sickly, and threatened with pulmonary trouble. My father’s business
kept him in London, while for me abundance of fresh air and a mild
climate were considered essential conditions if I was to grow to
manhood. His sister had married the vicar of Polearn, Richard Bolitho,
himself native to the place, and so it came about that I spent three
years, as a paying guest, with my relations. Richard Bolitho owned
a fine house in the place, which he inhabited in preference to the
vicarage, which he let to a young artist, John Evans, on whom the spell
of Polearn had fallen, for from year’s beginning to year’s end he never
left it. There was a solid roofed shelter, open on one side to the
air, built for me in the garden, and here I lived and slept, passing
scarcely one hour out of the twenty-four behind walls and windows.
I was out on the bay with the fisher-folk, or wandering along the
gorse-clad cliffs that climbed steeply to right and left of the deep
combe where the village lay, or pottering about on the pier-head, or
bird’s-nesting in the bushes with the boys of the village. Except on
Sunday and for the few daily hours of my lessons, I might do what I
pleased so long as I remained in the open air. About the lessons there
was nothing formidable; my uncle conducted me through flowering bypaths
among the thickets of arithmetic, and made pleasant excursions into the
elements of Latin grammar, and above all, he made me daily give him an
account, in clear and grammatical sentences, of what had been occupying
my mind or my movements. Should I select to tell him about a walk along
the cliffs, my speech must be orderly, not vague, slip-shod notes of
what I had observed. In this way, too, he trained my observation, for
he would bid me tell him what flowers were in bloom, and what birds
hovered fishing over the sea or were building in the bushes. For that
I owe him a perennial gratitude, for to observe and to express my
thoughts in the clear spoken word became my life’s profession.
But far more formidable than my weekday tasks was the prescribed
routine for Sunday. Some dark embers compounded of Calvinism and
mysticism smouldered in my uncle’s soul, and made it a day of terror.
His sermon in the morning scorched us with a foretaste of the eternal
fires reserved for unrepentant sinners, and he was hardly less
terrifying at the children’s service in the afternoon. Well do I
remember his exposition of the doctrine of guardian angels. A child,
he said, might think himself secure in such angelic care, but let him
beware of committing any of those numerous offences which would cause
his guardian to turn his face from him, for as sure as there were
angels to protect us, there were also evil and awful presences which
were ready to pounce; and on them he dwelt with peculiar gusto. Well,
too, do I remember in the morning sermon his commentary on the carved
panels of the altar-rails to which I have already alluded. There was
the angel of the Annunciation there, and the angel of the Resurrection,
but not less was there the witch of Endor, and, on the fourth panel,
a scene that concerned me most of all. This fourth panel (he came
down from his pulpit to trace its time-worn features) represented
the lych-gate of the church-yard at Polearn itself, and indeed the
resemblance when thus pointed out was remarkable. In the entry stood
the figure of a robed priest holding up a Cross, with which he faced
a terrible creature like a gigantic slug, that reared itself up in
front of him. That, so ran my uncle’s interpretation, was some evil
agency, such as he had spoken about to us children, of almost infinite
malignity and power, which could alone be combated by firm faith and a
pure heart. Below ran the legend “_Negotium perambulans in tenebris_”
from the ninety-first Psalm. We should find it translated there, “the
pestilence that walketh in darkness,” which but feebly rendered the
Latin. It was more deadly to the soul than any pestilence that can
only kill the body: it was the Thing, the Creature, the Business that
trafficked in the outer Darkness, a minister of God’s wrath on the
unrighteous....
I could see, as he spoke, the looks which the congregation exchanged
with each other, and knew that his words were evoking a surmise, a
remembrance. Nods and whispers passed between them, they understood
to what he alluded, and with the inquisitiveness of boyhood I could
not rest till I had wormed the story out of my friends among the
fisher-boys, as, next morning, we sat basking and naked in the sun
after our bathe. One knew one bit of it, one another, but it pieced
together into a truly alarming legend. In bald outline it was as
follows:
A church far more ancient than that in which my uncle terrified us
every Sunday had once stood not three hundred yards away, on the shelf
of level ground below the quarry from which its stones were hewn. The
owner of the land had pulled this down, and erected for himself a house
on the same site out of these materials, keeping, in a very ecstasy of
wickedness, the altar, and on this he dined and played dice afterwards.
But as he grew old some black melancholy seized him, and he would have
lights burning there all night, for he had deadly fear of the darkness.
On one winter evening there sprang up such a gale as was never before
known, which broke in the windows of the room where he had supped, and
extinguished the lamps. Yells of terror brought in his servants, who
found him lying on the floor with the blood streaming from his throat.
As they entered some huge black shadow seemed to move away from him,
crawled across the floor and up the wall and out of the broken window.
“There he lay a-dying,” said the last of my informants, “and him
that had been a great burly man was withered to a bag o’ skin, for
the critter had drained all the blood from him. His last breath was
a scream, and he hollered out the same words as parson read off the
screen.”
“_Negotium perambulans in tenebris_,” I suggested eagerly.
“Thereabouts. Latin anyhow.”
“And after that?” I asked.
“Nobody would go near the place, and the old house rotted and fell in
ruins till three years ago, when along comes Mr. Dooliss from Penzance,
and built the half of it up again. But he don’t care much about such
critters, nor about Latin neither. He takes his bottle of whisky a
day and gets drunk’s a lord in the evening. Eh, I’m gwine home to my
dinner.”
Whatever the authenticity of the legend, I had certainly heard the
truth about Mr. Dooliss from Penzance, who from that day became
an object of keen curiosity on my part, the more so because the
quarry-house adjoined my uncle’s garden. The Thing that walked in
the dark failed to stir my imagination, and already I was so used to
sleeping alone in my shelter that the night had no terrors for me. But
it would be intensely exciting to wake at some timeless hour and hear
Mr. Dooliss yelling, and conjecture that the Thing had got him.
But by degrees the whole story faded from my mind, overscored by
the more vivid interests of the day, and, for the last two years of
my out-door life in the vicarage garden, I seldom thought about Mr.
Dooliss and the possible fate that might await him for his temerity in
living in the place where that Thing of darkness had done business.
Occasionally I saw him over the garden fence, a great yellow lump of
a man, with slow and staggering gait, but never did I set eyes on him
outside his gate, either in the village street or down on the beach.
He interfered with none, and no one interfered with him. If he wanted
to run the risk of being the prey of the legendary nocturnal monster,
or quietly drink himself to death, it was his affair. My uncle, so I
gathered, had made several attempts to see him when first he came to
live at Polearn, but Mr. Dooliss appeared to have no use for parsons,
but said he was not at home and never returned the call.
* * * * *
After three years of sun, wind, and rain, I had completely outgrown
my early symptoms and had become a tough, strapping youngster of
thirteen. I was sent to Eton and Cambridge, and in due course ate my
dinners and became a barrister. In twenty years from that time I was
earning a yearly income of five figures, and had already laid by in
sound securities a sum that brought me dividends which would, for
one of my simple tastes and frugal habits, supply me with all the
material comforts I needed on this side of the grave. The great prizes
of my profession were already within my reach, but I had no ambition
beckoning me on, nor did I want a wife and children, being, I must
suppose, a natural celibate. In fact there was only one ambition which
through these busy years had held the lure of blue and far-off hills to
me, and that was to get back to Polearn, and live once more isolated
from the world with the sea and the gorse-clad hills for play-fellows,
and the secrets that lurked there for exploration. The spell of it had
been woven about my heart, and I can truly say that there had hardly
passed a day in all those years in which the thought of it and the
desire for it had been wholly absent from my mind. Though I had been in
frequent communication with my uncle there during his lifetime, and,
after his death, with his widow who still lived there, I had never
been back to it since I embarked on my profession, for I knew that if
I went there, it would be a wrench beyond my power to tear myself away
again. But I had made up my mind that when once I had provided for my
own independence, I would go back there not to leave it again. And yet
I did leave it again, and now nothing in the world would induce me to
turn down the lane from the road that leads from Penzance to the Land’s
End, and see the sides of the combe rise steep above the roofs of the
village and hear the gulls chiding as they fish in the bay. One of the
things invisible, of the dark powers, leaped into light, and I saw it
with my eyes.
The house where I had spent those three years of boyhood had been left
for life to my aunt, and when I made known to her my intention of
coming back to Polearn, she suggested that, till I found a suitable
house or found her proposal unsuitable, I should come to live with her.
“The house is too big for a lone old woman,” she wrote, “and I have
often thought of quitting and taking a little cottage sufficient for me
and my requirements. But come and share it, my dear, and if you find
me troublesome, you or I can go. You may want solitude--most people in
Polearn do--and will leave me. Or else I will leave you: one of the
main reasons of my stopping here all these years was a feeling that I
must not let the old house starve. Houses starve, you know, if they
are not lived in. They die a lingering death; the spirit in them grows
weaker and weaker, and at last fades out of them. Isn’t this nonsense
to your London notions?...”
Naturally I accepted with warmth this tentative arrangement, and on an
evening in June found myself at the head of the lane leading down to
Polearn, and once more I descended into the steep valley between the
hills. Time had stood still apparently for the combe, the dilapidated
signpost (or its successor) pointed a rickety finger down the lane,
and a few hundred yards farther on was the white box for the exchange
of letters. Point after remembered point met my eye, and what I saw
was not shrunk, as is often the case with the revisited scenes of
childhood, into a smaller scale. There stood the post-office, and there
the church and close beside it the vicarage, and beyond, the tall
shrubberies which separated the house for which I was bound from the
road, and beyond that again the grey roofs of the quarry-house damp and
shining with the moist evening wind from the sea. All was exactly as I
remembered it, and, above all, that sense of seclusion and isolation.
Somewhere above the tree-tops climbed the lane which joined the main
road to Penzance, but all that had become immeasurably distant. The
years that had passed since last I turned in at the well-known gate
faded like a frosty breath, and vanished in this warm, soft air. There
were law-courts somewhere in memory’s dull book which, if I cared to
turn the pages, would tell me that I had made a name and a great income
there. But the dull book was closed now, for I was back in Polearn, and
the spell was woven around me again.
And if Polearn was unchanged, so too was Aunt Hester, who met me at the
door. Dainty and china-white she had always been, and the years had
not aged but only refined her. As we sat and talked after dinner she
spoke of all that had happened in Polearn in that score of years, and
yet somehow the changes of which she spoke seemed but to confirm the
immutability of it all. As the recollection of names came back to me, I
asked her about the quarry-house and Mr. Dooliss, and her face gloomed
a little as with the shadow of a cloud on a spring day.
“Yes, Mr. Dooliss,” she said, “poor Mr. Dooliss, how well I remember
him, though it must be ten years and more since he died. I never wrote
to you about it, for it was all very dreadful, my dear, and I did not
want to darken your memories of Polearn. Your uncle always thought that
something of the sort might happen if he went on in his wicked, drunken
ways, and worse than that, and though nobody knew exactly what took
place, it was the sort of thing that might have been anticipated.”
“But what more or less happened, Aunt Hester?” I asked.
“Well, of course I can’t tell you everything, for no one knew it. But
he was a very sinful man, and the scandal about him at Newlyn was
shocking. And then he lived, too, in the quarry-house.... I wonder
if by any chance you remember a sermon of your uncle’s when he got
out of the pulpit and explained that panel in the altar-rails, the
one, I mean, with the horrible creature rearing itself up outside the
lych-gate?”
“Yes, I remember perfectly,” said I.
“Ah. It made an impression on you, I suppose, and so it did on all who
heard him, and that impression got stamped and branded on us all when
the catastrophe occurred. Somehow Mr. Dooliss got to hear about your
uncle’s sermon, and in some drunken fit he broke into the church and
smashed the panel to atoms. He seems to have thought that there was
some magic in it, and that if he destroyed that he would get rid of
the terrible fate that was threatening him. For I must tell you that
before he committed that dreadful sacrilege he had been a haunted man:
he hated and feared darkness, for he thought that the creature on the
panel was on his track, but that as long as he kept lights burning
it could not touch him. But the panel, to his disordered mind, was
the root of his terror, and so, as I said, he broke into the church
and attempted--you will see why I said ‘attempted’--to destroy it. It
certainly was found in splinters next morning, when your uncle went
into church for matins, and knowing Mr. Dooliss’s fear of the panel,
he went across to the quarry-house afterwards and taxed him with its
destruction. The man never denied it; he boasted of what he had done.
There he sat, though it was early morning, drinking his whisky.
“‘I’ve settled your Thing for you,’ he said, ‘and your sermon too. A
fig for such superstitions.’
“Your uncle left him without answering his blasphemy, meaning to go
straight into Penzance and give information to the police about this
outrage to the church, but on his way back from the quarry-house he
went into the church again, in order to be able to give details about
the damage, and there in the screen was the panel, untouched and
uninjured. And yet he had himself seen it smashed, and Mr. Dooliss had
confessed that the destruction of it was his work. But there it was,
and whether the power of God had mended it or some other power, who
knows?”
This was Polearn indeed, and it was the spirit of Polearn that made me
accept all Aunt Hester was telling me as attested fact. It had happened
like that. She went on in her quiet voice.
“Your uncle recognised that some power beyond police was at work, and
he did not go to Penzance or give information about the outrage, for
the evidence of it had vanished.”
A sudden spate of scepticism swept over me.
“There must have been some mistake,” I said. “It hadn’t been broken....”
She smiled.
“Yes, my dear, but you have been in London so long,” she said. “Let
me, anyhow, tell you the rest of my story. That night, for some reason,
I could not sleep. It was very hot and airless; I dare say you will
think that the sultry conditions accounted for my wakefulness. Once and
again, as I went to the window to see if I could not admit more air, I
could see from it the quarry-house, and I noticed the first time that
I left my bed that it was blazing with lights. But the second time I
saw that it was all in darkness, and as I wondered at that, I heard a
terrible scream, and the moment afterwards the steps of someone coming
at full speed down the road outside the gate. He yelled as he ran;
‘Light, light!’ he called out. ‘Give me light, or it will catch me!’ It
was very terrible to hear that, and I went to rouse my husband, who was
sleeping in the dressing-room across the passage. He wasted no time,
but by now the whole village was aroused by the screams, and when he
got down to the pier he found that all was over. The tide was low, and
on the rocks at its foot was lying the body of Mr. Dooliss. He must
have cut some artery when he fell on those sharp edges of stone, for
he had bled to death, they thought, and though he was a big burly man,
his corpse was but skin and bones. Yet there was no pool of blood round
him, such as you would have expected. Just skin and bones as if every
drop of blood in his body had been sucked out of him!”
She leaned forward.
“You and I, my dear, know what happened,” she said, “or at least
can guess. God has His instruments of vengeance on those who bring
wickedness into places that have been holy. Dark and mysterious are His
ways.”
Now what I should have thought of such a story if it had been told me
in London I can easily imagine. There was such an obvious explanation:
the man in question had been a drunkard, what wonder if the demons of
delirium pursued him? But here in Polearn it was different.
“And who is in the quarry-house now?” I asked. “Years ago the
fisher-boys told me the story of the man who first built it and of his
horrible end. And now again it has happened. Surely no one has ventured
to inhabit it once more?”
I saw in her face, even before I asked that question, that somebody had
done so.
“Yes, it is lived in again,” said she, “for there is no end to the
blindness.... I don’t know if you remember him. He was tenant of the
vicarage many years ago.”
“John Evans,” said I.
“Yes. Such a nice fellow he was too. Your uncle was pleased to get so
good a tenant. And now----”
She rose.
“Aunt Hester, you shouldn’t leave your sentences unfinished,” I said.
She shook her head.
“My dear, that sentence will finish itself,” she said. “But what a time
of night! I must go to bed, and you too, or they will think we have to
keep lights burning here through the dark hours.”
* * * * *
Before getting into bed I drew my curtains wide and opened all the
windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking
out into the garden I could see in the moonlight the roof of the
shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That,
as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now
returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap
of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one like
globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe, of mysterious
lights and reflections. Then, raising my eyes a little, I saw against
the black hill-side the windows of the quarry-house still alight.
Morning, as is so often the case, brought no shattering of my illusion.
As I began to regain consciousness, I fancied that I was a boy again
waking up in the shelter in the garden, and though, as I grew more
widely awake, I smiled at the impression, that on which it was based
I found to be indeed true. It was sufficient now as then to be here,
to wander again on the cliffs, and hear the popping of the ripened
seed-pods on the gorse-bushes; to stray along the shore to the
bathing-cove, to float and drift and swim in the warm tide, and bask
on the sand, and watch the gulls fishing, to lounge on the pier-head
with the fisher-folk, to see in their eyes and hear in their quiet
speech the evidence of secret things not so much known to them as
part of their instincts and their very being. There were powers and
presences about me; the white poplars that stood by the stream that
babbled down the valley knew of them, and showed a glimpse of their
knowledge sometimes, like the gleam of their white underleaves; the
very cobbles that paved the street were soaked in it.... All that I
wanted was to lie there and grow soaked in it too; unconsciously, as
a boy, I had done that, but now the process must be conscious. I must
know what stir of forces, fruitful and mysterious, seethed along the
hill-side at noon, and sparkled at night on the sea. They could be
known, they could even be controlled by those who were masters of the
spell, but never could they be spoken of, for they were dwellers in the
innermost, grafted into the eternal life of the world. There were dark
secrets as well as these clear, kindly powers, and to these no doubt
belonged the _negotium perambulans in tenebris_ which, though of deadly
malignity, might be regarded not only as evil, but as the avenger of
sacrilegious and impious deeds.... All this was part of the spell of
Polearn, of which the seeds had long lain dormant in me. But now they
were sprouting, and who knew what strange flower would unfold on their
stems?
It was not long before I came across John Evans. One morning, as I lay
on the beach, there came shambling across the sand a man stout and
middle-aged with the face of Silenus. He paused as he drew near and
regarded me from narrow eyes.
“Why, you’re the little chap that used to live in the parson’s garden,”
he said. “Don’t you recognise me?”
I saw who it was when he spoke: his voice, I think, instructed me, and
recognising it, I could see the features of the strong, alert young man
in this gross caricature.
“Yes, you’re John Evans,” I said. “You used to be very kind to me: you
used to draw pictures for me.”
“So I did, and I’ll draw you some more. Been bathing? That’s a risky
performance. You never know what lives in the sea, nor what lives on
the land for that matter. Not that I heed them. I stick to work and
whisky. God! I’ve learned to paint since I saw you, and drink too for
that matter. I live in the quarry-house, you know, and it’s a powerful
thirsty place. Come and have a look at my things if you’re passing.
Staying with your aunt, are you? I could do a wonderful portrait of
her. Interesting face; she knows a lot. People who live at Polearn get
to know a lot, though I don’t take much stock in that sort of knowledge
myself.”
I do not know when I have been at once so repelled and interested.
Behind the mere grossness of his face there lurked something which,
while it appalled, yet fascinated me. His thick lisping speech had the
same quality. And his paintings, what would they be like?...
“I was just going home,” I said. “I’ll gladly come in, if you’ll allow
me.”
He took me through the untended and overgrown garden into the house
which I had never yet entered. A great grey cat was sunning itself in
the window, and an old woman was laying lunch in a corner of the cool
hall into which the door opened. It was built of stone, and the carved
mouldings let into the walls, the fragments of gargoyles and sculptured
images, bore testimony to the truth of its having been built out of
the demolished church. In one corner was an oblong and carved wooden
table littered with a painter’s apparatus and stacks of canvases leaned
against the walls.
He jerked his thumb towards a head of an angel that was built into the
mantelpiece and giggled.
“Quite a sanctified air,” he said, “so we tone it down for the
purposes of ordinary life by a different sort of art. Have a drink? No?
Well, turn over some of my pictures while I put myself to rights.”
He was justified in his own estimate of his skill: he could paint (and
apparently he could paint anything), but never have I seen pictures
so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite studies of trees, and
you knew that something lurked in the flickering shadows. There was a
drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window, even as I had just now
seen it, and yet it was no cat but some beast of awful malignity. There
was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not human, but some evil thing
which had come out of the sea. Above all there were pictures of his
garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you knew that in the bushes were
presences ready to spring out on you....