The Letter of Wrath
It was a still September afternoon. No wind stirred in the hanging
woods that were dark all about the ancient house of Treff Loyne; the
only sound in the dim air was the lowing of the cattle; they had
wandered, it seemed, from the fields and had come in by the gate of the
farmyard and stood there melancholy, as if they mourned for their dead
master. And the horses; four great, heavy, patient-looking beasts they
were there too, and in the lower field the sheep were standing, as if
they waited to be fed.
“You would think they all knew there was something wrong,” one of the
soldiers muttered to another. A pale sun showed for a moment and
glittered on their bayonets. They were standing about the body of poor,
dead Griffith, with a certain grimness growing on their faces and
hardening there. Their corporal snapped something at them again; they
were quite ready. Lewis knelt down by the dead man and looked closely
at the great gaping wound in his side.
“He’s been dead a long time,” he said. “A week, two weeks, perhaps. He
was killed by some sharp pointed weapon. How about the family? How many
are there of them? I never attended them.”
“There was Griffith, and his wife, and his son Thomas and Mary
Griffith, his daughter. And I do think there was a gentleman lodging
with them this summer.”
That was from one of the farmers. They all looked at one another, this
party of rescue, who knew nothing of the danger that had smitten this
house of quiet people, nothing of the peril which had brought them to
this pass of a farmyard with a dead man in it, and his beasts standing
patiently about him, as if they waited for the farmer to rise up and
give them their food. Then the party turned to the house. It was an
old, sixteenth century building, with the singular round, “Flemish”
chimney that is characteristic of Meirion. The walls were snowy with
whitewash, the windows were deeply set and stone mullioned, and a
solid, stone-tiled porch sheltered the doorway from any winds that
might penetrate to the hollow of that hidden valley. The windows were
shut tight. There was no sign of any life or movement about the place.
The party of men looked at one another, and the churchwarden amongst
the farmers, the sergeant of police, Lewis, and the corporal drew
together.
“What is it to goodness, doctor?” said the churchwarden.
“I can tell you nothing at all—except that that poor man there has been
pierced to the heart,” said Lewis.
“Do you think they are inside and they will shoot us?” said another
farmer. He had no notion of what he meant by “they,” and no one of them
knew better than he. They did not know what the danger was, or where it
might strike them, or whether it was from without or from within. They
stared at the murdered man, and gazed dismally at one another.
“Come!” said Lewis, “we must do something. We must get into the house
and see what is wrong.”
“Yes, but suppose they are at us while we are getting in,” said the
sergeant. “Where shall we be then, Doctor Lewis?”
The corporal put one of his men by the gate at the top of the farmyard,
another at the gate by the bottom of the farmyard, and told them to
challenge and shoot. The doctor and the rest opened the little gate of
the front garden and went up to the porch and stood listening by the
door. It was all dead silence. Lewis took an ash stick from one of the
farmers and beat heavily three times on the old, black, oaken door
studded with antique nails.
He struck three thundering blows, and then they all waited. There was
no answer from within. He beat again, and still silence. He shouted to
the people within, but there was no answer. They all turned and looked
at one another, that party of quest and rescue who knew not what they
sought, what enemy they were to encounter. There was an iron ring on
the door. Lewis turned it but the door stood fast; it was evidently
barred and bolted. The sergeant of police called out to open, but again
there was no answer.
They consulted together. There was nothing for it but to blow the door
open, and some one of them called in a loud voice to anybody that might
be within to stand away from the door, or they would be killed. And at
this very moment the yellow sheepdog came bounding up the yard from the
woods and licked their hands and fawned on them and barked joyfully.
“Indeed now,” said one of the farmers; “he did know that there was
something amiss. A pity it was, Thomas Williams, that we did not follow
him when he implored us last Sunday.”
The corporal motioned the rest of the party back, and they stood
looking fearfully about them at the entrance to the porch. The corporal
disengaged his bayonet and shot into the keyhole, calling out once more
before he fired. He shot and shot again; so heavy and firm was the
ancient door, so stout its bolts and fastenings. At last he had to fire
at the massive hinges, and then they all pushed together and the door
lurched open and fell forward. The corporal raised his left hand and
stepped back a few paces. He hailed his two men at the top and bottom
of the farmyard. They were all right, they said. And so the party
climbed and struggled over the fallen door into the passage, and into
the kitchen of the farmhouse.
Young Griffith was lying dead before the hearth, before a dead fire of
white wood ashes. They went on towards the “parlor,” and in the doorway
of the room was the body of the artist, Secretan, as if he had fallen
in trying to get to the kitchen. Upstairs the two women, Mrs. Griffith
and her daughter, a girl of eighteen, were lying together on the bed in
the big bedroom, clasped in each others’ arms.
They went about the house, searched the pantries, the back kitchen and
the cellars; there was no life in it.
“Look!” said Dr. Lewis, when they came back to the big kitchen, “look!
It is as if they had been besieged. Do you see that piece of bacon,
half gnawed through?”
Then they found these pieces of bacon, cut from the sides on the
kitchen wall, here and there about the house. There was no bread in the
place, no milk, no water.
“And,” said one of the farmers, “they had the best water here in all
Meirion. The well is down there in the wood; it is most famous water.
The old people did use to call it Ffynnon Teilo; it was Saint Teilo’s
Well, they did say.”
“They must have died of thirst,” said Lewis. “They have been dead for
days and days.”
The group of men stood in the big kitchen and stared at one another, a
dreadful perplexity in their eyes. The dead were all about them, within
the house and without it; and it was in vain to ask why they had died
thus. The old man had been killed with the piercing thrust of some
sharp weapon; the rest had perished, it seemed probable, of thirst; but
what possible enemy was this that besieged the farm and shut in its
inhabitants? There was no answer.
The sergeant of police spoke of getting a cart and taking the bodies
into Porth, and Dr. Lewis went into the parlor that Secretan had used
as a sitting-room, intending to gather any possessions or effects of
the dead artist that he might find there. Half a dozen portfolios were
piled up in one corner, there were some books on a side table, a
fishing-rod and basket behind the door—that seemed all. No doubt there
would be clothes and such matters upstairs, and Lewis was about to
rejoin the rest of the party in the kitchen, when he looked down at
some scattered papers lying with the books on the side table. On one of
the sheets he read to his astonishment the words: “Dr. James Lewis,
Porth.” This was written in a staggering trembling scrawl, and
examining the other leaves he saw that they were covered with writing.
The table stood in a dark corner of the room, and Lewis gathered up the
sheets of paper and took them to the window-ledge and began to read,
amazed at certain phrases that had caught his eye. But the manuscript
was in disorder; as if the dead man who had written it had not been
equal to the task of gathering the leaves into their proper sequence;
it was some time before the doctor had each page in its place. This was
the statement that he read, with ever-growing wonder, while a couple of
the farmers were harnessing one of the horses in the yard to a cart,
and the others were bringing down the dead women.
“I do not think that I can last much longer. We shared out the last
drops of water a long time ago. I do not know how many days ago. We
fall asleep and dream and walk about the house in our dreams, and I am
often not sure whether I am awake or still dreaming, and so the days
and nights are confused in my mind. I awoke not long ago, at least I
suppose I awoke and found I was lying in the passage. I had a confused
feeling that I had had an awful dream which seemed horribly real, and I
thought for a moment what a relief it was to know that it wasn’t true,
whatever it might have been. I made up my mind to have a good long walk
to freshen myself up, and then I looked round and found that I had been
lying on the stones of the passage; and it all came back to me. There
was no walk for me.
“I have not seen Mrs. Griffith or her daughter for a long while. They
said they were going upstairs to have a rest. I heard them moving about
the room at first, now I can hear nothing. Young Griffith is lying in
the kitchen, before the hearth. He was talking to himself about the
harvest and the weather when I last went into the kitchen. He didn’t
seem to know I was there, as he went gabbling on in a low voice very
fast, and then he began to call the dog, Tiger.
“There seems no hope for any of us. We are in the dream of death....”
Here the manuscript became unintelligible for half a dozen lines.
Secretan had written the words “dream of death” three or four times
over. He had begun a fresh word and had scratched it out and then
followed strange, unmeaning characters, the script, as Lewis thought,
of a terrible language. And then the writing became clear, clearer than
it was at the beginning of the manuscript, and the sentences flowed
more easily, as if the cloud on Secretan’s mind had lifted for a while.
There was a fresh start, as it were, and the writer began again, in
ordinary letter-form:
“DEAR LEWIS,
“I hope you will excuse all this confusion and wandering. I intended to
begin a proper letter to you, and now I find all that stuff that you
have been reading—if this ever gets into your hands. I have not the
energy even to tear it up. If you read it you will know to what a sad
pass I had come when it was written. It looks like delirium or a bad
dream, and even now, though my mind seems to have cleared up a good
deal, I have to hold myself in tightly to be sure that the experiences
of the last days in this awful place are true, real things, not a long
nightmare from which I shall wake up presently and find myself in my
rooms at Chelsea.
“I have said of what I am writing, ‘if it ever gets into your hands,’
and I am not at all sure that it ever will. If what is happening here
is happening everywhere else, then I suppose, the world is coming to an
end. I cannot understand it, even now I can hardly believe it. I know
that I dream such wild dreams and walk in such mad fancies that I have
to look out and look about me to make sure that I am not still
dreaming.
“Do you remember that talk we had about two months ago when I dined
with you? We got on, somehow or other, to space and time, and I think
we agreed that as soon as one tried to reason about space and time one
was landed in a maze of contradictions. You said something to the
effect that it was very curious but this was just like a dream. ‘A man
will sometimes wake himself from his crazy dream,’ you said, ‘by
realizing that he is thinking nonsense.’ And we both wondered whether
these contradictions that one can’t avoid if one begins to think of
time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a
dream, and the moon and the stars bits of nightmare. I have often
thought over that lately. I kick at the walls as Dr. Johnson kicked at
the stone, to make sure that the things about me are there. And then
that other question gets into my mind—is the world really coming to an
end, the world as we have always known it; and what on earth will this
new world be like? I can’t imagine it; it’s a story like Noah’s Ark and
the Flood. People used to talk about the end of the world and fire, but
no one ever thought of anything like this.
“And then there’s another thing that bothers me. Now and then I wonder
whether we are not all mad together in this house. In spite of what I
see and know, or, perhaps, I should say, because what I see and know is
so impossible, I wonder whether we are not all suffering from a
delusion. Perhaps we are our own gaolers, and we are really free to go
out and live. Perhaps what we think we see is not there at all. I
believe I have heard of whole families going mad together, and I may
have come under the influence of the house, having lived in it for the
last four months. I know there have been people who have been kept
alive by their keepers forcing food down their throats, because they
are quite sure that their throats are closed, so that they feel they
are unable to swallow a morsel. I wonder now and then whether we are
all like this in Treff Loyne; yet in my heart I feel sure that it is
not so.
“Still, I do not want to leave a madman’s letter behind me, and so I
will not tell you the full story of what I have seen, or believe I have
seen. If I am a sane man you will be able to fill in the blanks for
yourself from your own knowledge. If I am mad, burn the letter and say
nothing about it. Or perhaps—and indeed, I am not quite sure—I may wake
up and hear Mary Griffith calling to me in her cheerful sing-song that
breakfast will be ready ‘directly, in a minute,’ and I shall enjoy it
and walk over to Porth and tell you the queerest, most horrible dream
that a man ever had, and ask what I had better take.
“I think that it was on a Tuesday that we first noticed that there was
something queer about, only at the time we didn’t know that there was
anything really queer in what we noticed. I had been out since nine
o’clock in the morning trying to paint the marsh, and I found it a very
tough job. I came home about five or six o’clock and found the family
at Treff Loyne laughing at old Tiger, the sheepdog. He was making short
runs from the farmyard to the door of the house, barking, with quick,
short yelps. Mrs. Griffith and Miss Griffith were standing by the
porch, and the dog would go to them, look in their faces, and then run
up the farmyard to the gate, and then look back with that eager yelping
bark, as if he were waiting for the women to follow him. Then, again
and again, he ran up to them and tugged at their skirts as if he would
pull them by main force away from the house.
“Then the men came home from the fields and he repeated this
performance. The dog was running all up and down the farmyard, in and
out of the barn and sheds yelping, barking; and always with that eager
run to the person he addressed, and running away directly, and looking
back as, if to see whether we were following him. When the house door
was shut and they all sat down to supper, he would give them no peace,
till at last they turned him out of doors. And then he sat in the porch
and scratched at the door with his claws, barking all the while. When
the daughter brought in my meal, she said: ‘We can’t think what is come
to old Tiger, and indeed, he has always been a good dog, too.’
“The dog barked and yelped and whined and scratched at the door all
through the evening. They let him in once, but he seemed to have become
quite frantic. He ran up to one member of the family after another; his
eyes were bloodshot and his mouth was foaming, and he tore at their
clothes till they drove him out again into the darkness. Then he broke
into a long, lamentable howl of anguish, and we heard no more of him.”