thrust me suddenly into a dazzling room. My eyes rejected its array of
brilliant light. On a small chest of drawers three candles were
guttering, two more stood flaring in the high window ledge, and a lamp
upon a table by the bed rendered these minor illuminations unnecessary
by its diffusive glare. There were even some small Christmas candles
dropping coloured grease down the wooden mantel-piece, and I noticed a
fire had been made, built entirely of wood. There were bits of an
inlaid workbox or desk, and a chair-rung, lying half burnt in the
grate. Some peremptory demand for light had been, these signs denoted,
unscrupulously met. A woman lay upon the bed, half clothed, asleep. As
the door slammed behind me the flames wavered and my companion
released my hand. She stood beside me, shuddering violently, but
without utterance.
I looked around. Everywhere proofs of recent energy were visible. The
bright panes reflecting back the low burnt candles, the wretched but
shining furniture, and some odd bits of painted china, set before the
spluttering lights upon the drawers, bore witness to a provincial
intolerance of grime. The boards were bare, and marks of extreme
poverty distinguished the whole room. The destitution of her
surroundings accorded ill with the girl's spotless person and
well-tended hands, which were hanging tremulously down.
Subsequently I realised that these deserted beings must have first
fronted the world from a sumptuous stage. The details in proof of it I
need not cite. It must have been so.
My previous apathy gave place to an exaggerated observation. Even some
pieces of a torn letter, dropped off the quilt, I noticed, were of
fine texture, and inscribed by a man's hand. One fragment bore an
elaborate device in colours. It may have been a club crest or
coat-of-arms. I was trying to decide which, when the girl at length
gave a cry of exhaustion or relief, at the same time falling into a
similar attitude to that she had taken in the dim church. Her entire
frame became shaken with tearless agony or terror. It was sickening to
watch. She began partly to call or moan, begging me, since I was
beside her, wildly, and then with heart-breaking weariness, "to stop,
to stay." She half rose and claimed me with distracted grace. All her
movements were noticeably fine.
I pass no judgment on her features; suffering for the time assumed
them, and they made no insistence of individual claim.
I tried to raise her, and kneeling, pulled her reluctantly towards me.
The proximity was distasteful. An alien presence has ever repelled me.
I should have pitied the girl keenly perhaps a few more feet away. She
clung to me with ebbing force. Her heart throbbed painfully close to
mine, and when I meet now in the dark streets others who have been
robbed, as she has been, of their great possession, I have to remember
that.
The magnetism of our meeting was already passing; and, reason
asserting itself, I reviewed the incident dispassionately, as she lay
like a broken piece of mechanism in my arms. Her dark hair had come
unfastened and fell about my shoulder. A faint white streak of it
stole through the brown. A gleam of moonlight strays thus through a
dusky room. I remember noticing, as it was swept with her involuntary
motions across my face, a faint fragrance which kept recurring like a
subtle and seductive sprite, hiding itself with fairy cunning in the
tangled maze.
The poor girl's mind was clearly travelling a devious way. Broken and
incoherent exclamations told of a recently wrung promise, made to
whom, or of what nature, it was not my business to conjecture or
inquire.
I record the passage of a few minutes. At the first opportunity I
sought the slumberer on the bed. She slept well: hers was a long rest;
there might be no awakening from it, for she was dead. Schooled in one
short hour to all surprises, the knowledge made me simply richer by a
fact. Nothing about the sternly set face invited horror. It had been,
and was yet, a strong and, if beauty be not confined to youth and
colour, a beautiful face.
Perhaps this quiet sharer of the convulsively broken silence was
thirty years old. Death had set a firmness about the finely controlled
features that might have shown her younger. The actual years are of
little matter; existence, as we reckon time, must have lasted long. It
was not death, but life that had planted the look of disillusion
there. And romance being over, all good-byes to youth are said. By the
bedside, on a roughly constructed table, was a dearly bought bunch of
violets. They were set in a blue bordered tea-cup, and hung over in
wistful challenge of their own diviner hue. They were foreign, and
their scent probably unnatural, but it stole very sweetly round the
room. A book lay face downwards beside them--alas for parochial
energies, not of a religious type--and the torn fragments of the
destroyed letter had fallen on the black binding.
A passionate movement of the girl's breast against mine directed my
glance elsewhere. She was shivering, and her arms about my neck were
stiffly cold. The possibility that she was starving missed my mind. It
would have found my heart. I wondered if she slept, and dared not
stir, though I was by this time cramped and chilled. The vehemence of
her agitation ended, she breathed gently, and slipped finally to the
floor.
I began to face the need of action and recalled the chances of the
night. When and how I might get home was a necessary question, and I
listened vainly for a friendly step outside. None since we left it had
climbed the last flight of stairs. I could hear a momentary vibration
of men's voices in the room below. Was it possible to leave these
suddenly discovered children of peace and tumult? Was it possible to
stay?
This was Saturday, and two days later I was bound for Scotland; a
practical recollection of empty trunks was not lost in my survey of
the situation. Then how, if I decided not to forsake the poor child,
now certainly sleeping in my arms, were my anxious friends to learn my
whereabouts, and understand the eccentricity of the scheme?
Indisputably, I determined, something must be done for the
half-frantic wanderer who was pressing a tiring weight against me. And
there should be some kind hand to cover the cold limbs and close the
wide eyes of the breathless sleeper, waiting a comrade's sanction to
fitting rest.
Conclusion was hastening to impatient thought, when my eyes let fall a
fatal glance upon the dead girl's face. I do not think it had changed
its first aspect of dignified repose, and yet now it woke in me a
sensation of cold dread. The dark eyes unwillingly open reached mine
in an insistent stare. One hand lying out upon the coverlid, I could
never again mistake for that of temporarily suspended life. My watch
ticked loudly, but I dared not examine it, nor could I wrench my sight
from the figure on the bed. For the first time the empty shell of
being assailed my senses. I watched feverishly, knowing well the
madness of the action, for a hint of breathing, almost stopping my
own.
To-day, as memory summons it, I cannot dwell without reluctance on
this hour of my realisation of the thing called Death.
A hundred fancies, clothed in mad intolerable terrors, possessed me,
and had not my lips refused it outlet, I should have set free a cry,
as the spent child beside me had doubtless longed to do, and failed,
ere, desperate, she fled.
My gaze was chained; it could not get free. As the shapes of monsters
of ever varying and increasing dreadfulness flit through one's dreams,
the images of those I loved crept round me, with stark yet well-known
features, their limbs borrowing death's rigid outline, as they mocked
my recognition of them with soundless semblances of mirth. They began
to wind their arms about me in fierce embraces of burning and
supernatural life. Gradually the contact froze. They bound me in an
icy prison. Their hold relaxed. These creatures of my heart were
restless. The horribly familiar company began to dance at intervals in
and out a ring of white gigantic bedsteads, set on end like
tombstones, each of which framed a huge and fearful travesty of the
sad set face that was all the while seeking vainly a pitiless
stranger's care. They vanished. My heart went home. The dear place was
desolate. No echo of its many voices on the threshold or stair. My
footsteps made no sound as I went rapidly up to a well-known room.
Here I besought the mirror for the reassurance of my own reflection.
It denied me human portraiture and threw back cold glare. As I opened
mechanically a treasured book, I noticed the leaves were blank, not
even blurred by spot or line; and then I shivered--it was deadly cold.
The fire that but an hour or two ago it seemed I had forsaken for the
winter twilight, glowed with slow derision at my efforts to rekindle
heat. My hands plunged savagely into its red embers, but I drew them
out quickly, unscathed and clean. The things by which I had touched
life were nothing. Here, as I called the dearest names, their echoes
came back again with the sound of an unlearned language. I did not
recognise, and yet I framed them. What was had never been!
My spirit summoned the being who claimed mine. He came, stretching out
arms of deathless welcome. As he reached me my heart took flight. I
called aloud to it, but my cries were lost in awful laughter that
broke to my bewildered fancy from the hideously familiar shapes which
had returned and now encircled the grand form of him I loved. But I
had never known him. I beat my breast to wake there the wonted pain of
tingling joy. I called past experience with unavailing importunity to
bear witness the man was wildly dear to me. He was not. He left me
with bent head a stranger, whom I would not if I could recall.
For one brief second, reason found me. I struggled to shake off the
phantoms of despair. I tried to grasp while it yet lingered the
teaching of this never-to-be-forgotten front of death. The homeless
house with its indefensible bow window stood out from beneath the
prison walls again. What had this to do with it? I questioned. And the
answer it had evoked replied, "Not the desolation of something lost,
but of something that had never been."
The half-clad girl of the wretched picture-shop came into view with
waxen hands and senseless symbolism. I had grown calmer, but her
doll-like lips hissed out the same half-meaningless but pregnant
words. Then the nights of a short life when I could pray, years back
in magical childhood, sought me. They found me past them--without the
power.
Truly the body had been for me the manifestation of the thing called
soul. Here was my embodiment bereft. My face was stiff with drying
tears. Sickly I longed to beg of an unknown God a miracle. Would He
but touch the passive body and breathe into it the breath even of
transitory life.
I craved but a fleeting proof of its ever possible existence. For to
me it was not, would never be, and had never been.
The partially relinquished horror was renewing dominance. Speech of
any incoherence or futility would have brought mental power of
resistance. My mind was fast losing landmarks amid the continued quiet
of the living and the awful stillness of the dead. There was no sound,
even of savage guidance, I should not then have welcomed with glad
response.
"The realm of Silence," says one of the world's great teachers, "is
large enough beyond the grave."
I seemed to have passed life's portal, and my soul's small strength
was beating back the noiseless gate. In my extremity, I cried, "O God!
for man's most bloody warshout, or Thy whisper!" It was useless. Not
one dweller in the crowded tenements broke his slumber or relaxed his
labour in answer to the involuntary prayer.
And may the 'Day of Account of Words' take note of this! Then, says
the old fable, shall the soul of the departed be weighed against an
image of Truth. I tried to construct in imagination the form of the
dumb deity who should bear down the balances for me. Soundlessness was
turning fear to madness. I could neither quit nor longer bear company
the grim Presence in that room. But the supreme moment was very near.
Long since, the four low candles had burned out, and now the lamp was
struggling fitfully to keep alight. The flame could last but a few
moments. I saw it, and did not face the possibility of darkness. The
sleeping girl, I concluded rapidly, had used all available weapons of
defiant light.
As yet, since my entrance, I had hardly stirred, steadily supporting
the burden on my breast. Now, without remembrance of it, I started up
to escape. The violent suddenness of the action woke my companion. She
staggered blindly to her feet and confronted me as I gained the door.
Scarcely able to stand, and dashing the dimness from her eyes, she
clutched a corner of the drawers behind her for support. Her head
thrown back, and her dark hair hanging round it, crowned a grandly
tragic form. This was no poor pleader, and I was unarmed for fight.
She seized my throbbing arm and cried in a whisper, low and hoarse,
but strongly audible:
"For God's sake, stay here with me."
My lips moved vainly. I shook my head.
"For God in heaven's sake"--she repeated, swaying, and turning her
burning, reddened eyes on mine--"don't leave me now."
I stood irresolute, half stunned. Stepping back, she stooped and began
piecing together the dismembered letter on the bed. A mute protest
arrested her from a cold sister's face. She swept the action from her,
crying, "No!" and bending forward suddenly, gripped me with fierce
force.
"Here! Here!" she prayed, dragging me passionately back into the room.
The piteous need and wild entreaty--no, the vision of dire
anguish--was breaking my purpose of flight. A fragrance that was to
haunt me stole between us. The poor little violets put in their plea.
I moved to stay. Then a smile--the splendour of it may never be
reached again--touched her pale lips and broke through them,
transforming, with divine radiance, her young and blurred and
never-to-be-forgotten face. It wavered, or was it the last uncertain
flicker of the lamp that made me fancy it? The exquisite moment was
barely over when darkness came. Then light indeed forsook me. Almost
ignorant of my own intention, I resisted the now trembling figure,
indistinguishable in the gloom, but it still clung. I thrust it off me
with unnatural vigour.
She fell heavily to the ground. Without a pause of thought I stumbled
down the horrible unlighted stairs. A few steps before I reached the
bottom my foot struck a splint off the thin edge of one of the rotten
treads. I slipped, and heard a door above open and then shut. No other
sound. At length I was at the door. It was ajar. I opened it and
looked out. Since I passed through it first the place had become quite
deserted. The inhabitants were, I suppose, all occupied elsewhere at
such an hour on their holiday night. The lamps, if there were any, had
not been lit. The outlook was dense blackness. Here too the hideous
dark pursued me and silence held its sway. Even the children were
screaming in more enticing haunts of gaudy squalor. Some, whose good
angels perhaps had not forgotten them, had put themselves to sleep.
Not many hours ago their shrieks were deafening. Were these too in
conspiracy against me? I remembered vaguely hustling some of them with
unmeant harshness in my hurried progress from the Church. Dumb the
whole place seemed; and it was, but for the dim stars aloft, quite
dark. I dared not venture across the threshold, bound by pitiable
cowardice to the spot. Alas for the unconscious girl upstairs. A
murmur from within the house might have sent me back to her. Certainly
it would have sent me, rather than forth into the empty street. The
faintest indication of humanity had recalled me. I waited the summons
of a sound. It came.
But from the deserted, yet not so shamefully deserted, street. A man
staggering home by aid of friendly railings, set up a drunken song. At
the first note I rushed towards him, pushing past him in wild
departure, and on till I reached the noisome and flaring thoroughfare,
a haven where sweet safety smiled. Here I breathed joy, and sped away
without memory of the two lifeless beings lying alone in that shrouded
chamber of desolation, and with no instinct to return.
My sole impulse was flight; and the way, unmarked in the earlier
evening, was unknown. It took me some minutes to find a cab; but the
incongruous vehicle, rudely dispersing the haggling traders in the
roadway, came at last, and carried me from the distorted crowd of
faces and the claims of pity to peace.
I lay back shivering, and the wind crept through the rattling glass in
front of me. I did not note the incalculable turnings that took me
home.
My account of the night's adventure was abridged and unsensational. I
was pressed neither for detail nor comment, but accorded a somewhat
humorous welcome which bade me say farewell to dying horror, and even
let me mount boldly to the once death-haunted room.
Upon its threshold I stood and looked in, half believing possible the
greeting pictured there under the dead girl's influence, and I could
not enter. Again I fled, this time to kindly light, and heard my
brothers laughing noisily with a friend in the bright hall.
A waltz struck up in the room above as I reached them. I joined the
impromptu dance, and whirled the remainder of that evening gladly
away.
Physically wearied, I slept. My slumber had no break in it. I woke
only to the exquisite joys of morning, and lay watching the early
shadows creep into the room. Presently the sun rose. His first smile
greeted me from the glass before my bed. I sprang up disdainful of
that majestic reflection, and flung the window wide to meet him face
to face. His splendour fell too on one who had trusted me, but I
forgot it. Not many days later the same sunlight that turned my life
to laughter shone on the saddest scene of mortal ending, and, for one
I had forsaken, lit the ways of death. I never dreamed it might. For
the next morning the tragedy of the past night was a distant one, no
longer intolerable.
At twelve o'clock, conscience suggested a search. I acquiesced, but
did not move. At half-past, it insisted on one, and I obeyed. I set
forth with a determination of success and no clue to promise it. At
four o'clock, I admitted the task hopeless and abandoned it. Duty
could ask no more of me, I decided, not wholly dissatisfied that
failure forbade more difficult demands. As I passed it on my way home,
some dramatic instinct impelled me to re-enter the unsightly church.
I must almost have expected to see the same prostrate figure, for my
eyes instantly sought the corner it had occupied. The winter twilight
showed it empty. A service was about to begin. One little lad in
violet skirt and goffered linen was struggling to light the
benediction tapers, and a troop of school children pushed past me as I
stood facing the altar and blocking their way. A grey-clad sister of
mercy was arresting each tiny figure, bidding it pause beside me, and
with two firm hands on either shoulder, compelling a ludicrous
curtsey, and at the same time whispering the injunction to each
hurried little personage,-- "always make a reverence to the altar."
"Ada, come back!" and behold another unwilling bob! Perhaps the good
woman saw her Master's face behind the tinsel trappings and flaring
lights. But she forgot His words. The saying to these little ones that
has rung through centuries commanded liberty and not allegiance. I
stood aside till they had shuffled into seats, and finally kneeling
stayed till the brief spectacle of the afternoon was over.
Towards its close I looked away from the mumbling priest, whose
attention, divided between inconvenient millinery and the holiest
mysteries, was distracting mine.
Two girls holding each other's hands came in and stood in deep shadow
behind the farthest rows of high-backed chairs by the door. The
younger rolled her head from side to side; her shifting eyes and
ceaseless imbecile grimaces chilled my blood. The other, who stood
praying, turned suddenly (the place but for the flaring altar lights
was dark) and kissed the dreadful creature by her side. I shuddered,
and yet her face wore no look of loathing nor of pity. The expression
was a divine one of habitual love.
She wiped the idiot's lips and stroked the shaking hand in hers, to
quiet the sad hysterical caresses she would not check. It was a page
of gospel which the old man with his back to it might never read. A
sublime and ghastly scene.
Up in the little gallery the grey-habited nuns were singing a long
Latin hymn of many verses, with the refrain "Oh! Sacred Heart!" I
buried my face till the last vibrating chord of the accompaniment was
struck. The organist ventured a plagal cadence. It evoked no "amen." I
whispered one, and an accidentally touched note shrieked disapproval.
I repeated it. Then I spit upon the bloodless cheek of duty, and
renewed my quest. This time it was for the satisfaction of my own
tingling soul.
I retook my unknown way. The streets were almost empty and thinly
strewn with snow. It was still falling. I shrank from marring the
spotless page that seemed outspread to challenge and exhibit the
defiling print of man. The quiet of the muffled streets soothed me.
The neighbourhood seemed lulled into unwonted rest.
Black little figures lurched out of the white alleys in twos and
threes. But their childish utterances sounded less shrill than usual,
and sooner died away.
Now in desperate earnest I spared neither myself nor the incredulous
and dishevelled people whose aid I sought.
Fate deals honestly with all. She will not compromise though she may
delay. Hunger and weariness at length sent me home, with an assortment
of embellished negatives ringing in my failing ears.
* * * * *
I had almost forgotten my strange experience, when, some months
afterwards, in late spring, the wraith of that winter meeting appeared
to me. It was past six o'clock, and I had reached, ignorant of the
ill-chosen hour, a notorious thoroughfare in the western part of this
glorious and guilty city. The place presented to my unfamiliar eyes a
remarkable sight. Brilliantly lit windows, exhibiting dazzling wares,
threw into prominence the human mart.
This was thronged. I pressed into the crowd. Its steady and opposite
progress neither repelled nor sanctioned my admittance. However, I had
determined on a purchase, and was not to be baulked by the unforeseen.
I made it, and stood for a moment at the shop-door preparing to break
again through the rapidly thickening throng.
Up and down, decked in frigid allurement, paced the insatiate
daughters of an everlasting king. What fair messengers, with streaming
eyes and impotently craving arms, did they send afar off ere they thus
"increased their perfumes and debased themselves even unto hell"? This
was my question. I asked not who forsook them, speaking in farewell
the "hideous English of their fate."
I watched coldly, yet not inapprehensive or a certain grandeur in the
scene. It was Virtue's very splendid Dance of Death.
A sickening confusion of odours assailed my senses; each essence a
vile enticement, outraging Nature by a perversion of her own pure
spell.
A timidly protesting fragrance stole strangely by. I started at its
approach. It summoned a stinging memory. I stepped forward to escape
it, but stopped, confronted by the being who had shared, by the
flickering lamplight and in the presence of that silent witness, the
poor little violet's prayer.
The man beside her was decorated with a bunch of sister flowers to
those which had taken part against him, months ago, in vain. He could
have borne no better badge of victory. He was looking at some
extravagant trifle in the window next the entry I had just crossed.
They spoke, comparing it with a silver case he turned over in his
hand. In the centre I noticed a tiny enamelled shield. The detail
seemed familiar, but beyond identity. They entered the shop. I stood
motionless, challenging memory, till it produced from some dim corner
of my brain a hoarded "No."
The device now headed a poor strip of paper on a dead girl's bed. I
saw a figure set by death, facing starvation, and with ruin in torn
fragments in her hand. But what place in the scene had I? A brief
discussion next me made swift answer.
They were once more beside me. The man was speaking: his companion
raised her face; I recognised its outline,--its true aspect I shall
not know. Four months since it wore the mask of sorrow; it was now but
one of the pages of man's immortal book. I was conscious of the
matchless motions which in the dim church had first attracted me.