great festival of colour, when his eye was arrested by a dark slinking
form that appeared among the roses, and suddenly turned two shining
luminous orbs on him. At this he started up, but his movement caused no
perturbation in the animal, which continued with back arched for
stroking, and poker-like tail, to advance towards him, purring. As it
came closer Dick felt that shuddering faintness, which often affected
him in the presence of cats, come over him, and he stamped and clapped
his hands. At this it turned tail quickly: a sort of dark shadow
streaked the garden-wall for a moment, and it vanished. But its
appearance had spoiled for him the sweet spell of the evening, and he
went indoors.
The next morning was pellucid summer: a faint north wind blew, and a sun
worthy to illumine the isles of Greece flooded the sky. Dick’s dreamless
and (for him) long sleep had banished from his mind that rather
disquieting incident of the cat, and he set up his canvas facing the
trellis-work and purple clematis with a huge sense of imminent ecstasy.
Also the garden, which at present he had only seen in the magic of
sunset, was gloriously rewarding, and glowed with colour, and though
life--this was present to his mind for the first time for months--in
the shape of Lady Madingley had not been very propitious, yet a man, he
argued to himself, must be a very poor hand at living if, with a passion
for plants and a passion for art, he cannot fashion a life that shall be
full of content. So breakfast being finished, and his model ready and
glowing with beauty, he quickly sketched in the broad lines of flowers
and foliage and began to paint.
Purple and green, green and purple: was there ever such a feast for the
eye? Gourmet like and greedy as well, he was utterly absorbed in it. He
was right too: as soon as he put on the first brush of colour he knew he
was right. It was just those divine and violent colours which would
cause his figure to step out from the picture, it was just that pale
strip of sky above which would focus her again, it was just that strip
of grey-green grass below her feet that would prevent her, so it seemed,
from actually leaving the canvas. And with swift eager sweeps of the
brush which never paused and never hurried, he lost himself in his work.
He stopped at length with a sense of breathlessness, feeling too as if
he had been suddenly called back from some immense distance off. He must
have been working some three hours, for his man was already laying the
table for lunch, yet it seemed to him that the morning had gone by in
one flash. The progress he had made was extraordinary, and he looked
long at his picture. Then his eye wandered from the brightness of the
canvas to the brightness of the garden-beds. There, just in front of the
bed of sweet-peas, not two yards from him, stood a very large grey cat,
watching him.
Now the presence of a cat was a thing that usually produced in Dick a
feeling of deadly faintness, yet, at this moment, as he looked at the
cat and the cat at him, he was conscious of no such feeling, and put
down the absence of it, in so far as he consciously thought about it, to
the fact that he was in the open air, not in the atmosphere of a closed
room. Yet, last night out here, the cat had made him feel faint. But he
hardly gave a thought to this, for what filled his mind was that he saw
in the rather friendly interested look of the beast that expression in
the eye which had so baffled him in his portrait of Lady Madingley. So,
slowly, and without any sudden movement that might startle the cat, he
reached out his hand for the palette he had just put down, and in a
corner of the canvas not yet painted over, recorded in half a dozen
swift intuitive touches, what he wanted. Even in the broad sunlight
where the animal stood, its eyes looked as if they were internally
smouldering as well as being lit from without: it was just so that Lady
Madingley looked. He would have to lay colour very thinly over white....
For five minutes or so he painted them with quiet eager strokes,
drawing the colour thinly over the background of white, and then looked
long at that sketch of the eye to see if he had got what he wanted. Then
he looked back at the cat which had stood so charmingly for him. But
there was no cat there. That, however, since he detested them, and this
one had served his purpose, was no matter for regret, and he merely
wondered a little at the suddenness of its disappearance. But the legacy
it had left on the canvas could not vanish thus, it was his own, a
possession, an achievement. Truly this was to be a portrait which would
altogether out-distance all he had ever done before. A woman, real,
alive, wearing her soul in her eyes, should stand there, and summer riot
round her.
An extraordinary clearness of vision was his all day, and towards sunset
an empty whisky-bottle. But this evening he was conscious for the first
time of two feelings, one physical, one mental, altogether strange to
him: the first an impression that he had drunk as much as was good for
him, the second a sort of echo in his mind of those tortures he had
undergone in the autumn, when he had been tossed aside by the girl, to
whom he had given his soul, like a soiled glove. Neither were at all
acutely felt, but both were present to him.
The evening altogether belied the brilliance of the day, and about six
o’clock thick clouds had driven up over the sky, and the clear heat of
summer had given place to a heat no less intense, but full of the
menace of storm. A few big hot drops, too, of rain warned him further,
and he pulled his easel into shelter, and gave orders that he would dine
indoors. As was usual with him when he was at work, he shunned the
distracting influence of any companionship, and he dined alone. Dinner
finished, he went into his sitting-room prepared to enjoy his solitary
evening. His servant had brought him in the tray, and till he went to
bed he would be undisturbed. Outside the storm was moving nearer, the
reverberation of the thunder, though not yet close, kept up a continual
growl: any moment it might move up and burst above in riot of fire and
sound.
Dick read a book for a while, but his thoughts wandered. The poignancy
of his trouble last autumn, which he thought had passed away from him
for ever, grew suddenly and strangely more acute, also his head was
heavy, perhaps with the storm, but possibly with what he had drunk. So,
intending to go to bed and sleep off his disquietude, he closed his
book, and went across to the window to close that also. But, half-way
towards it, he stopped. There on the sofa below it sat a large grey cat
with yellow gleaming eyes. In its mouth it held a young thrush, still
alive.
Then horror woke in him: his feeling of sick-faintness was there, and he
loathed and was terrified at this dreadful feline glee in the torture of
its prey, a glee so great that it preferred the postponement of its
meal to a shortening of the other. More than all, the resemblance of the
eyes of this cat to those of his portrait suddenly struck him as
something hellish. For one moment this all held him bound, as if with
paralysis, the next his physical shuddering could be withstood no
longer, and he threw the glass he carried at the cat, missing it. For
one second the animal paused there glaring at him with an intense and
dreadful hostility, then it made one spring of it out of the open
window. Dick shut it with a bang that startled himself, and then
searched on the sofa and the floor for the bird which he thought the cat
had dropped. Once or twice he thought he heard it feebly fluttering, but
this must have been an illusion, for he could not find it.
All this was rather shaky business, so before going to bed he steadied
himself, as his unspoken phrase ran, with a final drink. Outside the
thunder had ceased, but the rain beat hissing on to the grass. Then
another sound mingled with it, the mewing of a cat, not the long drawn
screeches and cries that are usual, but the plaintive calls of the beast
that wants to be admitted into its own home. The blind was down, but
after a while he could not resist peeping out. There on the window-sill
was seated the large grey cat. Though it was raining heavily its fur
seemed dry, for it was standing stiffly away from its body. But when it
saw him it spat at him, scratching angrily at the glass, and vanished.
Lady Madingley ... heavens, how he had loved her! And, infernally as she
had treated him, how passionately he wanted her now. Was all his trouble
then to begin over again? Had that nightmare dawned anew on him? It was
the cat’s fault: the eyes of the cat had done it. Yet just now all his
desire was blurred by this dullness of brain that was as unaccountable
as the re-awakening of his desire. For months now he had drunk far more
than he had drunk to-day, yet evening had seen him clear-headed, acute,
master of himself, and revelling in the liberty that had come to him,
and in the cool joy of creative vision. But to-night he stumbled and
groped across the room.
The neutral-coloured light of dawn awoke him, and he got up at once,
feeling still very drowsy, but in answer to some silent imperative call.
The storm had altogether passed away, and a jewel of a morning star hung
in a pale heaven. His room looked strangely unfamiliar to him, his own
sensations were unfamiliar, there was a vagueness about things, a
barrier between him and the world. One desire alone possessed him, to
finish the portrait. All else, so he felt, he left to chance, or
whatever laws regulate the world, those laws which choose that a certain
thrush shall be caught by a certain cat, and choose one scapegoat out of
a thousand, and let the rest go free.
Two hours later his servant called him, and found him gone from his
room. So as the morning was so fair, he went out to lay breakfast in the
shelter. The portrait was there, it had been dragged back into position
by the clematis, but it was covered with strange scratches, as if the
claws of some enraged animal or the nails perhaps of a man had furiously
attacked it. Dick Alingham was there, too, lying very still in front of
the disfigured canvas. Claws, also, or nails had attacked him, his
throat was horribly mangled by them. But his hands were covered with
paint, the nails of his fingers too were choked with it.
THE BUS-CONDUCTOR
My friend, Hugh Grainger, and I had just returned from a two days’ visit
in the country, where we had been staying in a house of sinister repute
which was supposed to be haunted by ghosts of a peculiarly fearsome and
truculent sort. The house itself was all that such a house should be,
Jacobean and oak-panelled, with long dark passages and high vaulted
rooms. It stood, also, very remote, and was encompassed by a wood of
sombre pines that muttered and whispered in the dark, and all the time
that we were there a south-westerly gale with torrents of scolding rain
had prevailed, so that by day and night weird voices moaned and fluted
in the chimneys, a company of uneasy spirits held colloquy among the
trees, and sudden tattoes and tappings beckoned from the window-panes.
But in spite of these surroundings, which were sufficient in themselves,
one would almost say, to spontaneously generate occult phenomena,
nothing of any description had occurred. I am bound to add, also, that
my own state of mind was peculiarly well adapted to receive or even to
invent the sights and sounds we had gone to seek, for I was, I confess,
during the whole time that we were there, in a state of abject
apprehension, and lay awake both nights through hours of terrified
unrest, afraid of the dark, yet more afraid of what a lighted candle
might show me.
Hugh Grainger, on the evening after our return to town, had dined with
me, and after dinner our conversation, as was natural, soon came back to
these entrancing topics.
“But why you go ghost-seeking I cannot imagine,” he said, “because your
teeth were chattering and your eyes starting out of your head all the
time you were there, from sheer fright. Or do you like being
frightened?”
Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways; this is
one of them.
“Why, of course, I like being frightened,” I said. “I want to be made to
creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of
emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.”
“Well, the fact that neither of us saw anything,” he said, “confirms
what I have always believed.”
“And what have you always believed?”
“That these phenomena are purely objective, not subjective, and that
one’s state of mind has nothing to do with the perception that perceives
them, nor have circumstances or surroundings anything to do with them
either. Look at Osburton. It has had the reputation of being a haunted
house for years, and it certainly has all the accessories of one. Look
at yourself, too, with all your nerves on edge, afraid to look round or
light a candle for fear of seeing something! Surely there was the right
man in the right place then, if ghosts are subjective.”
He got up and lit a cigarette, and looking at him--Hugh is about six
feet high, and as broad as he is long--I felt a retort on my lips, for I
could not help my mind going back to a certain period in his life, when,
from some cause which, as far as I knew, he had never told anybody, he
had become a mere quivering mass of disordered nerves. Oddly enough, at
the same moment and for the first time, he began, to speak of it
himself.
“You may reply that it was not worth my while to go either,” he said,
“because I was so clearly the wrong man in the wrong place. But I
wasn’t. You for all your apprehensions and expectancy have never seen a
ghost. But I have, though I am the last person in the world you would
have thought likely to do so, and, though my nerves are steady enough
again now, it knocked me all to bits.”
He sat down again in his chair.
“No doubt you remember my going to bits,” he said, “and since I believe
that I am sound again now, I should rather like to tell you about it.
But before I couldn’t; I couldn’t speak of it at all to anybody. Yet
there ought to have been nothing frightening about it; what I saw was
certainly a most useful and friendly ghost. But it came from the shaded
side of things; it looked suddenly out of the night and the mystery with
which life is surrounded.”
“I want first to tell you quite shortly my theory about ghost-seeing,”
he continued, “and I can explain it best by a simile, an image. Imagine
then that you and I and everybody in the world are like people whose eye
is directly opposite a little tiny hole in a sheet of cardboard which is
continually shifting and revolving and moving about. Back to back with
that sheet of cardboard is another, which also, by laws of its own, is
in perpetual but independent motion. In it too there is another hole,
and when, fortuitously it would seem, these two holes, the one through
which we are always looking, and the other in the spiritual plane, come
opposite one another, we see through, and then only do the sights and
sounds of the spiritual world become visible or audible to us. With most
people these holes never come opposite each other during their life. But
at the hour of death they do, and then they remain stationary. That, I
fancy, is how we ‘pass over.’
“Now, in some natures, these holes are comparatively large, and are
constantly coming into opposition. Clairvoyants, mediums are like that.
But, as far as I knew, I had no clairvoyant or mediumistic powers at
all. I therefore am the sort of person who long ago made up his mind
that he never would see a ghost. It was, so to speak, an incalculable
chance that my minute spy-hole should come into opposition with the
other. But it did: and it knocked me out of time.”
I had heard some such theory before, and though Hugh put it rather
picturesquely, there was nothing in the least convincing or practical
about it. It might be so, or again it might not.
“I hope your ghost was more original than your theory,” said I, in order
to bring him to the point.
“Yes, I think it was. You shall judge.”
I put on more coal and poked up the fire. Hugh has got, so I have always
considered, a great talent for telling stories, and that sense of drama
which is so necessary for the narrator. Indeed before now, I have
suggested to him that he should take this up as a profession, sit by the
fountain in Piccadilly Circus, when times are, as usual, bad, and tell
stories to the passers-by in the street, Arabian fashion, for reward.
The most part of mankind, I am aware, do not like long stories, but to
the few, among whom I number myself, who really like to listen to
lengthy accounts of experiences, Hugh is an ideal narrator. I do not
care for his theories, or for his similes, but when it comes to facts,
to things that happened, I like him to be lengthy.
“Go on, please, and slowly,” I said. “Brevity may be the soul of wit,
but it is the ruin of storytelling. I want to hear when and where and
how it all was, and what you had for lunch and where you had dined and
what----”
Hugh began:
“It was the 24th of June, just eighteen months ago,” he said. “I had let
my flat, you may remember, and came up from the country to stay with you
for a week. We had dined alone here----”
I could not help interrupting.
“Did you see the ghost here?” I asked. “In this square little box of a
house in a modern street?”
“I was in the house when I saw it.”
I hugged myself in silence.
“We had dined alone here in Graeme Street,” he said, “and after dinner I
went out to some party, and you stopped at home. At dinner your man did
not wait, and when I asked where he was, you told me he was ill, and, I
thought, changed the subject rather abruptly. You gave me your latch-key
when I went out, and on coming back, I found you had gone to bed. There
were, however, several letters for me, which required answers. I wrote
them there and then, and posted them at the pillar-box opposite. So I
suppose it was rather late when I went upstairs.
“You had put me in the front room, on the third floor, overlooking the
street, a room which I thought you generally occupied yourself. It was a
very hot night, and though there had been a moon when I started to my
party, on my return the whole sky was cloud-covered, and it both looked
and felt as if we might have a thunderstorm before morning. I was
feeling very sleepy and heavy, and it was not till after I had got into
bed that I noticed by the shadows of the window-frames on the blind that
only one of the windows was open. But it did not seem worth while to get
out of bed in order to open it, though I felt rather airless and
uncomfortable, and I went to sleep.
“What time it was when I awoke I do not know, but it was certainly not
yet dawn, and I never remember being conscious of such an extraordinary
stillness as prevailed. There was no sound either of foot-passengers or
wheeled traffic; the music of life appeared to be absolutely mute. But
now instead of being sleepy and heavy, I felt, though I must have slept
an hour or two at most, since it was not yet dawn, perfectly fresh and
wide-awake, and the effort which had seemed not worth making before,
that of getting out of bed and opening the other window, was quite easy
now, and I pulled up the blind, threw it wide open, and leaned out, for
somehow I parched and pined for air. Even outside the oppression was
very noticeable, and though, as you know, I am not easily given to feel
the mental effects of climate, I was aware of an awful creepiness coming
over me. I tried to analyse it away, but without success; the past day
had been pleasant, I looked forward to another pleasant day to-morrow,
and yet I was full of some nameless apprehension. I felt, too,
dreadfully lonely in this stillness before the dawn.
“Then I heard suddenly and not very far away the sound of some
approaching vehicle; I could distinguish the tread of two horses walking
at a slow foot’s pace. They were, though yet invisible, coming up the
street, and yet this indication of life did not abate that dreadful
sense of loneliness which I have spoken of. Also in some dim
unformulated way that which was coming seemed to me to have something to
do with the cause of my oppression.
“Then the vehicle came into sight. At first I could not distinguish what
it was. Then I saw that the horses were black and had long tails, and
that what they dragged was made of glass, but had a black frame. It was
a hearse. Empty.
“It was moving up this side of the street. It stopped at your door.
“Then the obvious solution struck me. You had said at dinner that your
man was ill, and you were, I thought, unwilling to speak more about his
illness. No doubt, so I imagined now, he was dead, and for some reason,
perhaps because you did not want me to know anything about it, you were
having the body removed at night. This, I must tell you, passed through
my mind quite instantaneously, and it did not occur to me how unlikely
it really was, before the next thing happened.
“I was still leaning out of the window, and I remember also wondering,
yet only momentarily, how odd it was that I saw things--or rather the
one thing I was looking at--so very distinctly. Of course, there was a
moon behind the clouds, but it was curious how every detail of the
hearse and the horses was visible. There was only one man, the driver,
with it, and the street was otherwise absolutely empty. It was at him I
was looking now. I could see every detail of his clothes, but from where
I was, so high above him, I could not see his face. He had on grey
trousers, brown boots, a black coat buttoned all the way up, and a straw
hat. Over his shoulder there was a strap, which seemed to support some
sort of little bag. He looked exactly like--well, from my description
what did he look exactly like?”
“Why--a bus-conductor,” I said instantly.
“So I thought, and even while I was thinking this, he looked up at me.
He had a rather long thin face, and on his left cheek there was a mole
with a growth of dark hair on it. All this was as distinct as if it had
been noonday, and as if I was within a yard of him. But--so
instantaneous was all that takes so long in the telling--I had not time
to think it strange that the driver of a hearse should be so
unfunereally dressed.
“Then he touched his hat to me, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.”
“‘Just room for one inside, sir,’ he said.
“There was something so odious, so coarse, so unfeeling about this that
I instantly drew my head in, pulled the blind down again, and then, for
what reason I do not know, turned on the electric light in order to see
what time it was. The hands of my watch pointed to half-past eleven.
“It was then for the first time, I think, that a doubt crossed my mind
as to the nature of what I had just seen. But I put out the light again,
got into bed, and began to think. We had dined; I had gone to a party, I
had come back and written letters, had gone to bed and had slept. So how
could it be half-past eleven?... Or--_what_ half-past eleven was it?
“Then another easy solution struck me; my watch must have stopped. But
it had not; I could hear it ticking.
“There was stillness and silence again. I expected every moment to hear
muffled footsteps on the stairs, footsteps moving slowly and smally
under the weight of a heavy burden, but from inside the house there was
no sound whatever. Outside, too, there was the same dead silence, while
the hearse waited at the door. And the minutes ticked on and ticked on,
and at length I began to see a difference in the light in the room, and
knew that the dawn was beginning to break outside. But how had it
happened then that if the corpse was to be removed at night it had not
gone, and that the hearse still waited, when morning was already coming?
“Presently I got out of bed again, and with the sense of strong physical
shrinking I went to the window and pulled back the blind. The dawn was
coming fast; the whole street was lit by that silver hueless light of
morning. But there was no hearse there.
“Once again I looked at my watch. It was just a quarter-past four. But I
would swear that not half an hour had passed since it had told me that
it was half-past eleven.
“Then a curious double sense, as if I was living in the present and at
the same moment had been living in some other time, came over me. It was
dawn on June 25th, and the street, as natural, was empty. But a little
while ago the driver of a hearse had spoken to me, and it was half-past
eleven. What was that driver, to what plane did he belong? And again
_what_ half-past eleven was it that I had seen recorded on the dial of
my watch?
“And then I told myself that the whole thing had been a dream. But if
you ask me whether I believed what I told myself, I must confess that I
did not.