not induce my friend Roderick Cardew to strike his melancholy tent in
Chelsea, and (leaving it struck) steal away like the Arabs and spend
this month of spring with me at my newly acquired house at Tilling to
observe the spell of April’s wand making magic in the country. I seemed
to have brought out all the arguments of which I was master; he had
been very ill, and his doctor recommended a clearer air with as mild a
climate as he could conveniently attain; he loved the great stretches
of drained marsh-land which lay spread like a pool of verdure round the
little town; he had not seen my new home which made a breach in the
functions of hospitality, and he really could not be expected to object
to his host, who, after all, was one of his oldest friends. Besides (to
leave no stone unturned) as he regained his strength he could begin to
play golf again, and it entailed, as he well remembered, a very mild
exertion for him to keep me in my proper position in such a pursuit.
At last there was some sign of yielding.
“Yes. I should like to see the marsh and the big sky once more,” he
said.
A rather sinister interpretation of his words “once more,” made a
sudden flashed signal of alarm in my mind. It was utterly fanciful, no
doubt, but that had better be extinguished first.
“Once more?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
“I always say ‘once more,’” he said. “It’s greedy to ask for too much.”
The very fact that he fenced so ingeniously deepened my suspicion.
“That won’t do,” I said. “Tell me, Roddie.”
He was silent a moment.
“I didn’t intend to,” he said, “for there can be no use in it. But
if you insist, as apparently you mean to do, I may as well give in.
It’s what you think; ‘once more’ will very likely be the most. But you
mustn’t fuss about it; I’m not going to. No proper person fusses about
death; that’s a train which we are all sure to catch. It always waits
for you.”
I have noticed that when one learns tidings of that sort, one feels,
almost immediately, that one has known them a long time. I felt so now.
“Go on,” I said.
“Well, that’s about all there is. I’ve had sentence of death passed
upon me, and it will probably be carried out, I’m delighted to say, in
the French fashion. In France, you know, they don’t tell you when you
are to be executed till a few minutes before. It is likely that I shall
have even less than that, so my doctor informs me. A second or two will
be all I shall get. Congratulate me, please.”
I thought it over for a moment.
“Yes, heartily,” I said. “I want to know a little more though.”
“Well, my heart’s all wrong, quite unmendably so. Heart-disease!
Doesn’t it sound romantic? In mid-Victorian romance, heroes and
heroines alone die of heart-disease. But that’s by the way. The fact
is that I may die at any time without a moment’s warning. I shall give
a couple of gasps, so he told me when I insisted on knowing details,
and that’ll be all. Now, perhaps, you understand why I was unwilling
to come and stay with you. I don’t want to die in your house; I think
it’s dreadfully bad manners to die in other people’s houses. I long
to see Tilling again, but I think I shall go to an hotel. Hotels are
fair game, for the management over-charges those who live there to
compensate themselves for those who die there. But it would be rude of
me to die in your house; it might entail a lot of bother for you, and I
couldn’t apologize----”
“But I don’t mind your dying in my house,” I said. “At least you see
what I mean----”
He laughed.
“I do, indeed,” he said. “And you couldn’t give a warmer assurance of
friendship. But I couldn’t come and stay with you in my present plight
without telling you what it was, and yet I didn’t mean to tell you. But
there we are now. Think again; reconsider your decision.”
“I don’t,” I said. “Come and die in my house by all means, if you’ve
got to. I would much sooner you lived there: your dying will, in any
case, annoy me immensely. But it would annoy me even more to know that
you had done it in some beastly hotel among plush and looking-glasses.
You shall have any bedroom you like. And I want you dreadfully to see
my house, which is adorable.... O Roddie, what a bore it all is!”
It was impossible to speak or to think differently. I knew well how
trivial a matter death was to my friend, and I was not sure that at
heart I did not agree with him. We were quite at one, too, in that
we had so often gossiped about death with cheerful conjecture and
interested surmise based on the steady assurance that something of new
and delightful import was to follow, since neither of us happened to be
of that melancholy cast of mind that can envisage annihilation. I had
promised, in case I was the first to embark on the great adventure, to
do my best to “get through,” and give him some irrefutable proof of the
continuance of my existence, just by way of endorsement of our belief,
and he had given a similar pledge, for it appeared to us both, that,
whatever the conditions of the future might turn out to be, it would
be impossible when lately translated there, not to be still greatly
concerned with what the present world still held for us in ties of
love and affection. I laughed now to remember how he had once imagined
himself begging to be excused for a few minutes, directly after death,
and saying to St. Peter: “May I keep your Holiness waiting for a minute
before you finally lock me into Heaven or Hell with those beautiful
keys? I won’t be a minute, but I do want so much to be a ghost, and
appear to a friend of mine who is on the look-out for such a visit. If
I find I can’t make myself visible I will come back at once.... Oh,
_thank_ you, your Holiness.”
So we agreed that I should run the risk of his dying in my house, and
promised not to make any reproaches posthumously (as far as he was
concerned) in case he did so. He on his side promised not to die if he
could possibly help it, and next week or so he would come down to me in
the heart of the country that he loved, and see April at work.
“And I haven’t told you anything about my house yet,” I said. “It’s
right at the top of the hill, square and Georgian and red-bricked. A
panelled hall, dining-room and panelled sitting-room downstairs, and
more panelled rooms upstairs. And there’s a garden with a lawn, and
a high brick wall round it, and there is a big garden room, full of
books, with a bow-window looking down the cobbled street. Which bedroom
will you have? Do you like looking on to the garden or on to the
street? You may even have my room if you like.”
He looked at me a moment with eager attention. “I’ll have the square
panelled bedroom that looks out on to the garden, please,” he said.
“It’s the second door on the right when you stand at the top of the
stairs.”
“But how do you know?” I asked.
“Because I’ve been in the house before, once only, three years ago,”
he said. “Margaret Alton took it furnished and lived there for a year
or so. She died there, and I was with her. And if I had known that
this was your house, I should never have dreamed of hesitating whether
I should accept your invitation. I should have thrown my good manners
about not dying in other people’s houses to the winds. But the moment
you began to describe the garden and garden-room I knew what house it
was. I have always longed to go there again. When may I come, please?
Next week is too far ahead. You’re off there this afternoon, aren’t
you?”
I rose: the clock warned me that it was time for me to go to the
station.
“Yes. Come this afternoon,” I suggested. “Come with me.”
“I wish I could, but I take that to mean that it will suit you if I
come to-morrow. For I certainly will. Good Lord! To think of your
having got just that house! It ought to be a wonderfully happy one,
for I saw---- But I’ll tell you about that perhaps when I’m there. But
don’t ask me to: I’ll tell you if and when I can, as the lawyers say.
Are you really off?”
I was really off, for I had no time to spare, but before I got to the
door he spoke again.
“Of course, the room I have chosen was _the_ room,” he said, and there
was no need for me to ask what he meant by _the_ room.
* * * * *
I knew no more than the barest and most public outline of that affair,
distant now by the space of many years, but, so I conceived, ever green
in Roderick’s heart, and, as my train threaded its way through the
gleams of this translucent spring evening, I retraced this outline as
far as I knew it. It was the one thing of which Roderick never spoke
(even now he was not sure that he could manage to tell me the end of
it), and I had to rummage in my memory for the reconstruction of the
half-obliterated lines.
Margaret--her maiden-name would not be conjured back into memory--had
been an extremely beautiful girl when Roderick first met her, and, not
without encouragement, he had fallen head over ears in love with her.
All seemed to be going well with his wooing, he had the air of a happy
lover, when there appeared on the scene that handsome and outrageous
fellow, Richard Alton. He was the heir to his uncle’s barony and his
really vast estates, and the girl, when he proceeded to lay siege, very
soon capitulated. She may have fallen in love with him, for he was
an attractive scamp, but the verdict at the time was that it was her
ambition, not her heart, that she indulged. In any case, there was the
end of Roderick’s wooing, and before the year was out she had married
the other.
I remembered seeing her once or twice in London about this time,
splendid and brilliant, of a beauty that dazzled, with the world
very much at her feet. She bore him two sons; she succeeded to a
great position; and then with the granting of her heart’s desire, the
leanness withal followed. Her husband’s infidelities were numerous and
notorious; he treated her with a subtle cruelty that just kept on the
right side of the law, and, finally, seeking his freedom, he deserted
her, and openly lived with another woman. Whether it was pride that
kept her from divorcing him, or whether she still loved him (if she
had ever done so) and was ready to take him back, or whether it was
out of revenge that she refused to have done with him legally, was an
affair of which I knew nothing. Calamity followed on calamity; first
one and then the other of her sons was killed in the European War, and
I remembered having heard that she was the victim of some malignant and
disfiguring disease, which caused her to lead a hermit life, seeing
nobody. It was now three years or so since she had died.
Such, with the addition that she had died in my house, and that
Roderick had been with her, was the sum of my meagre knowledge, which
might or might not, so he had intimated, be supplemented by him. He
arrived next day, having motored down from London for the avoidance
of fatigue, and certainly as we sat after dinner that night in the
garden-room, he had avoided it very successfully, for never had I seen
him more animated.
“Oh, I have been so right to come here,” he said, “for I feel steeped
in tranquillity and content. There’s such a tremendous sense of
Margaret’s presence here, and I never knew how much I wanted it.
Perhaps that is purely subjective, but what does that matter so long as
I feel it? How a scene soaks into the place where it has been enacted;
my room, which you know was her room, is alive with her. I want nothing
better than to be here, prowling and purring over the memory of the
last time, which was the only one, that I was here. Yes, just that; and
I know how odd you must think it. But it’s true, it was here that I saw
her die, and instead of shunning the place, I bathe myself in it. For
it was one of the happiest hours of my life.”
“Because----” I began.
“No; not because it gave her release, if that’s in your mind,” he said.
“It’s because I saw----”
He broke off, and remembering his stipulation that I should ask him
nothing, but that he would tell me “if and when” he could, I put no
question to him. His eyes were dancing with the sparkle of fire that
burned on the hearth, for though April was here, the evenings were
still chilly, and it was not the fire that gave them their light, but
a joyousness that was as bright as glee, and as deep as happiness.
“No, I’m not going on with that now,” he said, “though I expect I
shall before my days are out. At present I shall leave you wondering
why a place that should hold such mournful memories for me, is such a
well-spring. And as I am not for telling you about me, let me enquire
about you. Bring yourself up to date; what have you been doing, and
much more important, what have you been thinking about?”
“My doings have chiefly been confined to settling into this house,” I
said. “I’ve been pulling and pushing furniture into places where it
wouldn’t go, and cursing it.”
He looked round the room.
“It doesn’t seem to bear you any grudge,” he said. “It looks contented.
And what else?”
“In the intervals, when I couldn’t push and curse any more,” I said,
“I’ve been writing a few spook stories. All about the borderland, which
I love as much as you do.”
He laughed outright.
“Do you, indeed?” he said. “Then it’s no use my saying that it is quite
impossible. But I should like to know your views on the borderland.”
I pointed to a sheaf of typewritten stuff that littered my table.
“Them’s my sentiments,” I said, “and quite at your service.”
“Good; then I’ll take them to bed with me when I go, if you’ll allow
me. I’ve always thought that you had a pretty notion of the creepy,
but the mistake that you make is to imagine that creepiness is
characteristic of the borderland. No doubt there are creepy things
there, but so there are everywhere, and a thunder-storm is far more
terrifying than an apparition. And when you get really close to
the borderland, you see how enchanting it is, and how vastly more
enchanting the other side must be. I got right on to the borderland
once, here in this house, as I shall probably tell you, and I never
saw so happy and kindly a place. And without doubt I shall soon be
careering across it in my own person. That’ll be, as we’ve often
determined, wildly interesting, and it will have the solemnity of a
first night at a new play about it. There’ll be the curtain close
in front of you, and presently it will be raised, and you will see
something you never saw before. How well, on the whole, the secret has
been kept, though from time to time little bits of information, little
scraps of dialogue, little descriptions of scenery have leaked out.
Enthrallingly interesting; one wonders how they will come into the
great new drama.”
“You don’t mean the sort of thing that mediums tell us?” I asked.
“Of course I don’t. I hate the sloshy--really there’s no other word for
it, and why should there be, since that word fits so admirably--the
sloshy utterances of the ordinary high-class, beyond-suspicion medium
at half a guinea a sitting, who asks if there’s anybody present who
once knew a Charles, or if not Charles, Thomas or William. Naturally
somebody has known a Charles, Thomas or William who has passed over,
and is the son, brother, father or cousin of a lady in black. So
when she claims Thomas, he tells her that he is very busy and happy,
helping people.... O Lord, what rot! I went to one such séance a month
ago, just before I was taken ill, and the medium said that Margaret
wanted to get into touch with somebody. Two of us claimed Margaret,
but Margaret chose me and said she was the spirit of my wife. Wife,
you know! You must allow that this was a very unfortunate shot. When I
said that I was unmarried, Margaret said that she was my mother, whose
name was Charlotte. Oh dear, oh dear! Well, I shall go to bed with joy,
bringing your spooks with me....”
“Sheaves,” said I.
“Yes, but aren’t they the sheaves? Isn’t one’s gleaning of sheaves in
this world what they call spooks? That is, the knowledge of what one
takes across?”
“I don’t understand one word,” said I.
“But you must understand. All the knowledge--worth anything--which
you or I have collected here, is the beginning of the other life. We
toil and moil, and make our gleanings and our harvestings, and all our
decent efforts help us to realize what the real harvest is. Surely we
shall take with us exactly that which we have reaped....”
After he had gone up to bed I sat trying to correct the errors of a
typist, but still between me and the pages there dwelt that haunting
sense of all that we did here being only the grist for what was to
come. Our achievements were rewarded, so he seemed to say, by a
glimpse. And those glimpses--so I tried to follow him--were the hints
that had leaked out of the drama for which the curtain was twitching.
Was that it?
Roderick came down to breakfast next morning, superlatively frank and
happy.
“I didn’t read a single line of your stories,” he said. “When I got
into my bedroom I was so immeasurably content that I couldn’t risk
getting interested in anything else. I lay awake a long time, pinching
myself in order to prolong my sheer happiness, but the flesh was weak,
and at last, from sheer happiness, I slept and probably snored. Did
you hear me? I hope not. And then sheer happiness dictated my dreams,
though I don’t know what they were, and the moment I was called I got
up, because ... because I didn’t want to miss anything. Now, to be
practical again, what are you doing this morning?”
“I was intending to play golf,” I said, “unless----”
“There isn’t an ‘unless,’ if you mean Me. My plan made itself for me,
and I intend--this is my plan--to drive out with you, and sit in the
hollow by the fourth tee, and read your stories there. There’s a great
south-westerly wind, like a celestial housemaid, scouring the skies,
and I shall be completely sheltered there, and in the intervals of my
reading, I shall pleasantly observe the unsuccessful efforts of the
golfers to carry the big bunker. I can’t personally play golf any more,
but I shall enjoy seeing other people attempting to do it.”
“And no prowling or purring?” I asked.
“Not this morning. That’s all right: it’s there. It’s so much all right
that I want to be active in other directions. Sitting in a windless
hollow is about the range of my activities. I say that for fear that
you should.”
I found a match when we arrived at the club-house, and Roderick
strolled away to the goal of his observations. Half an hour afterwards
I found him watching with criminally ecstatic joy the soaring drives
that, in the teeth of the great wind, were arrested and blown back into
the unholiest bunker in all the world or the low clever balls that
never rose to the height of the shored-up cliff of sand. The couple
in front of my partner and me were sarcastic dogs, and bade us wait
only till they had delved themselves over the ridge, and then we might
follow as soon as we chose. After violent deeds in the bunker they
climbed over the big dune, thirty yards beyond which lay the green on
which they would now be putting.
As soon as they had disappeared, Roderick snatched my driver from my
hand.
“I can’t bear it,” he said. “I must hit a ball again. Tee it low,
caddie.... No, no tee at all.”
He hit a superb shot, just high enough to carry the ridge, and not so
high that it caught the opposing wind and was stopped towards the end
of its flight. He gave a loud croak of laughter.
“That’ll teach them not to insult my friend,” he said. “It must have
been pitched right among their careful puttings. And now I shall read
his ghost-stories.”
I have recorded this athletic incident because better than any analysis
of his attitude towards life and death it conveys just what that
attitude was. He knew perfectly well that any swift exertion might be
fatal to him, but he wanted to hit a golf ball again as sweetly and as
hard as it could be hit. He had done it: he had scored off death. And
as I went on my way I felt perfectly confident that if, with that brisk
free effort, he had fallen dead on the tee, he would have thought it
well worth while, provided only that he had made that irreproachable
shot. While alive, he proposed to partake in the pleasures of life,
amongst which he had always reckoned that of hitting golf balls, not
caring, though he liked to be alive, whether the immediate consequence
was death, just because he did not in the least object to being dead.
The choice was of such little consequence.... The history of that I was
to know that evening.
The stories which Roderick had taken to read were designed to be of
an uncomfortable type: one concerned a vampire, one an elemental, the
third the reincarnation of a certain execrable personage, and as we sat
in the garden-room after tea, he with these pages on his knees, I had
the pleasure of seeing him give hasty glances round, as he read, as if
to assure himself that there was nothing unusual in the dimmer corners
of the room.... I liked that; he was doing as I intended that a reader
should.
Before long he came to the last page.
“And are you intending to make a book of them?” he asked. “What are the
other stories like?”
“Worse,” said I, with the complacency of the horror-monger.
“Then--did you ask for criticism? I shall give it in any case--you will
make a book that not only is inartistic, all shadows and no light, but
a false book. Fiction can be false, you know, inherently false. You
play godfather to your stories, you see: you tell them in the first
person, those at least that I have read, and that, though it need not
be supposed that those experiences were actually yours, yet gives a
sort of guarantee that you believe the borderland of which you write to
be entirely terrible. But it isn’t: there are probably terrors there--I
think for instance that I believe in elemental spirits, of some ghastly
kind--but I am sure that I believe that the borderland, for the most
part, is almost inconceivably delightful. I’ve got the best of reasons
for believing that.”
“I’m willing to be convinced,” said I.
Again, as he looked at the fire, his eye sparkled, not with the
reflected flame, but with the brightness of some interior vision.
“Well, there’s an hour yet before dinner,” he said, “and my story won’t
take half of that. It’s about my previous experience of this house;
what I saw, in fact, in the room which I now occupy. It was because of
that, naturally, that I wanted the same room again. Here goes, then.
“For the twenty years of Margaret’s married life,” he said, “I never
saw her except quite accidentally and casually. Casually, like that,
I had seen her at theatres and what not with her two boys whom thus I
knew by sight. But I had never spoken to either of them, nor, after her
marriage, to their mother. I knew, as all the world knew, that she had
a terrible life, but circumstances being what they were, I could not
bring myself to her notice, the more so because she made no sign or
gesture of wanting me. But I am sure that no day passed on which I did
not long to be able to show her that my love and sympathy were hers.
Only, so I thought, I had to know that she wanted them.
“I heard, of course, of the death of her sons. They were both killed
in France within a few days of each other; one was eighteen, the other
nineteen. I wrote to her then formally, so long had we been strangers,
and she answered formally. After that, she took this house, where she
lived alone. A year later, I was told that she had now for some months
been suffering from a malignant and disfiguring disease.
“I was in London, strolling down Piccadilly when my companion mentioned
it, and I at once became aware that I must go to see her, not to-morrow
or soon, but now. It is difficult to describe the quality of that
conviction, or tell you how instinctive and over-mastering it was.
There are some things which you can’t help doing, not exactly because
you desire to do them, but because they must be done. If, for instance,
you are in the middle of the road, and see a motor coming towards you
at top-speed, you have to step to the side of the road, unless you
deliberately choose to commit suicide. It was just like that; unless I
intended to commit a sort of spiritual suicide there was no choice.
“A few hours later I was at your door here, asked to see her, and was
told that she was desperately ill and could see nobody. But I got her
maid to take the message that I was here, and presently her nurse came
down to tell me that she would see me. I should find Margaret, she
said, wearing a veil so as to conceal from me the dreadful ravages
which the disease had inflicted on her face, and the scars of the two
operations which she had undergone. Very likely she would not speak to
me, for she had great difficulty in speaking at all, and in any case
I was not to stay for more than a few minutes. Probably she could not
live many hours: I had only just come in time. And at that moment I
wished I had done anything rather than come here, for though instinct
had driven me here, yet instinct now recoiled with unspeakable horror.
The flesh wars against the spirit, you know, and under its stress I
now suggested that it was better perhaps that I should not see her....
But the nurse merely said again that Margaret wished to see me, and
guessing perhaps the cause of my unwillingness, ‘Her face will be quite
invisible,’ she added. ‘There will be nothing to shock you.’