I
I was expatriated by a man with an axe. The man and the axe were alike
visionary and unreal, though it needed a very considerable effort of
the will to hold them at mental arm’s length. I had work on hand which
imperatively demanded to be finished, and I was so broken down by a long
course of labour that it was a matter of actual difficulty with me when
I sat down at my desk of a morning to lay hold of the thread of last
night’s work, and to recall the personages who had moved through my
manuscript pages for the past three or four months. The day’s work
always began with a fog, which at first looked impenetrable, but would
brighten little by little until I could see my ideal friends moving in
it, and could recognise their familiar lineaments. Then the fog would
disperse altogether, and a certain indescribable, exultant, feverish
brightness would succeed it, and in this feverish brightness my ideal
friends would move and talk as it were of their own volition.
But one morning--it was in November, and the sand-tinged foam flecks
caught from the stormy bay were thick on the roadway before my
window--the fog was thicker and more obdurate than common. I read and
re-read the work of the day before, and the written words conveyed no
meaning. In a dim sort of way this seemed lamentable, and I remember
standing at the window, and looking out to where the white crests of the
waves came racing shorewards under a leaden-coloured sky, and saying to
myself over and over again, ‘Oh, that way madness lies!’ but without
any active sentiment of dismay or fear, and with a clouded, uninterested
wonder as to where the words came from. Quite suddenly I became aware
of a second presence in the chamber, and turned with an actual assurance
that some one stood behind me. I was alone, as a single glance about the
room informed me, but the sense of that second presence was so clearly
defined and positive that the mere evidence of sight seemed doubtful.
The day’s work began in the manner which had of late grown customary,
and in a while the fog gave way to a brilliance unusually flushed and
hectic. The uninvited, invisible personage kept his place, until, even
with the constant fancy that he was there looking over my shoulder, and
so close that there was always a risk of contact, I grew to disregard
him. All day long he watched the pen travelling over the paper, all day
long I was aware of him, featureless, shadowy, expressionless, with a
vague cheek near my own. During the brief interval I gave myself
for luncheon he stood behind my chair, and, being much refreshed and
brightened by my morning’s work, I mocked him quite gaily.
‘Your name is Nerves,’ I told him within myself, ‘and you live in the
land of Mental Overwork. I have still a fortnight’s stretch across the
country you inhabit, and if you so please you may accompany me all the
way. You may even follow me into the land of Repose which lies beyond
your own territory, but its air will not agree with you. You will
dwindle, peak, and pine in that exquisite atmosphere, and in a very
little while I shall have seen the last of you.’
After luncheon I took a constitutional on the pier, not without a hope
that my featureless friend might be blown away by the gusty wind, which
came bellowing up from the Firth of Forth, with enough stinging salt and
vivifying freshness in it, one might have fancied, to shrivel up a host
of phantoms. I tramped him up and down the gleaming planks in the keen
salt wind for half an hour, and he shadowed me unshrinkingly. With
the worst will in the world I took him home, and all afternoon and all
evening he stuck his shadowy head over my shoulder, and watched the pen
as it spread its cobweb lines over the white desert of the paper. He
waited behind my chair at dinner, and late at night, when the long day’s
work at last was over, he hung his intrusive head over my shoulder and
stared into the moderate glass of much-watered whisky which kept a final
pipe in company.
He had grown already into an unutterable bore, and when he insisted upon
passing the night with me I could--but for the obvious inutility of the
thing--have lost my temper fairly. He took his place at the bed-head,
and kept it till I fell asleep. He was there when I awoke in the night,
and probably because the darkness, the quiet, and the sense of solitude
were favourable to him he began to grow clearer. Quite suddenly, and
with a momentary but genuine thrill of fear, I made a discovery about
him. He carried an axe. This weapon was edged like a razor, but was
unusually solid and weighty at the back. From the moment at which
I first became aware of it to that happy hour when my phantom bore
departed and took his weapon with him, there was never a conscious
second in which the axe was not in act to fall, and yet it never fell.
It was always going to strike and never struck.
‘You cannot be supposed to know it, my phantom nuisance,’ I said, being
ready to seek any means by which I might discredit the dreadful rapidity
with which he seemed to be growing real;’ you cannot be supposed to know
it, but one of these days you will furnish excellent copy. As a literary
man’s companion you are not quite without your uses. One of these days I
will haunt a rascal with you, and he shall sweat and shiver at you, as
I decline to sweat and shiver. You observe I take you gaily. I am very
much inclined to think that if I took you any other way that axe might
fall, and sever something which might be difficult to mend. So long as
you choose to stay, I mean to make a study of you.’
Most happily I was able to adhere to that resolve, but I solemnly
declare it made him no less dreadful. Sometimes I tried to ignore him,
but that was a sheer impossibility. Very often I flouted him and jeered
at him, mocked him with his own unreality, and dared him to carry out
his constant threat and strike. But all day and every day, and in all
the many sleepless watches of my nights, he kept me company, and every
hour the threatened blow of the razor-edged axe seemed likelier to fall.
But at last--thank Heaven--the work was done, I touched the two or three
hundred pounds which paid for it, and I was free to take a holiday.
We had grown too accustomed to each other to part on a sudden, even
then. I never saw him, for he was always behind me (and even when I
stood before a mirror he was invisible but _there_), but he was no
longer featureless. His eyes shone through a black vizard with one
unwinking, glittering, ceaseless threat. He wore a slashed doublet with
long hose reaching to the upper thigh, and he had a rosette on each
instep. I can see quite clearly now the peculiar dull cold gleam the
razor-edged axe wore as he stood in some shadowed place behind me, and
the brighter gleam it had in daylight in the streets.
When I had borne with him until I felt that I could bear with him no
longer, I took him, being back in town again, to a London physician
of some eminence. The doctor took him somewhat gravely, insisted upon
absolute mental rest, prescribed a tonic, laid down certain rules about
diet, certain restrictions upon wine and tobacco, and ordered immediate
change of scene.
To begin with I went to Antwerp, thence to Brussels, and thence, by the
merest chance in the world, to Janenne, a little village in the Belgian
Ardennes, at no great distance from the French frontier. I had no idea
of staying there, and on the surface of things there was no reason why I
should have prolonged my stay beyond a day or two. People visit Janenne
in the summer time, and suppose themselves to have exhausted its limited
attractions in four-and-twenty hours. There is nothing at first sight
to keep the stranger longer, but if he will only stay for a week he will
inevitably want to stay for a fortnight, and if once he has stayed for a
fortnight, his business is done, and he is in love with Janenne for the
rest of his natural life. Rural quiet has made her home in Janenne, and
contentment dwells with her, sleepy-eyed.
Even in the first week of December, the russet and amber-coloured leaves
still cling to the branches of the huge old lime-trees of Lorette, and
my lonely feet on the thick carpet of dead leaves below made the sole
sound I heard there except the ceaseless musical tinkle of chisel
and stone from the distant granite quarries--a succession of notes
altogether rural in suggestion--like the tinkle of many sheep-bells.
Even in that first week of December I could sit in the open air there,
where the mild winter sunlight flashed the huge crucifix and the
colossal Christ of painted wood, which poise above the toy chapel carved
out of the live rock. The chapel and the crucifix are at one end of a
lime-tree avenue a third of a mile long, and the trees are aged beyond
strict local knowledge, gnarled and warty and bulbous and great
of girth. You climb to Lorette by a gentle ascent, and below the
rock-carved chapel lies a precipice--not an Alpine affair at all, but a
reasonable precipice for Belgium--say, two or even three hundred feet,
and away and away and away, the golden-dimpled hills go changing from
the yellowish green of winter grass to the variously-toned grays of the
same grass in mid-distance, and then to a blue which grows continually
hazier until it melts at the sky-line, and seems half to blend with the
dim pallid sapphire of a December sky.
Here, ‘with an ambrosial sense of over-weariness falling into sleep,’
would I often sit at the foot of the great crucifix, and would smoke
the pipe of idleness, a little unmindful, perhaps, of the good London
doctor’s caution against the misuse of tobacco. It was here that I awoke
to the fact one day that the man with the axe was absent. He had slipped
away with no good-byes on either side, and I was blissfully alone again.
The sweet peace of it, and the quiet of it no tongue or pen can tell.
The air was balsamic with the odours of the pines which clothed the
hillsides for miles and miles and miles in squares and oblongs and a
hundred irregular forms of blackish green, sometimes snaking in a thin
dark line, sometimes topping a crest with a close-cropped hog-mane, and
sometimes clustering densely over a whole slope, but always throwing
the neighbouring yellows and greens and grays into a wonderful aerial
delicacy of contrast. The scarred lime trunks had a bluish gray tone in
the winter sunlight, and the carpet at their feet was of Indian red and
sienna and brown, of fiercest scarlet and gold and palest lemon colour,
of amber and russet and dead green. And everywhere, and in my tired mind
most of all, was peace.
I had been a fortnight at Janenne when my intrusive phantom left me
on Lorette. I had made no acquaintances, for I was but feeble at the
language, and did not care to encounter the trouble of talking in it.
The first friendship I made--I have since spent three years in the
delightful place, and have made several friendships there--was begun
within five minutes of that exquisite moment at which I awoke to the
fact that my phantom was away.
There was not a living creature in sight, and there was not a sound
to be heard except the distant tinkle of chisel and stone, and the
occasional rustle of a falling leaf, until Schwartz, the subject of this
history, walked pensively round a corner eighty yards down the avenue,
and paused to scratch one ear with a hind foot. He stood for a time with
a thoughtful air, looked up the avenue and down the avenue, and then
with slow deliberation, and an occasional pause for thought, he walked
towards me. When within half a dozen yards he stopped and took good
stock of me, with brown eyes overhung by thick grizzled eyebrows.
Then he offered a short, interrogative, authoritative bark, a mere
monosyllable of inquiry.
‘A stranger,’ I responded. ‘An invalid stranger.’ He seemed not only
satisfied, but, for some unknown reason, delighted. He wagged the
cropped stump of a gray tail, and writhed his whole body with a greeting
that had an almost slavish air of charmed propitiation; and then,
without a word on his side or on mine, he mounted the steps which led
to the great crucifix, sate down upon the topmost step beside me, and
nestled his grizzled head in my lap. I confess that he could have done
nothing which would have pleased me more. I have always thought the
unconditional and immediate confidence of a dog or a child a sort of
certificate to character, though I know well that there is a kind of dog
whose native friendliness altogether outruns his discretion, and who
is doomed from birth to fall into error, and to encounter consequent
rebuffs which must be grievous to be borne.
My new companion wore a collar, and had other signs that distinguished
him from the mere mongrel of the village street, but he was of no
particular breed. His coat was of a bluish gray, and though soft enough
to the touch, had a harsh and spiky aspect. He came nearer to being a
broken-haired terrier than anything else, but I seemed to discern half a
dozen crosses in him, and a lover of dogs who asked for breed would not
have offered sixpence for him.