remember going to sleep feeling quite cheerful, but I awoke in some dark
still hour and It, the terror by night, had come while I slept. Fear and
misgiving, blind, unreasonable, and paralysing, had taken and gripped
me. What was it? Just as by an aneroid we can foretell the approach of
storm, so by this sinking of the spirit, unlike anything I had ever felt
before, I felt sure that disaster of some sort was presaged.
Jack saw it at once when we met at breakfast next morning, in the brown
haggard light of a foggy day, not dark enough for candles, but dismal
beyond all telling.
“So it has come to you too,” he said.
And I had not even the fighting-power left to tell him that I was merely
slightly unwell. Besides, never in my life had I felt better.
All next day, all the day after that fear lay like a black cloak over my
mind; I did not know what I dreaded, but it was something very acute,
something that was very near. It was coming nearer every moment,
spreading like a pall of clouds over the sky; but on the third day,
after miserably cowering under it, I suppose some sort of courage came
back to me: either this was pure imagination, some trick of disordered
nerves or what not, in which case we were both “disquieting ourselves in
vain,” or from the immeasurable waves of emotion that beat upon the
minds of men, something within both of us had caught a current, a
pressure. In either case it was infinitely better to try, however
ineffectively, to stand up against it. For these two days I had neither
worked nor played; I had only shrunk and shuddered; I planned for myself
a busy day, with diversion for us both in the evening.
“We will dine early,” I said, “and go to the ‘Man from Blankley’s.’ I
have already asked Philip to come, and he is coming, and I have
telephoned for tickets. Dinner at seven.”
Philip, I may remark, is an old friend of ours, neighbour in this
street, and by profession a much-respected doctor.
Jack laid down his paper.
“Yes, I expect you’re right,” he said. “It’s no use doing nothing, it
doesn’t help things. Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, beautifully,” I said rather snappishly, for I was all on edge
with the added burden of an almost sleepless night.
“I wish I had,” said he.
This would not do at all.
“We have got to play up!” I said. “Here are we two strong and stalwart
persons, with as much cause for satisfaction with life as any you can
mention, letting ourselves behave like worms. Our fear may be over
things imaginary or over things that are real, but it is the fact of
being afraid that is so despicable. There is nothing in the world to
fear except fear. You know that as well as I do. Now let’s read our
papers with interest. Which do you back, Mr Druce, or the Duke of
Portland, or the Times Book Club?”
That day, therefore, passed very busily for me; and there were enough
events moving in front of that black background, which I was conscious
was there all the time, to enable me to keep my eyes away from it, and I
was detained rather late at the office, and had to drive back to
Chelsea, in order to be in time to dress for dinner, instead of walking
back as I had intended.
Then the message, which for these three days, had been twittering in our
minds, the receivers, just making them quiver and rattle came through.
* * * * *
I found Jack already dressed, since it was within a minute or two of
seven when I got in, and sitting in the drawing-room. The day had been
warm and muggy, but when I looked in on the way up to my room, it
seemed to me to have grown suddenly and bitterly cold, not with the
dampness of English frost, but with the clear and stinging exhilaration
of such days as we had recently spent in Switzerland. Fire was laid in
the grate but not lit, and I went down on my knees on the hearth-rug to
light it.
“Why, it’s freezing in here,” I said. “What donkeys servants are! It
never occurs to them that you want fires in cold weather, and no fires
in hot weather.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t light the fire,” said he, “it’s the warmest
muggiest evening I ever remember.”
I stared at him in astonishment. My hands were shaking with the cold. He
saw this.
“Why, you are shivering!” he said. “Have you caught a chill? But as to
the room being cold let us look at the thermometer.”
There was one on the writing-table.
“Sixty-five,” he said.
There was no disputing that, nor did I want to, for at that moment, it
suddenly struck us, dimly and distantly that It was “coming through.” I
felt it like some curious internal vibration.
“Hot or cold, I must go and dress,” I said.
Still shivering, but feeling as if I was breathing some rarefied
exhilarating air, I went up to my room. My clothes were already laid
out, but, by an oversight, no hot water had been brought up, and I rang
for my man. He came up almost at once, but he looked scared, or, to my
already-startled senses, he appeared so.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Nothing, sir,” he said, and he could hardly articulate the words. “I
thought you rang.”
“Yes. Hot water. But what’s the matter?”
He shifted from one foot to the other.
“I thought I saw a lady on the stairs,” he said, “coming up close behind
me. And the front door bell hadn’t rung that I heard.”
“Where did you think you saw her?” I asked.
“On the stairs. Then on the landing outside the drawing-room door, sir,”
he said. “She stood there as if she didn’t know whether to go in or
not.”
“One--one of the servants,” I said. But again I felt that It was coming
through.
“No, sir. It was none of the servants,” he said.
“Who was it then?”
“Couldn’t see distinctly sir, it was dim-like. But I thought it was Mrs
Lorimer.”
“Oh, go and get me some hot water,” I said.
But he lingered; he was quite clearly frightened.
* * * * *
At this moment the front-door bell rang. It was just seven, and already
Philip had come with brutal punctuality while I was not yet
half-dressed.
“That’s Dr Enderly,” I said. “Perhaps if he is on the stairs you may be
able to pass the place where you saw the lady.”
Then quite suddenly there rang through the house a scream, so terrible,
so appalling in its agony and supreme terror, that I simply stood still
and shuddered, unable to move. Then by an effort so violent that I felt
as if something must break, I recalled the power of motion, and ran
downstairs, my man at my heels, to meet Philip who was running up from
the ground floor. He had heard it too.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “What was that?”
* * * * *
Together we went into the drawing-room, Jack was lying in front of the
fireplace, with the chair in which he had been sitting a few minutes
before overturned. Philip went straight to him and bent over him,
tearing open his white shirt.
“Open all the windows,” he said, “the place reeks.”
We flung open the windows, and there poured in, so it seemed to me, a
stream of hot air into the bitter cold. Eventually Philip got up.
“He is dead,” he said. “Keep the windows open. The place is still thick
with chloroform.”
Gradually to my sense the room got warmer, to Philip’s the drug-laden
atmosphere dispersed. But neither my servant nor I had smelt anything at
all.
A couple of hours later there came a telegram from Davos for me. It was
to tell me to break the news of Daisy’s death to Jack, and was sent by
her sister. She supposed he would come out immediately. But he had been
gone two hours now.
I left for Davos next day, and learned what had happened. Daisy had been
suffering for three days from a little abscess which had to be opened,
and, though the operation was of the slightest, she had been so nervous
about it that the doctor gave her chloroform. She made a good recovery
from the anæsthetic, but an hour later had a sudden attack of syncope,
and had died that night at a few minutes before eight, by central
European time, corresponding to seven in English time. She had insisted
that Jack should be told nothing about this little operation till it was
over, since the matter was quite unconnected with her general health,
and she did not wish to cause him needless anxiety.
And there the story ends. To my servant there came the sight of a woman
outside the drawing-room door, where Jack was, hesitating about her
entrance, at the moment when Daisy’s soul hovered between the two
worlds; to me there came--I do not think it is fanciful to suppose
this--the keen exhilarating cold of Davos; to Philip there came the
fumes of chloroform. And to Jack, I must suppose, came his wife. So he
joined her.
THE OTHER BED
I had gone out to Switzerland just before Christmas, expecting, from
experience, a month of divinely renovating weather, of skating all day
in brilliant sun, and basking in the hot frost of that windless
atmosphere. Occasionally, as I knew, there might be a snowfall, which
would last perhaps for forty-eight hours at the outside, and would be
succeeded by another ten days of cloudless perfection, cold even to zero
at night, but irradiated all day long by the unflecked splendour of the
sun.
Instead the climatic conditions were horrible. Day after day a gale
screamed through this upland valley that should have been so windless
and serene, bringing with it a tornado of sleet that changed to snow by
night. For ten days there was no abatement of it, and evening after
evening, as I consulted my barometer, feeling sure that the black finger
would show that we were coming to the end of these abominations, I found
that it had sunk a little lower yet, till it stayed, like a homing
pigeon, on the S of storm. I mention these things in depreciation of the
story that follows, in order that the intelligent reader may say at
once, if he wishes, that all that occurred was merely a result of the
malaise of nerves and digestion that perhaps arose from those
storm-bound and disturbing conditions. And now to go back to the
beginning again.
I had written to engage a room at the Hôtel Beau Site, and had been
agreeably surprised on arrival to find that for the modest sum of twelve
francs a day I was allotted a room on the first floor with two beds in
it. Otherwise the hotel was quite full. Fearing to be billeted in a
twenty-two-franc room, by mistake, I instantly confirmed my arrangements
at the bureau. There was no mistake: I had ordered a twelve-franc room
and had been given one. The very civil clerk hoped that I was satisfied
with it, for otherwise there was nothing vacant. I hastened to say that
I was more than satisfied, fearing the fate of Esau.
I arrived about three in the afternoon of a cloudless and glorious day,
the last of the series. I hurried down to the rink, having had the
prudence to put skates in the forefront of my luggage, and spent a
divine but struggling hour or two, coming up to the hotel about sunset.
I had letters to write, and after ordering tea to be sent up to my
gorgeous apartment, No. 23, on the first floor, I went straight up
there.
The door was ajar and--I feel certain I should not even remember this
now except in the light of what followed--just as I got close to it, I
heard some faint movement inside the room and instinctively knew that
my servant was there unpacking. Next moment I was in the room myself,
and it was empty. The unpacking had been finished, and everything was
neat, orderly, and comfortable. My barometer was on the table, and I
observed with dismay that it had gone down nearly half an inch. I did
not give another thought to the movement I thought I had heard from
outside.
Certainly I had a delightful room for my twelve francs a day. There
were, as I have said, two beds in it, on one of which were already laid
out my dress-clothes, while night-things were disposed on the other.
There were two windows, between which stood a large washing-stand, with
plenty of room on it; a sofa with its back to the light stood
conveniently near the pipes of central heating, there were a couple of
good arm-chairs, a writing table, and, rarest of luxuries, another
table, so that every time one had breakfast it was not necessary to pile
up a drift of books and papers to make room for the tray. My window
looked east, and sunset still flamed on the western faces of the virgin
snows, while above, in spite of the dejected barometer, the sky was bare
of clouds, and a thin slip of pale crescent moon was swung high among
the stars that still burned dimly in these first moments of their
kindling. Tea came up for me without delay, and, as I ate, I regarded my
surroundings with extreme complacency.
Then, quite suddenly and without cause, I saw that the disposition of
the beds would never do; I could not possibly sleep in the bed that my
servant had chosen for me, and without pause I jumped up, transferred my
dress clothes to the other bed, and put my night things where they had
been. It was done breathlessly almost, and not till then did I ask
myself why I had done it. I found I had not the slightest idea. I had
merely felt that I could not sleep in the other bed. But having made the
change I felt perfectly content.
My letters took me an hour or so to finish, and I had yawned and blinked
considerably over the last one or two, in part from their inherent
dullness, in part from quite natural sleepiness. For I had been in the
train for twenty-four hours, and was fresh to these bracing airs which
so conduce to appetite, activity, and sleep, and as there was still an
hour before I need dress, I lay down on my sofa with a book for excuse,
but the intention to slumber as reason. And consciousness ceased as if a
tap had been turned off.
Then--I dreamed. I dreamed that my servant came very quietly into the
room, to tell me no doubt that it was time to dress. I supposed there
were a few minutes to spare yet, and that he saw I was dozing, for,
instead of rousing me, he moved quietly about the room, setting things
in order. The light appeared to me to be very dim, for I could not see
him with any distinctness, indeed, I only knew it was he because it
could not be anybody else. Then he paused by my washing-stand, which had
a shelf for brushes and razors above it, and I saw him take a razor from
its case and begin stropping it; the light was strongly reflected on the
blade of the razor. He tried the edge once or twice on his thumbnail,
and then to my horror I saw him trying it on his throat. Instantaneously
one of those deafening dream-crashes awoke me, and I saw the door half
open, and my servant in the very act of coming in. No doubt the opening
of the door had constituted the crash.
I had joined a previously-arrived party of five, all of us old friends,
and accustomed to see each other often, and at dinner, and afterwards in
intervals of bridge, the conversation roamed agreeably over a variety of
topics, rocking-turns and the prospects of weather (a thing of vast
importance in Switzerland, and not a commonplace subject) and the
performances at the opera, and under what circumstances as revealed in
dummy’s hand, is it justifiable for a player to refuse to return his
partner’s original lead in no trumps. Then over whisky and soda and the
repeated “last cigarette,” it veered back via the Zantzigs to thought
transference and the transference of emotion. Here one of the party,
Harry Lambert, put forward the much discussed explanation of haunted
houses based on this principle. He put it very concisely.
“Everything that happens,” he said, “whether it is a step we take, or a
thought that crosses our mind, makes some change in its immediate
material world. Now the most violent and concentrated emotion we can
imagine is the emotion that leads a man to take so extreme a step as
killing himself or somebody else. I can easily imagine such a deed so
eating into the material scene, the room or the haunted heath, where it
happens, that its mark lasts an enormous time. The air rings with the
cry of the slain and still drips with his blood. It is not everybody who
will perceive it, but sensitives will. By the way, I am sure that man
who waits on us at dinner is a sensitive.”
It was already late, and I rose.
“Let us hurry him to the scene of a crime,” I said. “For myself I shall
hurry to the scene of sleep.”
* * * * *
Outside the threatening promise of the barometer was already finding
fulfilment, and a cold ugly wind was complaining among the pines, and
hooting round the peaks, and snow had begun to fall. The night was
thickly overcast, and it seemed as if uneasy presences were going to and
fro in the darkness. But there was no use in ill augury, and certainly
if we were to be house-bound for a few days I was lucky in having so
commodious a lodging. I had plenty to occupy myself with indoors, though
I should vastly have preferred to be engaged outside, and in the
immediate present how good it was to lie free in a proper bed after a
cramped night in the train.
* * * * *
I was half-undressed when there came a tap at my door, and the waiter
who had served us at dinner came in carrying a bottle of whisky. He was
a tall young fellow, and though I had not noticed him at dinner, I saw
at once now, as he stood in the glare of the electric light, what Harry
had meant when he said he was sure he was a sensitive. There is no
mistaking that look: it is exhibited in a peculiar “inlooking” of the
eye. Those eyes, one knows, see further than the surface....
“The bottle of whisky for monsieur,” he said, putting it down on the
table.
“But I ordered no whisky,” said I.
He looked puzzled.
“Number twenty-three?” he said.
Then he glanced at the other bed.
“Ah, for the other gentleman, without doubt,” he said.
“But there is no other gentleman,” said I. “I am alone here.”
He took up the bottle again.
“Pardon, monsieur,” he said. “There must be a mistake. I am new here; I
only came to-day. But I thought----”
“Yes?” said I.
“I thought that number twenty-three had ordered a bottle of whisky,” he
repeated. “Good-night, monsieur, and pardon.”
* * * * *
I got into bed, extinguished the light, and feeling very sleepy and
heavy with the oppression, no doubt, of the snow that was coming,
expected to fall asleep at once. Instead my mind would not quite go to
roost, but kept sleepily stumbling about among the little events of the
day, as some tired pedestrian in the dark stumbles over stones instead
of lifting his feet. And as I got sleepier it seemed to me that my mind
kept moving in a tiny little circle. At one moment it drowsily
recollected how I had thought I had heard movement inside my room, at
the next it remembered my dream of some figure going stealthily about
and stropping a razor, at a third it wondered why this Swiss waiter with
the eyes of a “sensitive” thought that number twenty-three had ordered a
bottle of whisky. But at the time I made no guess as to any coherence
between these little isolated facts; I only dwelt on them with drowsy
persistence. Then a fourth fact came to join the sleepy circle, and I
wondered why I had felt a repugnance against using the other bed. But
there was no explanation of this forthcoming, either, and the outlines
of thought grew more blurred and hazy, until I lost consciousness
altogether.
* * * * *
Next morning began the series of awful days, sleet and snow falling
relentlessly with gusts of chilly wind, making any out-of-door
amusement next to impossible. The snow was too soft for toboganning, it
balled on the skies, and as for the rink it was but a series of pools of
slushy snow. This in itself, of course, was quite enough to account for
any ordinary depression and heaviness of spirit, but all the time I felt
there was something more than that to which I owed the utter blackness
that hung over those days. I was beset too by fear that at first was
only vague, but which gradually became more definite, until it resolved
itself into a fear of number twenty-three and in particular a terror of
the other bed. I had no notion why or how I was afraid of it, the thing
was perfectly causeless, but the shape and the outline of it grew slowly
clearer, as detail after detail of ordinary life, each minute and
trivial in itself, carved and moulded this fear, till it became
definite. Yet the whole thing was so causeless and childish that I could
speak to no one of it; I could but assure myself that it was all a
figment of nerves disordered by this unseemly weather.
However, as to the details, there were plenty of them. Once I woke up
from strangling nightmare, unable at first to move, but in a panic of
terror, believing that I was sleeping in the other bed. More than once,
too, awaking before I was called, and getting out of bed to look at the
aspect of the morning, I saw with a sense of dreadful misgiving that the
bed-clothes on the other bed were strangely disarranged, as if some one
had slept there, and smoothed them down afterwards, but not so well as
not to give notice of the occupation. So one night I laid a trap, so to
speak, for the intruder, of which the real object was to calm my own
nervousness (for I still told myself that I was frightened of nothing),
and tucked in the sheet very carefully, laying the pillow on the top of
it. But in the morning it seemed as if my interference had not been to
the taste of the occupant, for there was more impatient disorder than
usual in the bed-clothes, and on the pillow was an indentation, round
and rather deep, such as we may see any morning in our own beds. Yet by
day these things did not frighten me, but it was when I went to bed at
night that I quaked at the thought of further developments.
It happened also from time to time that I wanted something brought me,
or wanted my servant. On three or four of these occasions my bell was
answered by the “Sensitive,” as we called him, but the Sensitive, I
noticed, never came into the room. He would open the door a chink to
receive my order, and on returning would again open it a chink to say
that my boots, or whatever it was, were at the door. Once I made him
come in, but I saw him cross himself as, with a face of icy terror, he
stepped into the room, and the sight somehow did not reassure me. Twice
also he came up in the evening, when I had not rung at all, even as he
came up the first night, and opened the door a chink to say that my
bottle of whisky was outside. But the poor fellow was in a state of such
bewilderment when I went out and told him that I had not ordered whisky,
that I did not press for an explanation. He begged my pardon profusely;
he thought a bottle of whisky had been ordered for number twenty-three.
It was his mistake, entirely--I should not be charged for it; it must
have been the other gentleman. Pardon again; he remembered there was no
other gentleman, the other bed was unoccupied.
It was on the night when this happened for the second time that I
definitely began to wish that I too was quite certain that the other bed
was unoccupied. The ten days of snow and sleet were at an end, and
to-night the moon once more, grown from a mere slip to a shining shield,
swung serenely among the stars. But though at dinner everyone exhibited
an extraordinary change of spirit, with the rising of the barometer and
the discharge of this huge snow-fall, the intolerable gloom which had
been mine so long but deepened and blackened. The fear was to me now
like some statue, nearly finished, modelled by the carving hands of
these details, and though it still stood below its moistened sheet, any
moment, I felt, the sheet might be twitched away, and I be confronted
with it. Twice that evening I had started to go to the bureau, to ask to
have a bed made up for me, anywhere, in the billiard-room or the
smoking-room, since the hotel was full, but the intolerable childishness
of the proceeding revolted me. What was I afraid of? A dream of my own,
a mere nightmare? Some fortuitous disarrangement of bed-linen? The fact
that a Swiss waiter made mistakes about bottles of whisky? It was an
impossible cowardice.
But equally impossible that night were billiards or bridge, or any form
of diversion. My only salvation seemed to lie in downright hard work,
and soon after dinner I went to my room (in order to make my first real
counter-move against fear) and sat down solidly to several hours of
proof-correcting, a menial and monotonous employment, but one which is
necessary, and engages the entire attention. But first I looked
thoroughly round the room, to reassure myself, and found all modern and
solid; a bright paper of daisies on the wall, a floor parquetted, the
hot-water pipes chuckling to themselves in the corner, my bed-clothes
turned down for the night, the other bed----