so sleepy that nothing but sleep seemed to matter; his stupor blunted
all his nerves. He fell asleep in his chair, indeed, and woke up with
the streaming light of morning. The room was clear and free; you would
never have guessed that anything save the commonplace had inhabited it.
Naturally, Louquier took the line of wondering if he had not eaten
something that oppressed him; though why boiled lettuce should introduce
you to the supernatural! The memory was vivid, however, and he saw a man
about installing electric switches below-stairs--one inside the library
door, and one in the hall outside. The business took a day or two, and
until it was done Louquier went straight from his dining-room to his
bedroom, locked the door, and read there. He did not sleep very well on
these nights. For one thing, he was acutely ashamed of being up-stairs
behind a locked door; for another, he had a very definite
conception--though he had no corroborative “sense” of it--of the thing’s
ranging about below in unholy and unlawful occupation of his,
Louquier’s, premises. No man really likes to pull the bedclothes over
his head while the burglar is frankly stealing the plate below, even
though he may wisely choose to do so; and that is precisely what it
seemed to Louquier that he was doing. Still he was not going, for any
consideration of mere dignity, to risk another encounter until he had
guarded his exit with electricity. With the lights properly installed,
electric switches marking his natural line of progress from after-dinner
coffee to bed, he returned to his habit of spending the evening in the
library. The fact that there was nothing he really wanted to
read--_ergo_, no joy to be had in sitting there, anyhow--tipped all his
plans and precautions with irony. Still, a man has to assume that his
routine--whatever it may be--has an unimpeachable reason for being, or
he has given up the game completely. Louquier was not ready to destroy
his convention and let life depart.
The next fortnight, to Louquier, was a long, cumulative agony. There
would be no point in making a diary of it; given the initial facts,
psychic and physical, which I have tried to make clear, one has only to
let logic deal with the situation. Each day became, in its turn, a new
irritation as well as a fresh irritant. Night after night he faced the
thing in his library. Its hours of appearing and disappearing differed
slightly, from evening to evening; it chose apparently, not to work like
an automaton or a mechanism, but to create to the end its impression of
individuality, of volition. It kept its appointment irregularly, as
though it had other engagements; but it always kept it.
Of course, in the long, irrelevant, sunlit hours, he balanced in his
mind the possibilities of the thing’s getting at his sanity. But he took
his sanity objectively, too. If his body was the citadel that must not
crumble, his healthy mind was the garrison within that must, if
possible, live on, and live on without surrendering. He did not want to
crawl out by any subterranean passage, and then make a hopeless running
fight of it. Not he! He stood on his rights; but he stood even more,
soldier-fashion, on his counted ammunition and the state of his
supplies. You could not truthfully say, however, that the wall was
unbreached. There were some nasty little breaks in it here and there--as
if the girl, the stained-glass, and the almond-smell, the unaccountable
discomfort of all the months, had been spies doing effective work
within, while awaiting the real _coup_. Louquier was not, nervously, all
that he might have been. Already, after a fortnight, he felt less able
to combat the thing. If it had appeared irregularly, so that Louquier
could have held it, to any extent, dependent on outside causes--the
weather, his digestion, anything--it would have been easier. But
whatever else might come or go, and though it chose its precise hour to
suit itself, it never failed him. “Old Faithful,” he jeered silently to
himself once. Sometime between dusk and dawn he could be sure of it. In
the third week of his siege he began definitely to fear that he could
not keep up his bluff much longer. He had a horrid vision of some
surrendering gesture--of his speaking to it, or going on his knees to
it. He loathed it almost more than he feared it. It seemed a
dishonorable enemy for a man to be up against. He would not be treated
like a soldier and a gentleman, if he did surrender.
Then came a night when Louquier walked from dining-room to library,
preternaturally grave. He felt so sapped and shrunken that he wasted no
gestures in bravado. He let himself walk like a tired man--which he was.
He put his tobacco beside him; he piled up his books; he passed his hand
over the hollow of the chair before seating himself; he shook the lamp a
little to see if there was oil enough to last out the night, if need be.
All that was mere ritual--and how tired he was of it! If the thing would
only let up on him for once--give him a rest, a chance to revictual
himself and bury his dead! This inevitable vigilance was like a cancer,
eating daily further into his vital tissue. Should he never again be
able to live carelessly, as other men do? In an hour, or two hours, or
three, he would look up from his book and be aware of its entrance;
would diagnose its actual mood and select his mask accordingly; would go
through the same difficult and wearisome ordeal. When its whim was
spent, and it took leave of him, he would go up-stairs to bed. Towards
morning he would sleep. He had never shut the door against it, judging
that his state of mind would be worse if, to his knowledge, it came
through a closed door. He left the portal hospitably open, and it
entered like any human through the passage provided. Good God! how bored
he was!
He did not have to wait long to-night. It came as early as if it had
rushed straight from dinner. Immediately he knew how it placed
itself--in a Morris-chair opposite him, beside a French window that led
into the garden. There was something jaunty and flippant in its manner.
Absurd though it may sound to speak of the thing’s manner, it is quite
within the facts as Louquier’s mind registered them. He was aware, as I
have said, of its gait; some stir of the displaced air where it moved
informed him. He perceived, though by none of the five senses, mass and
coherence in this creature, just as some hitherto useless convolution of
his brain registered its temper. It breathed its humor to him to-night
in some exact, unnamable way. Louquier leaned his head back and waited.
Perhaps it would go early; perhaps it had merely looked in to remind
him, and would presently be off, having other Stygian fish to fry. He
hoped so, for he was very tired. He even felt drowsiness coming on
before its time, and Louquier had no spur to prick him awake. None but
fear; and its sharp edge was blunted with much rowelling of his own
flesh. He closed his eyes occasionally for an instant, as one does to
push sleep out with the firm, sudden gesture of opening the eyelids. And
at last, in one of those lightning-brief intervals, the thing moved
towards him. The event was all too quick for Louquier to think, to
diagnose afresh its mood. He knew only, as he had never known before,
that he must have done with it. He had reached the point known to all of
us--though, thank heaven, in other contexts--when _ennui_ becomes a
passion like hatred or blood-lust, when weariness turns from a sigh to a
shriek. And with that sense he knew that the enemy was at last in the
citadel. His sanity was threatened. He dared wait no longer for its
moment. Louquier caught up a light chair that stood near and brought it
heavily down on the spot where the thing stood. The slim chair rocked on
its broken legs, and sank down in a mass of splinters. For the first
time, Louquier turned his back on the presence and fled from the room.
He did not care; he was not afraid any more as he rushed up the stairs;
he was only passionately excited and conscious of relief at having at
last acted, in however mad a way. All his sanity had gone into the blow;
it was Louquier’s protest, the protest of the whole of him, of the
integral man, against the sly and foul attack on his integrity. That was
what the thing had desired--to resolve his integrity, to riddle his ego,
and shred up his very soul; to leave him incapable of saying “I” with
conviction. It had wanted to disintegrate Louquier, to smash his
singleness into bits, to turn him to a loose agglomeration of mental
dust--so that no man again should be able to say, “This is Louquier.”
Louquier knew as well as any of us that you do not combat the psychic
fact with physical weapons, yet the violent gesture had seemed his only
way out. Though he could not hope to destroy the thing, he could perhaps
prove to it that he was not a mere puddle of fear. Practically, it was
as silly as trying to stab a ghost; yet it had counted, to Louquier
himself. He had no notion that he had hurt the thing, but he had shown
that his muscles were still at the service of his hatreds. Just before
he rose, he had felt himself going; the very marrow of his nature oozing
away through unguessed channels. By that one gesture the faithful flesh
had saved him.
Or, at least, so he thought, standing in his bedroom, erect and panting,
facing the door with clenched hands. A trickle of blood across one
knuckle elated him; it showed that he had put forth strength, that the
chair had really crashed and splintered under his hands. Within him, the
blood pumped through his heart; he felt its healthy, impatient motions
through his body. Would the thing rush up the stairs to avenge itself?
He did not care. Let it come. It might kill him, but not, now, before he
had made his gesture; not before he had let it know how he loathed it,
and how little it had mesmerized his spirit. He could at least die a
free man, overmatched, but not cowed. For the first time in months
Louquier felt genial, like a man playing an honest part in a world of
other men. All the last weeks he had seemed to himself isolated,
shamefully, as a criminal is isolated, because he is not worthy to
associate with others. All the things that had happened to him had
seemed chosen and selected for the purpose of showing him that he was
small game of a very dirty sort.
Louquier, standing there, triumphant over the unreal, with blood on his
knuckles from a smashed and splintered chair, is an absurd figure to the
inward eye. He was more like a silly and complacent drunken gentleman
than a hero who has fought with the powers of darkness. I am aware of
that. But Louquier, to whom, aforetime, a lifted hand or a _révérence de
la cour_ could seem, for reasons, an epic gesture, did not see himself
in that light. He was conscious only that for the first time since he
had said good-bye to the girl, he had expressed himself. Hanging the red
rep curtain, for example, had been the mere pout of the æsthete. Sacking
the cook was a weak artificial gesture. But now he walked into his
dressing-room and washed the blood--it was only a drop or two--off his
knuckle with the beautiful physical simplicity of a navvy. It was an
honorable wound; and honorable wounds got in the day’s work you stanch
as quickly as you can.
Louquier’s sense of the presence had never worked, away from it. He did
not know whether it remained below or had departed from his house. It
had not followed him, and after half an hour he realized that it did not
mean to leap to its revenge. He mused a little, strategically. It
seemed possible that his enemy, insulted by a mere thing of flesh, might
bide its time--wait for him to sleep and then pursue him. He fancied it
very angry; so angry, perhaps, that it would not leave his roof before
it had struck back. Note that Louquier, on reaffirming his independence,
in defying his terror, had no sense whatever of stepping out from under
an obsession. The thing was not an obsession; it was real, and it had
been--perhaps still was--there. His conception of facts had not been
false; his attitude to them, only, had been wrong. He realized, for
example, that he must watch until morning, for he still did not wish to
be helpless in sleep before his enemy. So far as he knew, the only power
that could prevail against it was the sovereign sun. Still the practical
man, he made with alert and vivid gestures his preparations for the
night: drew an easy-chair under the light, put on a comfortable
dressing-gown, set a pitcher of cold water on the table beside him, and
took up one of the humorists. Tobacco was not forgotten. It was an hour
or more, though, before he either smoked or read; for quite that length
of time he waited for a sign. The silence of night ebbed and flowed
around him. External sounds--a voice, carriage-wheels, the stir of an
animal in the shrubbery--fell across it occasionally; but every now and
then he would seem to reach some central pool of stillness, and then
that sense in him which perceived the presence would be strainingly on
its guard. No sign came, however--none at all; and after an hour he
relaxed a little and lighted a pipe.
The hours that followed were singularly monotonous. Suspicion,
reassurance, false alarms and quick reactions followed one another
interminably. Louquier was perfectly sure that something would happen
before morning; that his enemy, having perfected its plan, would mount
in search of him. Thence resulted a curious ignorance of how time was
passing. He had covered his watch with a cushion so as not to hear its
ticking, for though the straining of that sense was not listening, it
was more like listening than anything else. The dawn, when it came, was
incredible to him; it seemed impossible that the thing should not have
struck before fleeing, though the dim light on the waters of the
Assiniboine proved to him that he was safe. Louquier, still
half-dressed, threw himself on his bed and slept. He dreamed, a chain of
dreams, about the girl, and woke jaded.
The disapproving charwoman had set out his breakfast in response to his
ring from above-stairs. Louquier went straight to the dining-room and
ate. His first cigarette he took outside in the garden; there was time
enough, in all conscience, to revisit the battle-field. To him, among
the flower-beds, appeared the charwoman, twisting her apron in red, wet
hands. She had found the heap of broken wood, and all the
selfrighteousness of her clan was in arms. She had not touched nothing,
so help her; she had looked in with her mop and all, before breakfast,
and--she had seen what she had seen. She had not gone in; she had left
things as they was for the master to see with his own eyes. Louquier,
standing on the threshold of the garden door, his back to the light,
realized swiftly that there were three possibilities--to affect not to
believe her, to admit that he had done it himself, or to say that it was
very curious and perfectly incomprehensible. It does not matter which
one he chose, for it is plain to see that with charring easy come by, to
say nothing of plenty of places nearer ’ome, and her with three children
to leave all day by theirselves--it is plain to see that all three must
inevitably have led to the same conclusion. Either she had been called a
liar, or Louquier drank, or he couldn’t keep other people from playing
the monkey with his property. The charwoman, of course, gave notice, to
take effect after dinner that evening. Louquier thought for a moment of
asking the gardener if he could cook; but whatever the gardener could
have cooked, Louquier knew certainly he could not have eaten. Nor would
he for the twentieth time consult an employment agency in vain. It was a
dog’s life, and he wouldn’t live it. He would go to a hotel.
You are not to think that Louquier intended even then to run away. He
formed, during the day, a somewhat complicated plan. Mingled with the
relief of his decision to sleep and eat elsewhere--the charwoman,
showing a proper pride to the last, burned everything she cooked for him
that day--was the annoyance of realizing that he must also stick by. He
must not really leave the house; he must spend much of his day there.
Also--and this was most important of all--he must be at his post during
the long evening. If the thing returned, it must find him on the spot.
His relation to it had become to Louquier the most important present
fact of life, the fact he could least ignore. If it did not come--well,
after, say, three nights, he might honorably assume that it did not
intend to return. Then he could shut up the villa and leave Winnipeg, if
he liked. The practical man could no longer insist that he was saving
money by living in his own house if he was sleeping and eating at an
inn. He could tell the agent that he found it hard to get satisfactory
servants; _that_ wouldn’t give the house a black eye. The practical man,
absolved and justified, could go anywhere he liked, having done, in
perfect dignity, with his Winnipeg adventure. You may infer from all
this that Louquier was a different man after dealing, in however absurd
a way, with his enemy. But he was not precisely different; he had
merely, as it were, rearranged the furniture; a number of things had
gone into the attic. His mind was in no sense a new house, or even a
refurnished one.
To prove this, I have only to tell you that Louquier felt his enemy, if
anything, more actual, more dangerous, than during the long vigil in his
bedroom the night before. It had not perished. Was a mock-Sheraton chair
ever known to destroy an elemental being? The fact that it had delayed
its revenge seemed to Louquier significant and appalling, and reinforced
his conception of it as a creature of complicated intelligence. It was
not a mere evil impulse, to spend itself in windy, ungoverned ways. It
could control itself, hold off, plan--achieve, probably. It is no
exaggeration to say that Louquier looked forward to the evening as being
very probably fatal to him. If his will had not already been made, he
would, I fancy, have made it that day. You are to realize that Louquier
did not feel himself strong; he only felt himself decent. He had hit
back and proved himself normal. What gesture he should find to meet it
with again, he did not know--perhaps none. For that matter, it might
bring seven other devils with it when it came again. Louquier was very
tired, and his domestic arrangements and disarrangements did not make
him less so. At the end of the afternoon he flung himself down in his
hotel bedroom and slept, waking only in time for a late and hasty
dinner. He dressed for dinner, too, which cut his margin down. As he got
into a cab and gave his own address to the driver, he had all the sense
of being late for an important engagement. He distinctly wanted to be
first on the ground. Besides, he had to light up the house and fling
open the windows--to say nothing of arranging the library, as usual, for
the encounter.
First on the ground he was. He had plenty of time to make his
preparations to the last detail. He was more tired than he remembered
having been at all; but he had taken coffee and did not fear sleep. He
thought with irritation of the tourist crowd he had left in the hotel--a
mob with suit-cases, ready to go on to Banff and Lake Louise. They had
been very irrelevant to his own situation--or was he merely irrelevant
to theirs? Sitting in his library, he recalled their fantastic hats and
voices. Suppose he had kidnapped one or two of _them_, and chucked them
into his library there above the Assiniboine! He felt injured; he almost
wished he could have.
The evening lengthened; and still Louquier sat there, back against the
wall, flimsily barricaded as usual. The thing was late, very late. Ten
o’clock, and still it had not come. He read a little, or pretended to,
then at last lit a cigarette. And as if the striking of the match had
been a signal, his enemy entered. Louquier’s heart sank; he knew then
that all day, beneath his certainty, he had nursed a frail hope that it
would not return; that it had had enough of him. Just as always, his
sense placed it for him, showed him where it moved and how it felt. It
moved haltingly, jerking from corner to corner, as if the anger in his
famous gesture had maimed it. But it did not sit down. It moved about
the room in odd curves and tangents, limping ever a little nearer to
Louquier. Louquier could not stir; he could not even, this time, rise.
Never had the thing so concentrated its emotion on him; it focussed him
as with straight glances from its invisible eyes. He had not dreamed
that he, that any man, could be hated like that. The thing _was_ hate,
as God is love. It came swerving towards him like a drunken doom.
Louquier sat braced in his chair, his right hand, with the lighted
cigarette, shaking. There was no redress for this; the thing had
stripped itself of manner and of all hypocrisy. It was coming; it was on
him. Intenser than a physical touch, it covered him, pushing him back
against the cushions until the chair strained and creaked. His head bent
backward over the rim of the chair--his neck felt like to break. Had it
been human, its breath would have suffocated him, so close was its
invisible countenance to his. He could not move his legs or feet, or his
left arm, but his right elbow, pushed out across the wideish arm of the
chair, had a little margin still. He drove his elbow out farther, then
strained up a tense forearm and dug the lighted cigarette into the air
directly in front of his own face. So complete was his consciousness of
this terrible imponderable thing that he expected it to feel pain. He
held the cigarette there implacably, not three inches from his own nose.
In about ten seconds the lighted end went out. Yet he held it there, as
if the dead cigarette could still brand his enemy. Slowly, very slowly,
he got the sense of the thing’s slipping from him, of its weakly pulling
away. It seemed to withdraw, a loose and diminished being, out into the
room. He could lift his head again; he could lean forward, could stir
his legs and feet. It was still there, but its hatred seemed weaker,
like the hatred of a sick man. Louquier’s eyes never left it, but he
threw away the cigarette stub and reached out to the box at his left for
another, which he lighted and began to smoke. His neck ached
shockingly, and he was limp from the pressure of his antagonist--that
curious, weightless pressure on his body, as of air on the lungs. As he
smoked, he watched it. It drew farther and farther away, proceeding now
with indecision, different indeed from the angry lurches by which it had
approached him. It seemed vaguer, weaker, almost helpless. For an
instant it seemed to Louquier that the thing was groping for the door
and could not find it--as if he had blinded it. Then it disappeared
utterly, flowing aimlessly, feebly, across the threshold. He was aware
of it to the last--knowing even the moment of its crossing the threshold
and the instant when there was no vestige left of it.
For a half-hour Louquier sat on in his library, smoking, but not
pretending to read. The thing would not come back that night, he knew;
it had gone with all the gestures of defeat. He left the house then,
though he took the precaution of leaving the light in the hall to burn
on until daylight. He wanted no ambushes. Walking through the garden to
the street was perhaps the worst moment Louquier had ever had, for the
night was at his back. Safe in his bed at the hotel, he fell instantly
asleep, and did not wake until the sun was high.
Louquier had been tired many times in Winnipeg--during the last month
almost continuously so. But his weariness on this day was such a
weariness of the body as he had not hitherto known. He felt sick, as if
he had drunk deep the night before; he had all the sensations of
recovering from orgy. His face in the mirror frightened him. Positively,
it was a marvel that he had stood out against his enemy as he had. He
had a desperate desire to send the keys to his agent and to fling
himself into a train; but after a day of conflict, during which all his
food tasted fever-soaked, and his feet seemed cunningly wrapped in lead,
he decided that he must go back once more to Wellington Crescent. After
that, he would be free. Louquier’s ardor had ebbed; the magnificent
physical rage that had enabled him to smash the chair down upon his
enemy, and then rush past it up the stairs, even the tense and quiet
determination with which he had pushed the lighted cigarette into its
face, were gone. He was very clear as to what had happened. The thing
had nearly had him; his mind was just on the point of surrendering
before its advance, and the stupid, loyal flesh had stepped in and saved
him. Twice his arm had been lifted, by no conscious volition of his own,
when his brain had accepted defeat. What he had feared the first time
was madness; the second time he had feared only death. Still, even from
that lesser catastrophe, it was his body that had defended him, and with
no orders from him. The body had done enough; he ought to give it rest,
let its noble instincts relax and recuperate. Suppose he went again:
would it not be too much to ask of the taxed flesh? He had no reason to
suppose that if he spent another evening in his unloved library,
anything whatever would “happen.” He fancied the thing was tired of the
game. Yet he could not promise that; and he knew that, should it
reappear, he could not combat it with mind alone. Never, for example,
could he focus his weary emotions sufficiently to meet its hatred with
like hatred--if, indeed, anything human could. This thing carried no
useless baggage; it could give itself entirely to its business of
hating; and its capacity was one of the well-kept secrets of the
universe. No; if he met it again, he would have simply to hope that his
body would make another effort. He had done nothing, really, except
register his attitude to the presence; but that, only his body had been
capable of doing. He had expressed himself to it only in two wild,
instinctive gestures. Would there be strength enough there for another,
if another were needed? How _could_ he go?