Those last few days of August dragged on--days of a burning, windless
heat. Yet, as days, I enjoyed them. On some upper branch of my family
tree must have flourished the salamander. Indeed I think I should have
been a denizen of Venus rather than of this colder, darker planet. I sat
on my balcony, basking in the hot sunshine, my thoughts darting hither
and thither like flies under a ceiling--those strange, winged creatures
that ever seem to be attempting to trace out in their flittings the
starry "Square of Pegasus." In spite of my troubles and forebodings, and
fleeting panics, my inward mind was calm. I carefully packed away my few
little valuables. The very notion of food gave me nausea, but that I
determined to conquer, since of course to become, at either extreme, a
slave to one's stomach, is a folly.
The noise and tramplings of the men in the rooms beneath never ceased,
until Night brought quiet. The Sale lasted for two days. A stale and
clouded air ascended even into my locked bedroom from the human beings
(with their dust and tobacco and perfumes and natural presences)
collected together in the heat of the great dining-room. A hum, a
murmur, the scuffling of feet toiling downstairs with some heavy and
cumbrous burden, the cries of the auctioneer, the coarse voices and
laughter, the tinkle of glass--the stretching hours seemed endless; and
every minute of them knelled the fate of some beloved and familiar
object. I was glad my father couldn't hear the bidding, and sorry that
perhaps he did not know that the most valuable of his curios--_how_
valuable I was to learn later--was safely hidden away in an upper room.
So passed my birthday--the twentieth--nor tapped me on the shoulder
with, "Ah, but, my dear, just you wait till I come again!"
None the less I thought a good deal about birthdays that afternoon, and
wondered how it was that we human beings can bear even to go on living
between two such mysteries as the beginning and the end of life. Where
was my mother now? Where was I but two-and-twenty years ago? What was
all this "Past," this "History," of which I had heard so much and knew
so little? Just a story? Better brains than mine have puzzled over these
questions, and perhaps if I had studied the philosophers I should know
the answers. In the evenings, wrapped up in a shawl, Pollie carried me
downstairs, and we took a sober whispering walk in the hush and perfumes
of the deserted garden. Loud rang the tongues of the water over the
stones. The moths were fluttering to their trysts, and from some dark
little coign the cricket strummed me a solo. Standing up there in the
starry night the great house looked down on me like an elder brother,
mute but compassionate.
By the second day after the conclusion of the Sale, the removers' vans
and carts should have gutted the rooms and be gone. It had, therefore,
been arranged that Pollie should as usual share my bedroom the last
night, and that next day we should set off on our journey. After
luncheon--the flavour of its sliced nectarine (or is it of one that came
later?) is on my tongue at this moment--all the rest of the house being
now hollow and vacant, Pollie put on her hat, thrust the large door key
into her pocket, and went off to visit her mother in the village and to
fetch a clean nightdress. She promised to return before dark. Her shoes
clattered down the stone stairs, the outer door boomed like a gun. I
spread out my hands in the air, and as if my four-poster could bear
witness, cried softly, "I am alone." Marvel of marvels, even as I sit
here to-day gazing at my inkpot, there in its original corner stands
that same old four-poster. Pollie is living down in the village with her
husband and her two babies; and once more: I am alone. Is there anything
in life so fascinating, so astonishing, as these queer, common little
repetitions? Perhaps on the Last Day--but I anticipate.
I read a little; wrote on the flyleaf of my diminutive Johnson,
"September 1st, Lyndsey for the last time.--M."; arranged my morrow's
clothes on a chair, then sat down in my balcony to do nothing, to be
nothing, merely to dream. But nature decreed otherwise. Soon after six
by my grandfather's clock--it struck the hour out of its case, as if out
of a sepulchre--a storm, which all the afternoon had been steadily
piling its leaden vapours into space, began to break. Chizzel Hill with
its prehistoric barrow was sunk to a green mound beneath those lowering
cloudy heights, pooling so placid and lovely a blue between them. The
very air seemed to thicken, and every tree stood up as if carved out of
metal. Of a sudden a great wind, with heavy plashing drops of rain,
swept roaring round the house, thick with dust and green leaves torn
from the dishevelled summer trees. There was a hush. The darkness
intensified, and then a vast sheet of lightning seemed to picture all
Kent in my eyes, and the air was full of water.
One glance into the obscure vacancy of the room behind me persuaded me
to remain where I was, though the rain drove me further and further into
the corner of my balcony. Cold, and a little scared by the glare and
din, yet not unhappy, I cowered close up against the glass, and, shading
my eyes as best I could from the flames of the lightning, I watched the
storm. How long I sat there I cannot say. The clamour lulled and
benumbed my brain into a kind of trance. My only company was a blackbird
which had flown or been blown into my refuge, and with draggled feathers
stared black-eyed out of the greenery at me. It was gathering towards
dark when the rain and lightning began to abate, and the sullen thunder
drew away into the distance, echoing hollowly along the furthest
horizons. At last, with teeth chattering, and stiff to my bones, I made
my way into the room again, and the benighted blackbird went squawking
to his nest.
Slipping off my gown and shoes, and huddling myself in the blankets and
counterpane of my bed, I sat there pondering what next was to be done.
It would soon be night; and Pollie seemed unlikely to appear until all
this turmoil was over. I was not only alone, but forsaken and infinitely
solitary, a mere sentient living speck in the quiet sea of light that
washed ever and again into the gloomiest recesses of the room. And that
familiar room itself seemed now almost as cold and inhospitable as a
neglected church. I could hear the dark, vacant house beneath echoing
and murmuring at every prolonged reverberation of thunder, and sighing
through all its crannies and keyholes. My bedhangings softly shook in
the air. Gone beyond recovery were my father and mother: and I now
realized how irrevocably. I was no longer a child; and the
responsibilities of life were now wholly on my own shoulders.
Yet I was not utterly forlorn. The great scene comforted me, and now and
then I prayed, almost without thinking and without words, just as a
little tune will keep recurring in the mind. And now, darkness being
spread over the garden, in the east the moon was rising. Moreover, a
curious sight met my eyes; for as the storm settled, heavy rain in
travelling showers was still occasionally skirting the house; and when,
between the heaped-up masses of cloud, the distant lightning gleamed a
faint vaporous lilac, I saw motionless in the air, and as if suspended
in their falling between earth and sky, the multitudinous glass-clear,
pear-shaped drops of water. At sight of these jewels thus crystalling
the dark air I was filled with such a rapture that I actually clapped my
hands. And presently the moon herself appeared, as if to be my
companion. Serene, remote, she glided at last from cover of an enormous
bluff of cloud into the faint-starred vault of space, seemed to pause
for an instant in contemplation of the dark scene, then went musing on
her way. Beneath her silver all seemed at peace, and it was then that I
fell asleep.
And while I slept, I dreamed a dream. My dreams often commit me to a
quiet and radiant life, as if of a reality less strange to me than that
of waking. Others are a mere uneasiness and folly. In the old days I
would sometimes tell my dreams to Mrs Ballard; and she would look them
up in a frowsy book she kept in the dresser drawer, a brown,
grease-stained volume entitled _Napoleon's Book of Fate_. Then she would
promise me a prince for a husband, or that I would be a great traveller
across the sea, or that I must beware of a red-haired woman, and
nonsense of that kind. But this particular dream remains more vividly in
my memory than any.
Well, I dreamed that I was walking in a strange garden--an orchard. And,
as it seemed, I was either of the common human size, or this was a world
wherein of human beings I was myself of the usual stature. The night was
still, like the darkest picture, yet there must have been light there,
since I could see as I walked. The grasses were coarse and deep, but
they did not encumber my feet, and presently I found myself standing
beneath a tree whose branches in their towering sombre heaviness seemed
to be made of iron. Dangling here and there amid the pendulous leaves
hung enormous fruits--pears stagnant and heavy as shaped lumps of lead
or of stone. Why the sight of these fruits in the obscure luminosity of
the air around them laid such a spell upon me, I cannot say. I stood
there in the dew-cold grass, gazing up and up into those monstrous
branches as if enchanted, and then of a sudden the ground under my feet
seemed faintly to tremble as if at a muffled blow. One of the fruits in
my dream, now come to ripeness, had fallen stone-like from above. Then
again--thud! Realization of the dreadful danger in which I stood swept
over me. I turned to escape, and awoke, shivering and in a suffocating
heat, to discover in the moonlight that now flooded my room where in
actuality I was.
Yet still, as it seemed, the dying rumour of the sound persisted, and
surely, I thought, it must be poor, careless Pollie, her key forgotten,
come back in the darkness after the storm, and hammering with the great
knocker on the door below. Hardly a minute had passed indeed before the
whole house resounded again with her thumping. One seldom finds Courage
keeping tryst on the outskirts of sleep, and there was a vehemence in
the knocking as if Pollie was in an extremity of fear at finding herself
under the vacant house alone in the night. The thought of going to her
rescue set my teeth chattering. I threw back the bedclothes and gazed at
the moon, and the longer I sat there the more clearly I realized that I
must somehow descend the stairs, convey to her that I was safe, and, if
possible, let her in.
Three steep stone flights separated us, stairs which I had very rarely
ascended or descended except in her arms. I thrust my foot out; all was
still; I must go at once. But what of light? The moon was on this side
of the house. It might be pitch dark on the lower landings and in the
hall. On the stool by her bedside stood Pollie's copper candlestick,
with an inch or two of candle in it and a box of matches. It was a
thick-set tallow candle and none too convenient for me to grasp. With
this alight in my hand, the stick being too cumbersome, I set out on my
errand. The air was cool; the moon shone lustily. Just waked from sleep
my mind was curiously exalted. I sallied out into the empty corridor. A
pace or two beyond the threshold my heart seemed to swell up in my body,
for it seemed that at the head of the staircase lay stretched the still
form of my mother as I had found her in the cold midnight hours long
ago. It was but a play of light, a trick of fantasy. I recovered my
breath and went on.
To leap from stair to stair was far too formidable a means of
progression. I should certainly have dashed out my brains. So I must
sit, and jump sitting, manipulating my candle as best I could. In this
sidling, undignified fashion, my eyes fixed only on the stair beneath
me, I mastered the first flight, and paused to rest. What a medley of
furtive sounds ascended to my ear from the desolate rooms below: the
heavy plash of raindrop from the eaves, scurry and squeak of mouse,
rustle of straw, a stirring--light as the settling of dust, crack of
timber, an infinitely faint whisper; and from without, the whistle of
bat, the stony murmur of the garden stream, the hunting screech of some
predatory night-fowl over the soaked and tranquil harvest fields. And
who, Who?--that shape?... I turned sharply, and the melted tallow of the
guttering candle welled over and smartly burned the hand that held it.
The pain gave me confidence. But better than that, a voice from below
suddenly broke out, not Pollie's but Adam Waggett's, hollaing in the
porch. Adam--the wren-slaughterer--prove me a coward? No, indeed. All
misgiving gone, I girded my dressing-gown tighter around me, and
continued the descent.
It was a jolting and arduous business, and as I paused on the next
landing, I now looked into the moon-bathed vacancy of my father's
bedroom. Dismantled, littered with paper and the fragments of wood and
glass of a picture my mother had given him, a great hole in the plaster,
a broken chair straddling in the midst--a hideous spectacle it was. An
immense moth with greenly glowing eyes, lured out of its roosting place,
came fluttering round my candle, fanning my cheek with its plumy wings.
I shaded the flame and smiled up at the creature which, not being of a
kind that is bent on self-slaughter, presently wafted away. The lower I
descended the filthier grew my journey. My stub of candle was fast
wasting; and what use should I be to Pollie's messenger? When indeed in
the muck and refuse left by the Sale, I reached the door, it was too
late. He was now beating with his fists at the rear of the house; and I
must needs climb down the last flight of the back wooden staircase used
by the servants. When at last the great stagnant kitchen came into
view, it was my whole inward self that cried out in me. Its stone flags
were swarming with cockroaches.
These shelled, nocturnal, sour-smelling creatures are among the few
insects that fill me with horror. By comparison the devil's coachman may
be worse-tempered, but he is a gentleman. The very thought of one of
them rearing itself against my slippered foot filled me with disgust;
and the males were winged. They went scurrying away into hiding, infants
seemingly to their mothers, whisper, whisper--I felt sick at the sight.
There came a noise at the window. Peering from round my candle flame I
perceived Adam's dusky face, with its long nose, staring in at me
through the glass. At sight of the plight I was in, he burst into a
prolonged guffaw of laughter. This enraged me beyond measure. I stamped
my foot, and at last he sobered down enough to yell through the glass
that Pollie's mother had sent him to see that I was safe and had
forgotten to give him the house-key. Pollie herself would be with me
next morning.
I waved my candle at him in token that I understood. At this the melted
grease once more trickled over and ran scalding up my arm. The candle
fell to the floor, went out; the pale moonshine spread through the air.
I could see Adam's conical head outlined against the soft light of the
sky; though he could no longer see me. Horror of the cockroaches
returned on me. Instantly I turned tail, leaving the lump of tallow for
their spoil.
How, in that dark, high house, I managed to remount those stairs, I
cannot conceive. Youth and persistency, I suppose. I doubt if I could do
it now. Utterly exhausted and bedraggled I regained my bedroom at last
without further misadventure. I sponged the smoke and grime from face
and hands in my washbowl, hung my dressing-gown where the morning air
might refresh it, and was soon in a dead sleep, from which I think even
the Angel Gabriel would have failed to arouse me.