of baize that cut the corridor
into definite lengths, making little rooms of the spaces between them,
were both wide-open--in the dim light no mean achievement. Also that the
fronds of a palm plant, some ten feet in front of me, still stirred
gently from the air of someone who had recently gone past them. The long
green leaves waved to and fro like hands. Then I went stealthily forward
down the narrow space, proud even that I had this command of myself, and
so carefully that my feet made no sound upon the Japanese matting on the
floor.
It was a journey that seemed timeless. I have no idea how fast or slow I
went, but I remember that I deliberately examined articles on each side
of me, peering with particular closeness into the recesses of wall and
window. I passed the first baize doors, and the passage beyond them
widened out to hold shelves of books; there were sofas and small
reading-tables against the wall.
It narrowed again presently, as I entered the second stretch. The
windows here were higher and smaller, and marble statuettes of classical
subject lined the walls, watching me like figures of the dead. Their
white and shining faces saw me, yet made no sign. I passed next between
the second baize doors. They, too, had been fastened back with hooks
against the wall. Thus all doors were open--had been recently opened.
And so, at length, I found myself in the final widening of the corridor
which formed an antechamber to the music-room itself. It had been used
formerly to hold the overflow of meetings. No door separated it from the
great hall beyond, but heavy curtains hung usually to close it off, and
these curtains were invariably drawn. They now stood wide. And here--I
can merely state the impression that came upon me--I knew myself at last
surrounded. The throng that pressed behind me, also surged in front:
facing me in the big room, and waiting for my entry, stood a multitude;
on either side of me, in the very air above my head, the vast assemblage
paused upon my coming. The pause, however, was momentary, for instantly
the deep, tumultuous movement was resumed that yet was silent as a
cavern underground. I felt the agony that was in it, the passionate
striving, the awful struggle to escape. The semi-darkness held
beseeching faces that fought to press themselves upon my vision,
yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to
implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of
misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead, frozen by the horror
of vain pity. That intolerable, vain Hope was everywhere.
And the multitude, it came to me, was not a single multitude, but many;
for, as soon as one huge division pressed too close upon the edge of
escape, it was dragged back by another and prevented. The wild host was
divided against itself. Here dwelt the Shadow I had "imagined" weeks
ago, and in it struggled armies of lost souls as in the depths of some
bottomless pit whence there is no escape. The layers mingled, fighting
against themselves in endless torture. It was in this great Shadow I had
clairvoyantly seen Mabel, but about its fearful mouth, I now was
certain, hovered another figure of darkness, a figure who sought to keep
it in existence, since to her thought were due those lampless depths of
woe without escape.... Towards me the multitudes now surged.
It was a sound and a movement that brought me back into myself. The
great dock at the farther end of the room just then struck the hour of
three. That was the sound. And the movement--? I was aware that a figure
was passing across the distant center of the floor. Instantly I dropped
back into the arena of my little human terror. My hand again clutched
stupidly at the pistol butt. I drew back into the folds of the heavy
curtain. And the figure advanced.
I remember every detail. At first it seemed to me enormous--this
advancing shadow--far beyond human scale; but as it came nearer, I
measured it, though not consciously, by the organ pipes that gleamed in
faint colors, just above its gradual soft approach. It passed them,
already halfway across the great room. I saw then that its stature was
that of ordinary men. The prolonged booming of the clock died away. I
heard the footfall, shuffling upon the polished boards. I heard another
sound--a voice, low and monotonous, droning as in prayer. The figure was
speaking. It was a woman. And she carried in both hands before her a
small object that faintly shimmered--a glass of water. And then I
recognized her.
There was still an instant's time before she reached me, and I made use
of it. I shrank back, flattening myself against the wall. Her voice
ceased a moment, as she turned and carefully drew the curtains together
behind her, dosing them with one hand. Oblivious of my presence, though
she actually touched my dressing gown with the hand that pulled the
cords, she resumed her dreadful, solemn march, disappearing at length
down the long vista of the corridor like a shadow.
But as she passed me, her voice began again, so that I heard each word
distinctly as she uttered it, her head aloft, her figure upright, as
though she moved at the head of a procession:
"A drop of cold water, given in His name, shall moisten their burning
tongues."
It was repeated monotonously over and over again, droning down into the
distance as she went, until at length both voice and figure faded into
the shadows at the farther end.
For a time, I have no means of measuring precisely, I stood in that dark
corner, pressing my back against the wall, and would have drawn the
curtains down to hide me had I dared to stretch an arm out. The dread
that presently the woman would return passed gradually away. I realized
that the air had emptied, the crowd her presence had stirred into
activity had retreated; I was alone in the gloomy under-space of the
odious building.... Then I remembered suddenly again the terrified women
waiting for me on that upper landing; and realized that my skin was wet
and freezing cold after a profuse perspiration. I prepared to retrace my
steps. I remember the effort it cost me to leave the support of the wall
and covering darkness of my corner, and step out into the grey light of
the corridor. At first I sidled, then, finding this mode of walking
impossible, turned my face boldly and walked quickly, regardless that my
dressing gown set the precious objects shaking as I passed. A wind that
sighed mournfully against the high, small windows seemed to have got
inside the corridor as well; it felt so cold; and every moment I dreaded
to see the outline of the woman's figure as she waited in recess or
angle against the wall for me to pass.
Was there another thing I dreaded even more? I cannot say. I only know
that the first baize doors had swung to behind me, and the second ones
were close at hand, when the great dim thunder caught me, pouring up
with prodigious volume so that it, seemed to roll out from another
world. It shook the very bowels of the building. I was closer to it than
that other time, when it had followed me from the goblin garden. There
was strength and hardness in it, as of metal reverberation. Some touch
of numbness, almost of paralysis, must surely have been upon me that I
felt no actual terror, for I remember even turning and standing still to
hear it better. "That is the Noise," my thought ran stupidly, and I
think I whispered it aloud; "the Doors are closing." The wind outside
against the windows was audible, so it cannot have been really loud, yet
to me it was the biggest, deepest sound I have ever heard, but so far
away, with such awful remoteness in it, that I had to doubt my own ears
at the same time. It seemed underground--the rumbling of earthquake
gates that shut remorselessly within the rocky Earth--stupendous
ultimate thunder. They were shut off from help again. The doors had
closed.
I felt a storm of pity, an agony of bitter, futile hate sweep through
me. My memory of the figure changed then. The Woman with the glass of
cooling water had stepped down from Heaven; but the Man--or was it Men?
--who smeared this terrible layer of belief and Thought upon the
world!...
I crossed the dining room--it was fancy, of course, that held my eyes
from glancing at the portrait for fear I should see it smiling approval
--and so finally reached the hall, where the light from the floor above
seemed now quite bright in comparison. All the doors I closed carefully
behind me; but first I had to open them. The woman had closed every one.
Up the stairs, then, I actually ran, two steps at a time. My sister was
standing outside Mabel's door. By her face I knew that she had also
heard. There was no need to ask. I quickly made my mind up.
"There's nothing," I said, and detailed briefly my tour of search. "All
is quiet and undisturbed downstairs." May God forgive me!
She beckoned to me, closing the door softly behind her. My heart beat
violently a moment, then stood still.
"Mabel," she said aloud.
It was like the sentence of a judge, that one short word.
I tried to push past her and go in, but she stopped me with her arm. She
was wholly mistress of herself, I saw.
"Hush!" she said in a lower voice. "I've got her round again with
brandy. She's sleeping quietly now. We won't disturb her."
She drew me farther out into the landing, and as she did so, the clock
in the hall below struck half-past three. I had stood, then, thirty
minutes in the corridor below. "You've been such a long time." she said
simply. "I feared for you," and she took my hand in her own that was
cold and clammy.