unnecessary for him to work, so long as his tastes remained simple. The
lady apart, he had no ambitions; he was, I regret to say, the sort of
obsolescent fool who thinks that it is more lovely to be than to do, and
that your most serious task in life is to adorn and beautify your
personality. If he had been up to it, he would have been a first-class
dilettante. He would have loved rejecting (like Walter Pater) exquisite
cinerarias of the wrong color, or leaving a concert-hall because
Beethoven was too vulgarly romantic. But he could never have done
either, for the simple reason that his good, garish taste would never
have given him the tip. His way did not lie through Art. He was too
easily pleased. He loved Beauty even when it was merely pretty. No, his
way did not lie through Art.
Louquier knew something of all this and wisely did not try for instincts
that he did not possess. But he had his own way of being a highbrow. He
could first isolate and then appreciate an emotion or a
sensation--either in himself or in others. He loved the quiet dramas
that take place within an individual nature; he could scent psychologic
moments from afar. The twist of a mouth or the lift of an eyebrow meant
to him unutterable things. He would carry home with him a gesture, a
phrase, a twitch of the mask, and before his comfortable fire sit, as in
a parquet-box, watching a gorgeous third act of his own creation. It
should be said here that Louquier was usually right about his third acts
and seldom mistook a curtain-raiser for a play. He had a _flair_. He
rejected, at sight, the kind of human being to whom no spiritual
adventures come; and could recognize hysterical imitation a mile away.
He despised emotion for emotion’s sake. It might be as slight as you
liked, but it must be the real thing. He was perfectly sincere in his
own amorous misadventure; he suffered as naïvely as a boy of eighteen.
His heart was veritably broken, and when he withdrew from the world it
was to nurse a real wound.
Louquier had brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin, the lean figure that
best sorts with that general brownness and half presupposes an
eye-glass. He did not, however, wear an eye-glass; and he had large,
white, tombstone teeth--not the teeth of his type. He was a good fellow,
and popular with men. You see, he never told any one about his passion
for other people’s crises; he kept it very shyly and decently to
himself. Moreover, no one ever brought first-aid to the emotionally
injured more promptly than Louquier, so people told him things. Yet, as
he had no business, and had wandered a good deal (in the most
conventional ways), he had no fixed circle of friends. At any given
moment, in any given place, he was apt to be rather solitary.
That is enough about Louquier’s personality. If you can’t “get” him, I
can hardly give him to you.
Louquier withdrew, as I say, into himself--retreated to a house that, by
accident of a cousin’s investment, now, the cousin being dead, belonged
to him. He had hitherto rented it, for the few years that he had owned
it; but the lease had expired, and it struck Louquier that he had never
lived in a house of his own. That in itself might give him a
sensation--a conventional one, but worth experiencing. As he couldn’t
marry, and had no religion, perhaps it was as near as he would ever come
to feeling like a pillar of society. It was really that sense of the
curious value of living under one’s own vine and fig-tree which drew
him. His natural instinct would have been to retire to mountain
fastnesses, or discover some Ravenswoodish ruin in which to shiver. You
can see that he was very hard hit, and that he was not a subtle person.
The villa was at least remote from the scene of his discomfiture. It was
a smallish, comfortable, rather ugly mansion on the bank of the
Assiniboine, one of the older houses on Wellington Crescent, Winnipeg,
Manitoba. Girdled by a high wall, its best rooms arranged at the back,
facing the river, to which its tangled garden sloped negligently down,
“Whitewood” had a wholly English flavor of privacy and comfort. It was
at once modest and sturdy; it lived to itself, and asked favors of no
one--least of all the favor of looking into its neighbors’ premises.
That suited Louquier perfectly; he saw at once that a British tradition
was there to offset the newness of Winnipeg. Of course, being officially
an American, he couldn’t well taste the essence of being “colonial,” but
he thought he could be secluded and _guindé_ and “middle” with the best.
It quite suited his present temper, and he established himself. Good
servants sprang miraculously into being on the spot--probably because he
was a bachelor. The Assiniboine was a noble stream; the wall round his
garden was very high; it was delightfully incongruous of him to be there
at all; he was pleased with himself for having had the courage to come.
He felt more steeped in foreignness than if he had done something more
exotic. He saw no one, except for necessary business. He did not wish to
force the note. He rather liked subjecting his dramatic sense to local
color. Still, he never forgot the girl, for he had been very hard hit.
At this stage of Louquier’s life he even shrank a little from
encountering a woman.
Then--it was hard to say just when, for his experience was very
gradual--he began to be uncomfortable; he could not precisely say how or
why. He had mapped out for himself a course of reading that included
some notorious modern Frenchmen. (This was all before the war.) He
hoped, I fancy, to get a sensation out of reading Huysmans on the banks
of the Assiniboine. Certainly any effect that Huysmans and Catulle
Mendès could succeed in producing, in Winnipeg, would be a real effect,
not meretriciously aided. The long evenings were a good time to read.
During the day, he wandered about out of doors or went about the slow
business of regenerating the interior of the house. One of his
concessions had been to buy furniture in bulk, on the spot; but there
were still gaps to be filled and rearranging to be done. His library was
disfigured by a hideous stained-glass window. He was always planning to
have it replaced; but in the end he kept it because he thought the
Indians would have liked it. You can see how unworthily Louquier amused
himself. The fact is that he was very tired of it all--“it all” being
life. He was bored with his own depression; but he simply could not
bestir himself for an antidote. For a long time he felt, peevishly, that
it was up to Wellington Crescent to be the antidote.
The spring came early that year, and, as I said, Louquier spent a good
deal of time out of doors. Once, driven forth by his curious mental
discomfort which had begun in the late winter, he took a train to
Calgary. He returned almost immediately, and while he found that he was
glad to get back, still, Calgary had not done for him what he hoped.
Calgary was nauseous in retrospect without making him feel that Winnipeg
was heaven. The fact is, Winnipeg was no place for Louquier. But his
discomfort was of that peculiar kind which one does not run away from.
At first it showed itself in mere inability to keep his mind on his book
or on anything else. Louquier took a blue-pill and hired a horse to
ride. But still he could not, in the evenings, keep his mind on
anything. Then he wondered if the stained-glass window were not
responsible: he hated it so. Even with the curtain drawn across it at
night, he was conscious of it behind his back. The stained glass was not
a picture, and was a design only by courtesy. It looked like what one
used to see through an old-fashioned kaleidoscope; or, rather, it looked
like circumstantial evidence of a lunatic’s having been turned loose in
a kindergarten. Yet the weeks went by, and he did not replace it. A
morbid indolence was gaining the secret channels of his soul. His mind
seemed as complicated an organism as the body, and it felt as your body
feels when you have a bad case of grippe--he seemed to have mental hands
and feet and vital organs, all of which ached and were tired. Yet he was
still perfectly capable of admiring the technique of _En Ménage_--when
he could pay attention to it. That was the trouble: he could not
concentrate. Each thing refused to hold him and passed him on to
another. He was a shuttle-cock among a thousand battledores. He was not
consciously averse to any of the physical facts of his life, except the
stained-glass window. Finally he took to keeping the curtain drawn
across it all day; but when the sun struck it, it spotted and dashed and
figured the pale silk curtain. That was dreadful--to think that it had
power to make over something else in its own indecent likeness. Louquier
did rouse himself to get a heavy drapery of red rep hung over it. He
felt that life would be better after that; but then the almond-smell
began.
Louquier was never able positively to account for the odor of bitter
almonds that beset him in the late spring. It had nothing to do with the
vegetation at “Whitewood.” He sniffed every flower, shrub, and tree to
find out. It was not merely in Louquier’s mind, for when he went in to
town or rode about the environs of Winnipeg he escaped it utterly. Nor
was it the natural effluvium of the Assiniboine River. Besides, it was
noticeable only in the house. He remarked it at first without suspicion,
with a languid curiosity. He was almost happy, the one or two days that
he spent sniffing. It gave him something to think about, for a few
hours; something to do for its own sake. When he had proved the
innocence of nature, he investigated the house. He crept down into the
kitchen one afternoon when both the servants were safe elsewhere, opened
canisters, and peeped into cupboards. He could find no source for the
odor. The almond-smell surrounded him faintly in the kitchen as it did
everywhere else, but there was no sharp increase of it in any corner to
guide him. So he eliminated the kitchen from his conjectures, but he did
not get rid of the smell. It was not unpleasant in itself, but it was
too constant. To sit in the library, day after day, beside the red rep
curtain and smell bitter almonds was too much--just too much.
Louquier had, of course, questioned the cook in the beginning; but she
had disavowed completely all culinary use of almonds. At last,
however--he had sniffed all the furniture by this time, and he was
convinced that no upholstery or varnish was responsible--he decided to
get rid of the cook. The odor had not been there when he settled in the
villa, and that he did not carry the scent upon himself was proved by
the fact that only in his own house were his nostrils oppressed by it.
Of course he had sniffed through his whole wardrobe. It might be that
his cook was an almond-carrier, as some people are typhoid-carriers.
Getting rid of her meant getting rid also of his capable man-servant,
for the two were united in the bonds of matrimony. It was a great
nuisance, for they served him well; but in the end he did it. Louquier
could not bring himself to put to the woman a straight question as to
whether any of her toilet accessories were almond-scented. He had
attested the fact of the pervasive odor and shown that he objected to
it; if she used almond soap or anything of the kind, it was up to her,
on that hint, to change her cosmetic habit. But there was no sign of her
making any such concession to his prejudices. He shrank from active
discussion of so personal a matter. He had given hints enough, and his
hints were disregarded. Either the woman wasn’t responsible, or, being
responsible, she chose not to reform. There was only one way out: he
sacked them both.
The almond episode had no real sequel, but it had two important results.
In the first place, the servants were not easily replaced. They left
their “situation,” undoubtedly spreading tales. Louquier was probably
the victim of a servile boycott. At all events, he could not find their
equivalents, and he had no friend among the Winnipeg ladies to turn to
for counsel. It reduced itself to his getting on with a charwoman who
came to get his breakfast and departed after cooking him an early and
unspeakably English dinner. An old Scotchman pottered about the garden
for a few hours each day. This domestic discomfort was one result of the
almond nuisance. The other was a serious impairment of Louquier’s
nervous condition. The mental discomfort became acute. That he was not
the easy prey of obsessions is shown by the fact that he really did,
within a week or so after the servants’ departure, cease to notice the
almond-smell. Had he been a nervous wreck, it would have been only too
easy for him to invent the odor for himself; and that he did not do. It
was really gone, and his nostrils bore unimpeachable witness to the
fact. I do not offer Louquier’s refusal to shut up the villa and leave
Winnipeg as an evidence of sanity. To leave would have been the most
sensible thing he could do. But there his mortal indolence came in. He
could go about sniffing, but he could not go about packing. He simply
stuck on, the worse for wear. Louquier also, of course, had the
universal male illusion: namely, that he was a practical person. It was
much more sensible to stay on a few months more and rent, if he could,
in the autumn; no one would rent in the spring, anyhow; it would be a
bad advertisement to leave so soon; and, besides, he was saving money.
Everything, you see, combined to keep him there. Early in May he heard
from a kind friend that the lady had announced her engagement. That
disposed of any wandering notions he might have had of departure. It
would be to insult his own heart to pretend it was a casino when it was
really a tomb. Meanwhile the mental discomfort grew and grew like a
secret malady. It is only fair to say that Louquier did not in the least
enjoy his own drama. He would have given the world and all to be happy.
By mid-May, Huysmans, Catulle Mendès et Cⁱᵉ were flung aside. Louquier
simply could not stand literature. He took to American fiction, which
again shows his sanity. The novels disgusted him, but for a time they
worked; even the love-making did not depress him, for it was very badly
done. But after a fortnight the charm failed. He found himself idly
inverting all the situations--making the characters (when there were
any) sardonically and plausibly do something quite different. His
running marginal gloss turned the most ridiculous and optimistic plots
into the most logical and depressing horrors. The hero ceased, for
Louquier, to rescue the heroine; the heroine walked not unscathed
through her vicious context; the villains flourished like the green
bay-tree, refusing either to reform or to perish. He stopped reading our
serious contemporaries and took to the humorists. But he soon found that
one cannot laugh indefinitely alone.
By June, Louquier was really in a bad way. If he had not tried to be
sensible, he would have done much better; but he was busy adorning his
personality with an iron will. At that stage of the game an iron will
was about as useful to him as the red curtain over the stained-glass
window. He ought, in the interests of health and happiness, to have
wobbled a little; to have seized on Falstaffian wisdom and run away. His
brown face was growing white with his effort. But Louquier was perfectly
sincere in not seeing it that way. Remember, too, that his chosen
diversion was failing him. A recluse on the banks of the Assiniboine, he
had no third acts to divine. His _flair_, disused, became temporarily
lost to him, and he found the Winnipeg streets barren of drama. He could
not even reconstruct the tragedy of his own charwoman, though obviously
every charwoman must have had one. The Scotch gardener was as
impenetrable as a Scotch mist. Louquier gave up riding; he gave up his
blue-pills; he stuck to his own vine and upas-tree. If he had not always
expected to leave Winnipeg in the autumn, I think he would have gone
under. But he did not--quite.
Louquier was now afraid. Up to that time he had not experienced fear;
his condition had stopped at acute discomfort. It was very like a bodily
ailment, not serious, for which people try home remedies. The home
remedies had not worked, but he was not going to a specialist for a
malady that seemed to attack him in one spot as much as, and no more
than, in another. He would, you might say, hardly know whether to choose
an aurist or an orthopedist. His broken heart, his indolence, and his
iron will combined to keep him passive; and he called it being sensible.
Thanks to the girl, flavor had gone out of life like the taste out of
honey; it was a thick, insipid glue. It was wearing; it was
disagreeable; but it could be borne, since other men had borne it.
Then, as I say, fear came.
Louquier was sitting alone in his library, trying to read. The charwoman
had left a few hours since; the gardener, of course, long before that.
Quite suddenly he realized that he had a new fact to reckon with. He
laid his book down very softly on the table, rose, by the aid of his
iron will, from his chair, and walked slowly across to the corner of the
room between the fireplace and the built-in book-shelves. A light chair
that stood in his way he moved, first passing his hand across its satin
seat. Then he took his stand in the exact corner of the room, facing
outward, arms truculently folded. He stood there for about five minutes,
his eyes glancing hither and yon. Then he walked back, lugged his
easy-chair over by the fireplace and set it with its back to the wall.
Before leaving it, he passed his hand carefully down the wall behind it.
Then he moved the table, with the lamp, over beside the arm-chair. Thus
the chair was hemmed in between the square table on one side and the
jutting chimney-breast on the other. Behind it was a windowless wall.
Louquier then sat down and took up his book again. He knew as well as if
he had seen it with his eyes or heard it with his ears, where the thing
was that disturbed him, but he refused to treat it as anything more than
a manifestation of impudence. He trusted that by putting it, as it were,
in its place, he could teach it manners--perhaps discourage it finally.
The presence was perceptible to no sense; it flowed from spot to spot as
quietly as air; but Louquier knew at any given moment where it was. He
knew, too, whether it faced him or turned away; and he was more
comfortable when it turned away. He kept his eyes on his book; he
turned over pages; he even lighted and smoked a cigarette. He put up a
brave front to the beastly thing. All the same, he knew that if it did
not go away, he should have to sit there all night. He was not going to
turn his back to it, to pass through the door; and he would not,
positively would not (here was the iron will), back out of the room.
Besides, if the thing followed him up-stairs, it would be worse. He
could not switch on the up-stairs lights from below. It was very
curious, how much he seemed to know about the thing--its size, for
example, and the measure of its gait as it moved. He had even a vague
impression of its shape, though his eye could not detect the faintest
alteration in the look of the spot where it so definitely stood. He had
as yet no means of knowing whether it was malevolent or not, but he
loathed it. Occasionally he looked up from his book, oriented the
presence, and looked directly at it with bored and scornful eyes. That
was all he could do--get up again, he would not. Nor would he speak to
it. He had a curious conviction that that way lay madness. No; he would
meet it on its own ground. It moved, and he might move; it directed
itself in some unnamable way towards him, and he would stare at it
insolently; it occupied its place, and he would definitely occupy his
own. But he would not speak; he would not probe the laws of its being
further than itself announced them. The merest visual sign would have
been an immense relief to him--a devil with cloven hoof, a ghost draped
in white, would have been child’s play. Then he could have trusted his
eye or his ear; as it was, he had to depend wholly on this nameless
sense which placed his enemy for him. That nameless sense must not get
blunted. He must keep very wide awake lest his enemy steal a march on
him. Above all, he must not pretend to be unaware, and at the same time
must pretend not to be frightened. How much intelligence the thing had,
of course he did not know. It might be laughing at his bluff, but at
least he would keep it up. He hoped he should not grow sleepy. He had
long since given up coffee and other stimulants. Louquier had become a
man for whom there is absolutely no sense in keeping awake.
After an hour, during which Louquier turned over just forty pages--he
kept careful track of his intervals--the thing departed by the door open
into the hall. Louquier felt it go. He had a very pretty problem to
face, then: whether to follow it or not. If he did not, it meant sitting
all night in his library--a great nuisance and a craven act. It would
prove to the thing that he was afraid of it, and that would be
exceedingly unfortunate. He ought, of course, to pretend that he was
tired and wanted to go to bed--and to go. On the other hand, it was
going to be a difficult business to blow out the lamp, walk into a dark
hall, and mount the dark stairs to his bedroom. True, he could not see
the thing, even in the lighted room; but he doubted if, in the dark, he
could place it at all. It could be lived with only if it could be
placed--delimited, as it were. He would not answer for his perfect
conduct if the thing turned out to be lurking in the hall. He had no
clue whatever to the intelligence of this besetting presence; but he
felt, somehow, that it gauged him by the visual signs he gave. It might,
if he stayed there, know that he was afraid of it; still, it might not
be clever enough to make that inference. Whereas if he rushed out into
the darkness, he could not answer for what he should do--something, very
likely, that would show beyond question how terrified he was. He might
even blunder into the thing itself, in the dark. He was by no means sure
that it was perceptible even to the touch, yet he dreaded the thought of
such an impact as though it had been certain death. There was nothing
for him to do but stay--though, for all he knew, the thing might already
have wandered out into the night. He would not even get up and shut the
door. How did he know whether doors were an obstacle to it? And if it
should elect to come back, through the closed door, he would be more
mocked than ever--to say nothing of the sense he would have of being
shut in with it, without redress. No, there was nothing for it but for
him to stay--and to fend off sleep somehow. If he should drowse and it
should return, he would be left to its unclean mercy. Louquier was
angry. First, the girl; then the stained-glass and the bitter almonds;
then the recognized but unadmitted stupidity of his whole Winnipeg idea;
the acute discomfort--and now this.