The old words sounded in his ears like the ending of a chant, and he
heard the music’s close. Once only in his weary hapless life, once the
world had passed away, and he had known her, the dear, dear Annie, the
symbol of all mystic womanhood.
The heaviness of languor still oppressed him, holding him back amongst
these old memories, so that he could not stir from his place. Oddly,
there seemed something unaccustomed about the darkness of the room, as
if the shadows he had summoned had changed the aspect of the walls. He
was conscious that on this night he was not altogether himself;
fatigue, and the weariness of sleep, and the waking vision had
perplexed him. He remembered how once or twice when he was a little boy
startled by an uneasy dream, and had stared with a frightened gaze into
nothingness, not knowing where he was, all trembling, and breathing
quick, till he touched the rail of his bed, and the familiar outlines
of the looking-glass and the chiffonier began to glimmer out of the
gloom. So now he touched the pile of manuscript and the desk at which
he had worked so many hours, and felt reassured, though he smiled at
himself, and he felt the old childish dread, the longing to cry out for
some one to bring a candle, and show him that he really was in his own
room. He glanced up for an instant, expecting to see perhaps the
glitter of the brass gas jet that was fixed on the wall, just beside
his bureau, but it was too dark, and he could not rouse himself and
make the effort that would drive the cloud and the muttering thoughts
away.
He leant back again, picturing the wet street without, the rain driving
like fountain spray about the gas lamp, the shrilling of the wind on
those waste places to the north. It was strange how in the brick and
stucco desert where no trees were, he all the time imagined the noise
of tossing boughs, the grinding of the boughs together. There was a
great storm and tumult in this wilderness of London, and for the sound
of the rain and the wind he could not hear the hum and jangle of the
trams, and the jar and shriek of the garden gates as they opened and
shut. But he could imagine his street, the rain-swept desolate curve of
it, as it turned northward, and beyond the empty suburban roads, the
twinkling villa windows, the ruined field, the broken lane, and then
yet another suburb rising, a solitary gas-lamp glimmering at a corner,
and the plane tree lashing its boughs, and driving great showers
against the glass.
It was wonderful to think of. For when these remote roads were ended
one dipped down the hill into the open country, into the dim world
beyond the glint of friendly fires. Tonight, how waste they were, these
wet roads, edged with the red-brick houses, with shrubs whipped by the
wind against one another, against the paling and the wall. There the
wind swayed the great elms scattered on the sidewalk, the remnants of
the old stately fields, and beneath each tree was a pool of wet, and a
torment of raindrops fell with every gust. And one passed through the
red avenues, perhaps by a little settlement of flickering shops, and
passed the last sentinel wavering lamp, and the road became a ragged
lane, and the storm screamed from hedge to hedge across the open
fields. And then, beyond, one touched again upon a still remoter
avant-garde of London, an island amidst the darkness, surrounded by its
pale of twinkling, starry lights.
He remembered his wanderings amongst these outposts of the town, and
thought how desolate all their ways must be tonight. They were solitary
in wet and wind, and only at long intervals some one pattered and
hurried along them, bending his eyes down to escape the drift of rain.
Within the villas, behind the close-drawn curtains, they drew about the
fire, and wondered at the violence of the storm, listening for each
great gust as it gathered far away, and rocked the trees, and at last
rushed with a huge shock against their walls as if it were the coming
of the sea. He thought of himself walking, as he had often walked, from
lamp to lamp on such a night, treasuring his lonely thoughts, and
weighing the hard task awaiting him in his room. Often in the evening,
after a long day’s labour, he had thrown down his pen in utter
listlessness, feeling that he could struggle no more with ideas and
words, and he had gone out into driving rain and darkness, seeking the
word of the enigma as he tramped on and on beneath these outer
battlements of London.
Or on some grey afternoon in March or November he had sickened of the
dull monotony and the stagnant life that he saw from his window, and
had taken his design with him to the lonely places, halting now and
again by a gate, and pausing in the shelter of a hedge through which
the austere wind shivered, while, perhaps, he dreamed of Sicily, or of
sunlight on the Provençal olives. Often as he strayed solitary from
street to field, and passed the Syrian fig tree imprisoned in Britain,
nailed to an ungenial wall, the solution of the puzzle became evident,
and he laughed and hurried home eager to make the page speak, to note
the song he had heard on his way.
Sometimes he had spent many hours treading this edge and brim of
London, now lost amidst the dun fields, watching the bushes shaken by
the wind, and now looking down from a height whence he could see the
dim waves of the town, and a barbaric water tower rising from a hill,
and the snuff-coloured cloud of smoke that seemed blown up from the
streets into the sky.
There were certain ways and places that he had cherished; he loved a
great old common that stood on high ground, curtained about with
ancient spacious houses of red brick, and their cedarn gardens. And
there was on the road that led to this common a space of ragged uneven
ground with a pool and a twisted oak, and here he had often stayed in
autumn and looked across the mist and the valley at the great theatre
of the sunset, where a red cloud like a charging knight shone and
conquered a purple dragon shape, and golden lances glittered in a field
of faerie green.
Or sometimes, when the unending prospect of trim, monotonous, modern
streets had wearied him, he had found an immense refreshment in the
discovery of a forgotten hamlet, left in a hollow, while all new London
pressed and surged on every side, threatening the rest of the red roofs
with its vulgar growth. These little peaceful houses, huddled together
beneath the shelter of trees, with their bulging leaded windows and
uneven roofs, somehow brought back to him the sense of the country, and
soothed him with the thought of the old farm-houses, white or grey, the
homes of quiet lives, harbors where, perhaps, no tormenting thoughts
ever broke in.
For he had instinctively determined that there was neither rest nor
health in all the arid waste of streets about him. It seemed as if in
those dull rows of dwellings, in the prim new villas, red and white and
staring, there must be a leaven working which transformed all to base
vulgarity. Beneath the dull sad slates, behind the blistered doors,
love turned to squalid intrigue, mirth to drunken clamor, and the
mystery of life became a common thing; religion was sought for in the
greasy piety and flatulent oratory of the Independent chapel, the
stuccoed nightmare of the Doric columns. Nothing fine, nothing rare,
nothing exquisite, it seemed, could exist in the weltering suburban
sea, in the habitations which had risen from the stench and slime of
the brickfields. It was as if the sickening fumes that steamed from the
burning bricks had been sublimed into the shape of houses, and those
who lived in these grey places could also claim kinship with the putrid
mud.
Hence he had delighted in the few remains of the past that he could
find still surviving on the suburb’s edge, in the grave old houses that
stood apart from the road, in the mouldering taverns of the eighteenth
century, in the huddled hamlets that had preserved only the glow and
the sunlight of all the years that had passed over them. It appeared to
him that vulgarity and greasiness and squalor had come with a flood,
that not only the good but also the evil in man’s heart had been made
common and ugly, that a sordid scum was mingled with all the springs,
of death as of life. It would be alike futile to search amongst these
mean two-storied houses for a splendid sinner as for a splendid saint;
the very vices of these people smelt of cabbage water and a pothouse
vomit.
And so he had often fled away from the serried maze that encircled him,
seeking for the old and worn and significant as an antiquary looks for
the fragments of the Roman temple amidst the modern shops. In some way
the gusts of wind and the beating rain of the night reminded him of an
old house that had often attracted him with a strange indefinable
curiosity. He had found it on a grim grey day in March, when he had
gone out under a leaden-moulded sky, cowering from a dry freezing wind
that brought with it the gloom and the doom of far unhappy Siberian
plains. More than ever that day the suburb had oppressed him;
insignificant, detestable, repulsive to body and mind, it was the only
hell that a vulgar age could conceive or make, an inferno created not
by Dante but by the jerry-builder. He had gone out to the north, and
when he lifted up his eyes again he found that he had chanced to turn
up by one of the little lanes that still strayed across the broken
fields. He had never chosen this path before because the lane at its
outlet was so wholly degraded and offensive, littered with rusty tins
and broken crockery, and hedged in with a paling fashioned out of
scraps of wire, rotting timber, and bending worn-out rails. But on this
day, by happy chance, he had fled from the high road by the first
opening that offered, and he no longer groped his way amongst obscene
refuse, sickened by the bloated bodies of dead dogs, and fetid odours
from unclean decay, but the malpassage had become a peaceful winding
lane, with warm shelter beneath its banks from the dismal wind. For a
mile he had walked quietly, and then a turn in the road showed him a
little glen or hollow, watered by such a tiny rushing brooklet as his
own woods knew, and beyond, alas, the glaring foreguard of a “new
neighborhood”; raw red villas, semi-detached, and then a row of
lamentable shops.
But as he was about to turn back, in the hope of finding some other
outlet, his attention was charmed by a small house that stood back a
little from the road on his right hand. There had been a white gate,
but the paint had long faded to grey and black, and the wood crumbled
under the touch, and only moss marked out the lines of the drive. The
iron railing round the lawn had fallen, and the poor flower-beds were
choked with grass and a faded growth of weeds. But here and there a
rosebush lingered amidst suckers that had sprung grossly from the root,
and on each side of the hall door were box trees, untrimmed, ragged,
but still green. The slate roof was all stained and livid, blotched
with the drippings of a great elm that stood at one corner of the
neglected lawn, and marks of damp and decay were thick on the uneven
walls, which had been washed yellow many years before. There was a
porch of trellis work before the door, and Lucian had seen it rock in
the wind, swaying as if every gust must drive it down. There were two
windows on the ground floor, one on each side of the door, and two
above, with a blind space where a central window had been blocked up.
This poor and desolate house had fascinated him. Ancient and poor and
fallen, disfigured by the slate roof and the yellow wash that had
replaced the old mellow dipping tiles and the warm red walls, and
disfigured again by spots and patches of decay; it seemed as if its
happy days were for ever ended. To Lucian it appealed with a sense of
doom and horror; the black streaks that crept upon the walls, and the
green drift upon the roof, appeared not so much the work of foul
weather and dripping boughs, as the outward signs of evil working and
creeping in the lives of those within.
The stage seemed to him decked for doom, painted with the symbols of
tragedy; and he wondered as he looked whether any one were so unhappy
as to live there still. There were torn blinds in the windows, but he
had asked himself who could be so brave as to sit in that room,
darkened by the dreary box, and listen of winter nights to the rain
upon the window, and the moaning of wind amongst the tossing boughs
that beat against the roof.
He could not imagine that any chamber in such a house was habitable.
Here the dead had lain, through the white blind the thin light had
filtered on the rigid mouth, and still the floor must be wet with tears
and still that great rocking elm echoed the groaning and the sobs of
those who watched. No doubt, the damp was rising, and the odour of the
earth filled the house, and made such as entered draw back, foreseeing
the hour of death.
Often the thought of this strange old house had haunted him; he had
imagined the empty rooms where a heavy paper peeled from the walls and
hung in dark strips; and he could not believe that a light ever shone
from those windows that stared black and glittering on the neglected
lawn. But tonight the wet and the storm seemed curiously to bring the
image of the place before him, and as the wind sounded he thought how
unhappy those must be, if any there were, who sat in the musty chambers
by a flickering light, and listened to the elm-tree moaning and beating
and weeping on the walls.
And tonight was Saturday night; and there was about that phrase
something that muttered of the condemned cell, of the agony of a doomed
man. Ghastly to his eyes was the conception of any one sitting in that
room to the right of the door behind the larger box tree, where the
wall was cracked above the window and smeared with a black stain in an
ugly shape.
He knew how foolish it had been in the first place to trouble his mind
with such conceits of a dreary cottage on the outskirts of London. And
it was more foolish now to meditate these things, fantasies, feigned
forms, the issue of a sad mood and a bleak day of spring. For soon, in
a few moments, he was to rise to a new life. He was but reckoning up
the account of his past, and when the light came he was to think no
more of sorrow and heaviness, of real or imagined terrors. He had
stayed too long in London, and he would once more taste the breath of
the hills, and see the river winding in the long lovely valley; ah! he
would go home.
Something like a thrill, the thrill of fear, passed over him as he
remembered that there was no home. It was in the winter, a year and a
half after his arrival in town, that he had suffered the loss of his
father. He lay for many days prostrate, overwhelmed with sorrow and
with the thought that now indeed he was utterly alone in the world.
Miss Deacon was to live with another cousin in Yorkshire; the old home
was at last ended and done. He felt sorry that he had not written more
frequently to his father: there were things in his cousin’s letters
that had made his heart sore. “Your poor father was always looking for
your letters,” she wrote, “they used to cheer him so much. He nearly
broke down when you sent him that money last Christmas; he got it into
his head that you were starving yourself to send it to him. He was
hoping so much that you would have come down this Christmas, and kept
asking me about the plum-puddings months ago.”
It was not only his father that had died, but with him the last strong
link was broken, and the past life, the days of his boyhood, grew faint
as a dream. With his father his mother died again, and the long years
died, the time of his innocence, the memory of affection. He was sorry
that his letters had gone home so rarely; it hurt him to imagine his
father looking out when the post came in the morning, and forced to be
sad because there was nothing. But he had never thought that his father
valued the few lines that he wrote, and indeed it was often difficult
to know what to say. It would have been useless to write of those
agonizing nights when the pen seemed an awkward and outlandish
instrument, when every effort ended in shameful defeat, or of the
happier hours when at last wonder appeared and the line glowed, crowned
and exalted. To poor Mr. Taylor such tales would have seemed but
trivial histories of some Oriental game, like an odd story from a land
where men have time for the infinitely little, and can seriously make a
science of arranging blossoms in a jar, and discuss perfumes instead of
politics. It would have been useless to write to the rectory of his
only interest, and so he wrote seldom.
And then he had been sorry because he could never write again and never
see his home. He had wondered whether he would have gone down to the
old place at Christmas, if his father had lived. It was curious how
common things evoked the bitterest griefs, but his father’s anxiety
that the plum-pudding should be good, and ready for him, had brought
the tears into his eyes. He could hear him saying in a nervous voice
that attempted to be cheerful: “I suppose you will be thinking of the
Christmas puddings soon, Jane; you remember how fond Lucian used to be
of plum-pudding. I hope we shall see him this December.” No doubt poor
Miss Deacon paled with rage at the suggestion that she should make
Christmas pudding in July; and returned a sharp answer; but it was
pathetic. The wind wailed, and the rain dashed and beat again and again
upon the window. He imagined that all his thoughts of home, of the old
rectory amongst the elms, had conjured into his mind the sound of the
storm upon the trees, for, tonight, very clearly he heard the creaking
of the boughs, the noise of boughs moaning and beating and weeping on
the walls, and even a pattering of wet, on wet earth, as if there were
a shrub near the window that shook off the raindrops, before the gust.
That thrill, as it were a shudder of fear, passed over him again, and
he knew not what had made him afraid. There was some dark shadow on
his mind that saddened him, it seemed as if a vague memory of terrible
days hung like a cloud over his thought, but it was all indefinite,
perhaps the last grim and ragged edge of the melancholy wrack that had
swelled over his life and the bygone years. He shivered and tried to
rouse himself and drive away the sense of dread and shame that seemed
so real and so awful, and yet he could not grasp it. But the torpor of
sleep, the burden of the work that he had ended a few hours before,
still weighed down his limb and bound his thoughts. He could scarcely
believe that he had been busy at his desk a little while ago, and that
just before the winter day closed in and the rain began to fall he had
laid down the pen with a sigh of relief, and had slept in his chair. It
was rather as if he had slumbered deeply through a long and weary
night, as if an awful vision of flame and darkness and the worm that
dieth not had come to him sleeping. But he would dwell no more on the
darkness; he went back to the early days in London when he had said
farewell to the hills and to the waterpools, and had set to work in
this little room in the dingy street.
How he had toiled and laboured at the desk before him! He had put away
the old wild hopes of the masterpiece conceived and executed in a fury
of inspiration, wrought out in one white heat of creative joy; it was
enough if by dint of long perseverance and singleness of desire he
could at last, in pain and agony and despair, after failure and
disappointment and effort constantly renewed, fashion something of
which he need not be ashamed. He had put himself to school again, and
had, with what patience he could command, ground his teeth into the
rudiments, resolved that at last he would test out the heart of the
mystery. They were good nights to remember, these; he was glad to think
of the little ugly room, with its silly wall-paper and its “bird’s-eye”
furniture, lighted up, while he sat at the bureau and wrote on into the
cold stillness of the London morning, when the flickering lamplight and
the daystar shone together. It was an interminable labour, and he had
always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy. The gold, the great and
glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead ashes and
smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the
interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious
things.
These were the good nights that he could look back on without any fear
or shame, when he had been happy and content on a diet of bread and tea
and tobacco, and could hear of some imbecility passing into its
hundredth thousand, and laugh cheerfully—if only that last page had
been imagined aright, if the phrases noted in the still hours rang out
their music when he read them in the morning. He remembered the
drolleries and fantasies that the worthy Miss Deacon used to write to
him, and how he had grinned at her words of reproof, admonition, and
advice. She had once instigated Dolly _fils_ to pay him a visit, and
that young prop of respectability had talked about the extraordinary
running of Bolter at the Scurragh meeting in Ireland; and then,
glancing at Lucian’s books, had inquired whether any of them had “warm
bits.” He had been kind though patronizing, and seemed to have moved
freely in the most brilliant society of Stoke Newington. He had not
been able to give any information as to the present condition of Edgar
Allan Poe’s old school. It appeared eventually that his report at home
had not been a very favorable one, for no invitation to high tea had
followed, as Miss Deacon had hoped. The Dollys knew many nice people,
who were well off, and Lucian’s cousin, as she afterwards said, had
done _her_ best to introduce him to the _beau monde_ of those northern
suburbs.
But after the visit of the young Dolly, with what joy he had returned
to the treasures which he had concealed from profane eyes. He had
looked out and seen his visitor on board the tram at the street corner,
and he laughed out loud, and locked his door. There had been moments
when he was lonely, and wished to hear again the sound of friendly
speech, but, after such an irruption of suburban futility, it was a
keen delight, to feel that he was secure on his tower, that he could
absorb himself in his wonderful task as safe and silent as if he were
in mid-desert.
But there was one period that he dared not revive; he could not bear to
think of those weeks of desolation and terror in the winter after his
coming to London. His mind was sluggish, and he could not quite
remember how many years had passed since that dismal experience; it
sounded all an old story, but yet it was still vivid, a flaming scroll
of terror from which he turned his eyes away. One awful scene glowed
into his memory, and he could not shut out the sight of an orgy, of
dusky figures whirling in a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing in
the darkness, of great glittering lamps, like infernal thuribles, very
slowly swaying in a violent blast of air. And there was something else,
something which he could not remember, but it filled him with terror,
but it slunk in the dark places of his soul, as a wild beast crouches
in the depths of a cave.
Again, and without reason, he began to image to himself that old
mouldering house in the field. With what a loud incessant noise the
wind must be clamoring about on this fearful night, how the great elm
swayed and cried in the storm, and the rain dashed and pattered on the
windows, and dripped on the sodden earth from the shaking shrubs beside
the door. He moved uneasily on his chair, and struggled to put the
picture out of his thoughts; but in spite of himself he saw the stained
uneven walls, that ugly blot of mildew above the window, and perhaps a
feeble gleam of light filtered through the blind, and some one, unhappy
above all and for ever lost, sat within the dismal room. Or rather,
every window was black, without a glimmer of hope, and he who was shut
in thick darkness heard the wind and the rain, and the noise of the
elm-tree moaning and beating and weeping on the walls.
For all his effort the impression would not leave him, and as he sat
before his desk looking into the vague darkness he could almost see
that chamber which he had so often imagined; the low whitewashed
ceiling held up by a heavy beam, the smears of smoke and long usage,
the cracks and fissures of the plaster. Old furniture, shabby,
deplorable, battered, stood about the room; there was a horsehair sofa
worn and tottering, and a dismal paper, patterned in a livid red,
blackened and mouldered near the floor, and peeled off and hung in
strips from the dank walls. And there was that odour of decay, of the
rank soil steaming, of rotting wood, a vapor that choked the breath and
made the heart full of fear and heaviness.
Lucian again shivered with a thrill of dread; he was afraid that he had
overworked himself and that he was suffering from the first symptoms of
grave illness. His mind dwelt on confused and terrible recollections,
and with a mad ingenuity gave form and substance to phantoms; and even
now he drew a long breath, almost imagining that the air in his room
was heavy and noisome, that it entered his nostrils with some taint of
the crypt. And his body was still languid, and though he made a half
motion to rise he could not find enough energy for the effort, and he
sank again into the chair. At all events, he would think no more of
that sad house in the field; he would return to those long struggles
with letters, to the happy nights when he had gained victories.
He remembered something of his escape from the desolation and the worse
than desolation that had obsessed him during that first winter in
London. He had gone free one bleak morning in February, and after those
dreary terrible weeks the desk and the heap and litter of papers had
once more engulfed and absorbed him. And in the succeeding summer, of a
night when he lay awake and listened to the birds, shining images came
wantonly to him. For an hour, while the dawn brightened, he had felt
the presence of an age, the resurrection of the life that the green
fields had hidden, and his heart stirred for joy when he knew that he
held and possessed all the loveliness that had so long mouldered. He
could scarcely fall asleep for eager and leaping thoughts, and as soon
as his breakfast was over he went out and bought paper and pens of a
certain celestial stationer in Notting Hill. The street was not changed
as he passed to and fro on his errand. The rattling wagons jostled by
at intervals, a rare hansom came spinning down from London, there
sounded the same hum and jangle of the gliding trams. The languid life
of the pavement was unaltered; a few people, un-classed, without
salience or possible description, lounged and walked from east to west,
and from west to east, or slowly dropped into the byways to wander in
the black waste to the north, or perhaps go astray in the systems that
stretched towards the river. He glanced down these by-roads as he
passed, and was astonished, as always, at their mysterious and desert
aspect. Some were utterly empty; lines of neat, appalling residences,
trim and garnished as if for occupation, edging the white glaring road;
and not a soul was abroad, and not a sound broke their stillness. It
was a picture of the desolation of midnight lighted up, but empty and
waste as the most profound and solemn hours before the day. Other of
these by-roads, of older settlement, were furnished with more important
houses, standing far back from the pavement, each in a little wood of
greenery, and thus one might look down as through a forest vista, and
see a way smooth and guarded with low walls and yet untrodden, and all
a leafy silence. Here and there in some of these echoing roads a figure
seemed lazily advancing in the distance, hesitating and delaying, as if
lost in the labyrinth. It was difficult to say which were the more
dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or
the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the
latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who traveled by it
were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain
and misty shapes that come and go across the desert in an Eastern tale,
when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in
silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and repassed each
other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his
own secret, and wrapped in obscurity. One might have sworn that not a
man saw his neighbor who met him or jostled him, that here every one
was a phantom for the other, though the lines of their paths crossed
and recrossed, and their eyes stared like the eyes of live men. When
two went by together, they mumbled and cast distrustful glances behind
them as though afraid all the world was an enemy, and the pattering of
feet was like the noise of a shower of rain. Curious appearances and
simulations of life gathered at points in the road, for at intervals
the villas ended and shops began in a dismal row, and looked so
hopeless that one wondered who could buy. There were women fluttering
uneasily about the greengrocers, and shabby things in rusty black
touched and retouched the red lumps that an unshaven butcher offered,
and already in the corner public there was a confused noise, with a
tossing of voices that rose and fell like a Jewish chant, with the
senseless stir of marionettes jerked into an imitation of gaiety. Then,
in crossing a side street that seemed like grey mid-winter in stone, he
trespassed from one world to another, for an old decayed house amidst
its garden held the opposite corner. The laurels had grown into black
skeletons, patched with green drift, the ilex gloomed over the porch,
the deodar had blighted the flower-beds. Dark ivies swarmed over an
elm-tree, and a brown clustering fungus sprang in gross masses on the
lawn, showing where the roots of dead trees mouldered. The blue
verandah, the blue balcony over the door, had faded to grey, and the
stucco was blotched with ugly marks of weather, and a dank smell of
decay, that vapor of black rotten earth in old town gardens, hung heavy
about the gates. And then a row of musty villas had pushed out in shops
to the pavement, and the things in faded black buzzed and stirred about
the limp cabbages, and the red lumps of meat.
It was the same terrible street, whose pavements he had trodden so
often, where sunshine seemed but a gaudy light, where the fume of
burning bricks always drifted. On black winter nights he had seen the
sparse lights glimmering through the rain and drawing close together,
as the dreary road vanished in long perspective. Perhaps this was its
most appropriate moment, when nothing of its smug villas and skeleton
shops remained but the bright patches of their windows, when the old
house amongst its mouldering shrubs was but a dark cloud, and the
streets to the north and south seemed like starry wastes, beyond them
the blackness of infinity. Always in the daylight it had been to him
abhorred and abominable, and its grey houses and purlieus had been
fungus-like sproutings, an efflorescence of horrible decay.
But on that bright morning neither the dreadful street nor those who
moved about it appalled him. He returned joyously to his den, and
reverently laid out the paper on his desk. The world about him was but
a grey shadow hovering on a shining wall; its noises were faint as the
rustling of trees in a distant wood. The lovely and exquisite forms of
those who served the Amber Venus were his distinct, clear, and manifest
visions, and for one amongst them who came to him in a fire of bronze
hair his heart stirred with the adoration of love. She it was who stood
forth from all the rest and fell down prostrate before the radiant form
in amber, drawing out her pins in curious gold, her glowing brooches of
enamel, and pouring from a silver box all her treasures of jewels and
precious stones, chrysoberyl and sardonyx, opal and diamond, topaz and
pearl. And then she stripped from her body her precious robes and stood
before the goddess in the glowing mist of her hair, praying that to her
who had given all and came naked to the shrine, love might be given,
and the grace of Venus. And when at last, after strange adventures, her
prayer was granted, then when the sweet light came from the sea, and
her lover turned at dawn to that bronze glory, he saw beside him a
little statuette of amber. And in the shrine, far in Britain where the
black rains stained the marble, they found the splendid and sumptuous
statue of the Golden Venus, the last fine robe of silk that the lady
had dedicated falling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at her
feet. And her face was like the lady’s face when the sun had brightened
it on that day of her devotion.
The bronze mist glimmered before Lucian’s eyes; he felt as though the
soft floating hair touched his forehead and his lips and his hands. The
fume of burning bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never reached his
nostrils that were filled with the perfume of rare unguents, with the
breath of the violet sea in Italy. His pleasure was an inebriation, an
ecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile Hottentot kraals and mud
avenues as with one white lightning flash, and through the hours of
that day he sat enthralled, not contriving a story with patient art,
but rapt into another time, and entranced by the urgent gleam in the
lady’s eyes.
The little tale of _The Amber Statuette_ had at last issued from a
humble office in the spring after his father’s death. The author was
utterly unknown; the author’s Murray was a wholesale stationer and
printer in process of development, so that Lucian was astonished when
the book became a moderate success. The reviewers had been sadly
irritated, and even now he recollected with cheerfulness an article in
an influential daily paper, an article pleasantly headed: “Where are
the disinfectants?”
And then—but all the months afterwards seemed doubtful, there were only
broken revelations of the labourious hours renewed, and the white
nights when he had seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight grow wan at
the approach of dawn.
He listened. Surely that was the sound of rain falling on sodden
ground, the heavy sound of great swollen drops driven down from wet
leaves by the gust of wind, and then again the strain of boughs sang
above the tumult of the air; there was a doleful noise as if the storm
shook the masts of a ship. He had only to get up and look out of the
window and he would see the treeless empty street, and the rain
starring the puddles under the gas-lamp, but he would wait a little
while.
He tried to think why, in spite of all his resolutions, a dark horror
seemed to brood more and more over all his mind. How often he had sat
and worked on just such nights as this, contented if the words were in
accord though the wind might wail, though the air were black with rain.
Even about the little book that he had made there seemed some taint,
some shuddering memory that came to him across the gulf of
forgetfulness. Somehow the remembrance of the offering to Venus, of the
phrases that he had so lovingly invented, brought back again the dusky
figures that danced in the orgy, beneath the brassy glittering lamps;
and again the naphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in the
fields, and the red glare lit up the mildewed walls and the black
hopeless windows. He gasped for breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air
that reeked of decay and rottenness, and the odour of the clay was in
his nostrils.
That unknown cloud that had darkened his thoughts grew blacker and
engulfed him, despair was heavy upon him, his heart fainted with a
horrible dread. In a moment, it seemed, a veil would be drawn away and
certain awful things would appear.
He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not. Deep,
deep the darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away. The
Roman fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a
ring, and behind them a glow and heat of fire. There were hideous
shapes that swarmed in the thicket of the oaks; they called and
beckoned to him, and rose into the air, into the flame that was smitten
from heaven about the walls. And amongst them was the form of the
beloved, but jets of flame issued from her breasts, and beside her was
a horrible old woman, naked; and they, too, summoned him to mount the
hill.
He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been
found in old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage, obscene figures, and unknown
contrivances. She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.
He fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewildered
him. All his life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the
common world he had fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his
eyes. Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide
one from the other. He had let Annie drink his soul beneath the hill,
on the night when the moonfire shone, but he had not surely seen her
exalted in the flame, the Queen of the Sabbath. Dimly he remembered Dr.
Burrows coming to see him in London, but had he not imagined all the
rest?
Again he found himself in the dusky lane, and Annie floated down to him
from the moon above the hill. His head sank upon her breast again, but,
alas, it was aflame. And he looked down, and he saw that his own flesh
was aflame, and he knew that the fire could never be quenched.
There was a heavy weight upon his head, his feet were nailed to the
floor, and his arms bound tight beside him. He seemed to himself to
rage and struggle with the strength of a madman; but his hand only
stirred and quivered a little as it lay upon the desk.
Again he was astray in the mist; wandering through the waste avenues of
a city that had been ruined from ages. It had been splendid as Rome,
terrible as Babylon, and for ever the darkness had covered it, and it
lay desolate for ever in the accursed plain. And far and far the grey
passages stretched into the night, into the icy fields, into the place
of eternal gloom.
Ring within ring the awful temple closed around him; unending circles
of vast stones, circle within circle, and every circle less throughout
all ages. In the center was the sanctuary of the infernal rite, and he
was borne thither as in the eddies of a whirlpool, to consummate his
ruin, to celebrate the wedding of the Sabbath. He flung up his arms and
beat the air, resisting with all his strength, with muscles that could
throw down mountains; and this time his little finger stirred for an
instant, and his foot twitched upon the floor.
Then suddenly a flaring street shone before him. There was darkness
round about him, but it flamed with hissing jets of light and naphtha
fires, and great glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a violent blast
of air. A horrible music, and the exultation of discordant voices,
swelled in his ears, and he saw an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky
figures that circled and leapt before him. There was a noise like the
chant of the lost, and then there appeared in the midst of the orgy,
beneath a red flame, the figure of a woman. Her bronze hair and flushed
cheeks were illuminate, and an argent light shone from her eyes, and
with a smile that froze his heart her lips opened to speak to him. The
tossing crowd faded away, falling into a gulf of darkness, and then she
drew out from her hair pins of curious gold, and glowing brooches in
enamel, and poured out jewels before him from a silver box, and then
she stripped from her body her precious robes, and stood in the glowing
mist of her hair, and held out her arms to him. But he raised his eyes
and saw the mould and decay gaining on the walls of a dismal room, and
a gloomy paper was dropping to the rotting floor. A vapor of the grave
entered his nostrils, and he cried out with a loud scream; but there
was only an indistinct guttural murmur in his throat.
And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her. She
fled away before him through midnight country, and he followed after
her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And at
last he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went
up to celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath. They were within
the matted thicket, and they writhed in the flames, insatiable, for
ever. They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of
thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like
a black smoke.
Without, the storm swelled to the roaring of an awful sea, the wind
grew to a shrill long scream, the elm-tree was riven and split with the
crash of a thunderclap. To Lucian the tumult and the shock came as a
gentle murmur, as if a brake stirred before a sudden breeze in summer.
And then a vast silence overwhelmed him.
A few minutes later there was a shuffling of feet in the passage, and
the door was softly opened. A woman came in, holding a light, and she
peered curiously at the figure sitting quite still in the chair before
the desk. The woman was half dressed, and she had let her splendid
bronze hair flow down, her cheeks were flushed, and as she advanced
into the shabby room, the lamp she carried cast quaking shadows on the
mouldering paper, patched with marks of rising damp, and hanging in
strips from the wet, dripping wall. The blind had not been drawn, but
no light or glimmer of light filtered through the window, for a great
straggling box tree that beat the rain upon the panes shut out even the
night. The woman came softly, and as she bent down over Lucian an
argent gleam shone from her brown eyes, and the little curls upon her
neck were like golden work upon marble. She put her hand to his heart,
and looked up, and beckoned to some one who was waiting by the door.
“Come in, Joe,” she said. “It’s just as I thought it would be: ‘Death
by misadventure’;” and she held up a little empty bottle of dark blue
glass that was standing on the desk. “He would take it, and I always
knew he would take a drop too much one of these days.”
“What’s all those papers that he’s got there?”
“Didn’t I tell you? It was crool to see him. He got it into ’is ’ead he
could write a book; he’s been at it for the last six months. Look
’ere.”
She spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and
took a sheet at haphazard. It was all covered with illegible hopeless
scribblings; only here and there it was possible to recognize a word.
“Why, nobody could read it, if they wanted to.”
“It’s all like that. He thought it was beautiful. I used to ’ear him
jabbering to himself about it, dreadful nonsense it was he used to
talk. I did my best to tongue him out of it, but it wasn’t any good.”
“He must have been a bit dotty. He’s left you everything.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to see about the funeral.”
“There’ll be the inquest and all that first.”
“You’ve got evidence to show he took the stuff.”
“Yes, to be sure I have. The doctor told him he would be certain to do
for himself, and he was found two or three times quite silly in the
streets. They had to drag him away from a house in Halden Road. He was
carrying on dreadful, shaking at the gaite, and calling out it was ’is
’ome and they wouldn’t let him in. I heard Dr. Manning myself tell ’im
in this very room that he’d kill ’imself one of these days. Joe! Aren’t
you ashamed of yourself. I declare you’re quite rude, and it’s almost
Sunday too. Bring the light over here, can’t you?”
The man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and set it on the desk,
beside the scattered heap of that terrible manuscript. The flaring
light shone through the dead eyes into the dying brain, and there was a
glow within, as if great furnace doors were opened.