‘What’s in a name?’ laughed Herbert. ‘But it really is a queer show-up
of human oddity. A fellow comes in here, searching; that’s all.’ His
back was turned, as he stood staring absently out, sipping his tea
between his sentences. ‘He comes in—oh, it’s a positive fact, for I’ve
seen him myself, just sitting back in my chair here, you know, watching
him as one would a tramp in one’s orchard.’ He cast a candid glance
over his shoulder. ‘First he looks round, like a prying servant. Then
he comes cautiously on—a kind of grizzled, fawn-coloured face,
middle-size, with big hands; and then just like some quiet, groping,
nocturnal creature, he begins his precious search—shelves, drawers that
are not here, cupboards gone years ago, questing and nosing no end, and
quite methodically too, until he reaches the window. Then he stops,
looks back, narrows his foxy lids, listens—quite perceptibly, you know,
a kind of gingerish blur; then he seems to open this corner bookcase
here, as if it were a door and goes out along what I suppose might at
some time have been an outside gallery or balcony, unless, as I rather
fancy, the house extended once beyond these windows. Anyhow, out he
goes quite deliberately, treading the air as lightly as Botticelli’s
angels, until, however far you lean out of the window, you can’t follow
him any further. And then—and this is the bit that takes one’s
fancy—when you have contentedly noddled down again to whatever you may
have been doing when the wretch appeared, or are sitting in a cold
sweat, with bolting eyes awaiting developments, just according to your
school of thought, or of nerves, the creature comes back—comes back;
and with what looks uncommonly like a lighted candle in his hand. That
really is a thrill, I assure you.’
‘But you’ve seen this—you’ve really seen this yourself?’
‘Oh yes, twice,’ replied Herbert cheerfully. ‘And my sister, quite by
haphazard, once saw him from the garden. She was shelling peas one
evening for Sallie, and she distinctly saw him shamble out of the
window here, and go shuffling along, mid-air, across the roaring
washpot down below, turn sharp round the high corner of the house,
sheer against the stars, in a kind of frightened hurry. And then, after
five minutes’ concentrated watching over the shucks, she saw him come
shuffling back again—the same distraction, the same nebulous snuff
colour, and a candle trailing its smoke behind him as he whisked in
home.’
‘And then?’
‘Ah, then,’ said Herbert, lagging along the bookshelves, and scanning
the book-backs with eyes partially closed: he turned with lifted
teapot, and refilled his visitor’s cup; ‘then, wherever you are—I
mean,’ he added, cutting up a little cake into six neat slices,
‘wherever the chance inmate of the room happens to be, he comes
straight for you, at a quite alarming velocity, and fades, vanishes,
melts, or, as it were, silts inside.’
Lawford listened in a curious hush that had suddenly fallen over his
mind. ‘“Fades inside? silts?”—I’m awfully stupid, but what on earth do
you mean?’ The room had slowly emptied itself of daylight; its own
darkness, it seemed, had met that of the narrowing night, and Herbert
deliberately lit a cigarette before replying. His clear pale face, with
its smooth outline and thin mouth and rather long dark eyes, turned
with a kind of serene good-humour towards his questioner.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘I mean frankly just that. Besides, it’s Grisel’s own
phrase; and an old nurse we used to have said much the same. He comes,
or _it_ comes towards you, first just walking, then with a kind of
gradually accelerated slide or glide, and sweeps straight into you,’ he
tapped his chest, ‘me, whoever it may be is here. In a kind of panic, I
suppose, to hide, or perhaps simply to get back again.’
‘Get back where?’
‘Be resumed, as it were, via you. You see, I suppose he is compelled to
regain his circle, or Purgatory, or Styx, whatever you like to call it,
via consciousness. No one present, then no revenant or spook, or astral
body, or hallucination: what’s in a name? And of course even an
hallucination is mind-stuff, and on its own, as it were. What I mean is
that the poor devil must have some kind of human personality to get
back through in order to make his exit from our sphere of consciousness
into his. And naturally, of course to make his entrance too. If like a
tenuous smoke he can get in, the probability is that he gets out in
precisely the same fashion. For really, if you weren’t consciously
expecting the customary impact (you actually jerk forward in the act of
resistance unresisted), you would not notice his going. I am afraid I
must be horribly boring you with all these tangled theories. All I mean
is, that if you were really absorbed in what you happened to be doing
at the time, the thing might come and go, with your mind for entrance
and exit, as it were, without your being conscious of it at all.’ There
was a longish pause, in which Herbert slowly inhaled and softly
breathed out his smoke.
‘And what—what is the poor wretch searching _for?_ And what—why, what
becomes of him when he does go?’
‘Ah, there you have me! One merely surmises just as one’s temperament
or convictions lean. Grisel says it’s some poor derelict soul in search
of peace—that the poor beggar wants finally to die, in fact, and can’t.
Sallie smells crime. After all, what is every man?’ he talked on; ‘a
horde of ghosts—like a Chinese nest of boxes—oaks that were acorns that
were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front—in our ancestors, back
and back, until—’
‘“Until?”’ Lawford managed to remark.
‘Ah, that settles me again. Don’t they call it an amoeba? But really I
am abjectly ignorant of all that kind of stuff. We are _all_ we are,
and all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter,
anything outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life.
It is after all just what the old boy said—it’s only the impossible
that’s credible; whatever credible may mean....’
It seemed to Lawford as if the last remark had wafted him bodily into
the presence of his kind, blinking, intensely anxious old friend, Mr
Bethany. And what leagues asunder the two men were who had happened on
much the same words to express their convictions.
He drew his hand gropingly over his face, half rose, and again seated
himself. ‘Whatever it may be,’ he said, ‘the whole thing reminds me,
you know—it is in a way so curiously like my own—my own case.’
Herbert sat on, a little drawn up in his chair, quietly smoking. The
crash of the falling water, after seeming to increase in volume with
the fading of evening, had again died down in the darkness to a low
multitudinous tumult as of countless inarticulate, echoing voices.
‘“Bizarre,” you said; God knows _I_ am.’ But Herbert still remained
obdurately silent. ‘You remember, perhaps,’ Lawford faintly began
again, ‘our talk the other night?’
‘Oh, rather,’ replied the cordial voice out of the dusk.
‘I suppose you thought I was insane?’
‘Insane!’ There was a genuinely amused astonishment in the echo. ‘You
were lucidity itself. Besides—well, honestly, if I may venture, I don’t
put very much truck in what one calls one’s sanity: except, of course,
as a bond of respectability and a means of livelihood.’
‘But did you realise in the least from what I said how I really stand?
That I went down into that old shadowy hollow one man, and came
back—well—this?’
‘I gathered vaguely something like that. I thought at first it was
merely an affectation—that what you said was an affectation, I
mean—until—well, to be frank, it was the “this” that so immensely
interested me. Especially,’ he added almost with a touch of gaiety,
‘especially the last glimpse. But if it’s really not a forbidden
question, what precisely _was_ the other? What precise manner of man, I
mean, came down into Widderstone?’
‘It is my face that is changed, Mr Herbert. If you’ll try to understand
me—my _face_. What you see now is not what I really am, not what I was.
Oh, it is all quite different. I know perfectly well how absurd it must
sound. And you won’t press me further. But that’s the truth: that’s
what they have done for me.’
It seemed to Lawford as if a remote tiny shout of laughter had been
suddenly caught back in the silence that had followed this confession.
He peered in vain in the direction of his companion. Even his cigarette
revealed no sign of him. ‘I know, I know,’ he went gropingly on; ‘I
felt it would sound to you like nothing but frantic incredible
nonsense. _You_ can’t see it. _You_ can’t feel it. _You_ can’t hear
these hooting voices. It’s no use at all blinking the fact; I am simply
on the verge, if not over it, of insanity.’
‘As to that, Mr Lawford,’ came the still voice out of the darkness;
‘the very fact of your being able to say so seems to me all but proof
positive that you’re not. Insanity is on another plane, isn’t it? in
which one can’t compare one’s states. As for what you say being
credible, take our precious noodle of a spook here! Ninety-nine
hundredths of this amiable world of ours would have guffawed the poor
creature into imperceptibility ages ago. To such poor credulous
creatures as my sister and I he is no more and no less a fact, a
personality, an amusing reality than—well, this teacup. Here we are,
amazing mysteries both of us in any case; and all round us are scores
of books, dealing just with life, pure, candid, and unexpurgated; and
there’s not a single one among them but reads like a taradiddle. Yet
grope between the lines of any autobiography, it’s pretty clear what
one has got—a feeble, timid, creeping attempt to describe the
indescribable. As for what you say _your_ case is, the bizarre—that
kind very seldom gets into print at all. In all our make-believe, all
our pretence, how, honestly, could it? But there, this is immaterial.
The real question is, may I, can I help? What I gather is this: You
just trundled down into Widderstone all among the dead men, and—but one
moment, I’ll light up.’
A light flickered up in the dark. Shading it in his hand from the night
air straying through the open window, Herbert lit the two candles that
stood upon the little chimneypiece behind Lawford’s head. Then
sauntering over to the window again, almost as if with an affectation
of nonchalance, he drew one of the shutters, and sat down. ‘Nothing
much struck me,’ he went on, leaning back on his hands, ‘I mean on
Sunday evening, until you said good-bye. It was then that I caught in
the moon a distinct glimpse of your face.’
‘This,’ said Lawford, with a sudden horrible sinking of the heart.
Herbert nodded. ‘The fact is, I have a print of it,’ he said.
‘A print of it?’
‘A miserable little dingy engraving.’
‘Of this?’ Herbert nodded, with eyes fixed. ‘Where?’
‘That’s the nuisance. I searched high and low for it the instant I got
home. For the moment it has been mislaid; but it must be somewhere in
the house and it will turn up all in good time. It’s the frontispiece
of one of a queer old hotchpotch of pamphlets, sewn up together by some
amateur enthusiast in a marbled paper cover—confessions, travels,
trials and so on. All eighteenth century, and all in French.’
‘And mine?’ said Lawford, gazing stonily across the candlelight.
Herbert, from a head slightly stooping, gazed back in an almost
birdlike fashion across the room at his visitor.
‘Sabathier’s,’ he said.
‘Sabathier’s!’
‘A really curious resemblance. Of course, I am speaking only from
memory; and perhaps it’s not quite so vivid in this light; but still
astonishingly clear.’
Lawford sat drawn up, staring at his companion’s face in an intense and
helpless silence. His mouth opened but no words came.
‘Of course,’ began Herbert again, ‘I don’t say there’s anything in
it—except the—the mere coincidence,’ he paused and glanced out of the
open casement beside him. ‘But there’s just one obvious question. Do
you happen to know of any strain of French blood in your family?’
Lawford shut his eyes, even memory seemed to be forsaking him at last.
‘No,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘there’s a little Dutch, I think, on
my mother’s side, but no French.’
‘No Sabathier, then?’ said Herbert, smiling. ‘And then there’s another
question—this change; is it really as complete as you suppose? Has
it—please just warn me off if I am in the least intruding—has it been
noticed?’
Lawford hesitated. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said slowly, ‘it has been noticed—my
wife, a few friends.’
‘Do you mind this infernal clatter?’ said Herbert, laying his fingers
on the open casement.
‘No, no. And you think?’
‘My dear fellow, I don’t think anything. It’s all the craziest
conjecture. Stranger things even than this have happened. There are
dozens here—in print. What are we human beings after all? Clay in the
hands of the potter. Our bodies are merely an inheritance, packed tight
and corded up. We have practically no control over their main
functions. We can’t even replace a little finger-nail. And look at the
faces of us—what atrocious mockeries most of them are of _any_ kind of
image! But we know our bodies change—age, sickness, thought, passion,
fatality. It proves they are amazingly plastic. And merely even as a
theory it is not in the least untenable that by force of some violent
convulsive effort from outside one’s body _might_ change. It answers
with odd voluntariness to friend or foe, smile or snarl. As for what we
call the laws of Nature, they are pure assumptions to-day, and may be
nothing better than scrap-iron tomorrow. Good Heavens, Lawford,
consider man’s abysmal impudence.’ He smoked on in silence for a
moment. ‘You say you fell asleep down there?’
Lawford nodded. Herbert tapped his cigarette on the sill. ‘Just
following up our ludicrous conjecture, you know,’ he remarked musingly,
‘it wasn’t such a bad opportunity for the poor chap.’
‘But surely,’ said Lawford, speaking as it were out of a dream of
candle-light and reverberating sound and clearest darkness, towards
this strange deliberate phantom with the unruffled clear-cut
features—‘surely then, in that case, he is here now? And yet, on my
word of honour, though every friend I ever had in the world should deny
it, I am the same. Memory stretches back clear and sound to my
childhood. I can see myself with extraordinary lucidity, how I think,
my motives and all that; and in spite of these voices that I seem to
hear, and this peculiar kind of longing to break away, as it were, just
to press on—it is I,—I myself, that am speaking to you now out of
this—this mask.’
Herbert glanced reflectively at his companion. ‘You mustn’t let me tire
you,’ he said; ‘but even on our theory it would not necessarily follow
that you yourself would be much affected. It’s true this fellow
Sabathier really was something of a personality. He had a rather
unusual itch for life, for trying on and on to squeeze something out of
experience that isn’t there; and he seemed never to weary of a
magnificent attempt to find in his fellow-creatures, especially in the
women he met, what even—if they have it—they cannot give. The little
book I wanted to show you is partly autobiographical and really does
manage to set the fellow on his feet. Even there he does absolutely
take one’s imagination. I shall never forget the thrill of picking him
up in the Charing Cross Road. You see, I had known the queer old
tombstone for years. He’s enormously vivid—quite beyond my feebleness
to describe, with a kind of French verve and rapture. Unluckily we
can’t get nearer than two years to his death. I shouldn’t mind guessing
some last devastating dream swept over him, held him the breath of an
instant too long beneath the wave, and he caved in. We know he killed
himself; and perhaps lived to regret it ever after.
‘After all, what is this precious dying we talk so much about?’ Herbert
continued after a while, his eyes restlessly wandering from shelf to
shelf. ‘You remember our talk in the churchyard? We all know that the
body fades quick enough when its occupant is gone. Supposing even in
the sleep of the living it lies very feebly guarded. And supposing in
that state some infernally potent thing outside it, wandering
disembodied, just happens on it—like some hungry sexton beetle on the
carcase of a mouse. Supposing—I know it’s the most outrageous
theorising—but supposing all these years of sun and dark, Sabathier’s
emanation, or whatever you like to call it, horribly restless, by some
fatality longing on and on just for life, or even for the face, the
voice, of some “impossible she” whom he couldn’t get in this muddled
world, simply loathing all else; supposing he has been lingering in
ambush down beside those poor old dusty bones that had poured out for
him such marrowy hospitality—oh, I know it; the dead do. And then, by a
chance, one quiet autumn evening, a veritable godsend of a little Miss
Muffet comes wandering down under the shade of his immortal cypresses,
half asleep, fagged out, depressed in mind and body, perhaps: imagine
yourself in his place, and he in yours!’ Herbert stood up in his
eagerness, his sleek hair shining. ‘The one clinching chance of a
century! Wouldn’t you have made a fight for it? Wouldn’t you have
risked the raid? I can just conceive it—the amazing struggle in that
darkness within a darkness; like some dazed alien bee bursting through
the sentinels of a hive; one mad impetuous clutch at victory; then the
appalling stirring on the other side; the groping back to a house
dismantled, rearranged, not, mind you, disorganised or
disintegrated....’ He broke off with a smile, as if of apology for his
long, fantastic harangue.
Lawford sat listening, his eyes fixed on Herbert’s colourless face.
There was not a sound else, it seemed, than that slightly drawling
scrupulous voice poking its way amid a maze of enticing, baffling
thoughts. Herbert turned away with a shrug. ‘It’s tempting stuff,’ he
said, choosing another cigarette. ‘But anyhow, the poor beggar failed.’
‘Failed?’
‘Why, surely; if he had succeeded I should not now be talking to a mere
imperfect simulacrum, to the outward illusion of a passing likeness to
the man, but to Sabathier himself!’ His eyes moved slowly round and
dwelt for a moment with a dark, quiet scrutiny on his visitor.
‘You say a passing likeness; do you _mean_ that?’
Herbert smiled indulgently. ‘If one _can_ mean what is purely a
speculation. I am only trying to look at the thing dispassionately, you
see. We are so much the slaves of mere repetition. Here is life—yours
and mine—a kind of plenum in vacuo_. It is only when we begin to play
the eavesdropper; when something goes askew; when one of the sentries
on the frontier of the unexpected shouts a hoarse “Qui vive?”_—it is
only then we begin to question; to prick our aldermen and pinch the
calves of our kings. Why, who is there can answer to anybody’s but his
own satisfaction just that one fundamental question—Are we the
prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures, or the creators
of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust? As for identity or
likeness or personality, we have only our neighbours’ nod for them, and
just a fading memory. No, the old fairy tales knew better; and
witchcraft’s witchcraft to the end of the chapter. Honestly, and just
of course on that one theory, Lawford, I can’t help thinking that
Sabathier’s raid only just so far succeeded as to leave his impression
in the wax. It doesn’t, of course, follow that it will necessarily end
there. It might—it may be even now just gradually fading away. It may,
you know, need driving out—with whips and scorpions. It might, perhaps,
work in.’
Lawford sat cold and still. ‘It’s no good, no good,’ he said, ‘I don’t
understand; I can’t follow you. I was always stupid, always bigoted and
cocksure. These things have never seemed anything but old women’s tales
to me. And now I must pay for it. And this Nicholas Sabathier; you say
he was a blackguard?’
‘Well,’ said Herbert with a faint smile, ‘that depends on your
definition of the word. He wasn’t a flunkey, a fool, or a prig, if
that’s what you mean. He wasn’t perhaps on Mrs Grundy’s visiting list.
He wasn’t exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of
temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To
the stodgy, suety world of course it’s little else than sheer
moonshine, midsummer madness. Naturally, in its own charming and stodgy
way the world kept flickering cold water in his direction. Naturally it
hissed.... I shall find the book. You shall have the book; oh yes.’
‘There’s only one more question,’ said Lawford in a dull, slow voice,
stooping and covering his face with his hands. ‘I know it’s impossible
for you to realise—but to me time seems like that water there, to be
heaping up about me. I wait, just as one waits when the conductor of an
orchestra lifts his hand and in a moment the whole surge of brass and
wood, cymbal and drum will crash out—and sweep me under. I can’t tell
you Herbert, how it all is, with just these groping stirrings of that
mole in my mind’s dark. You say it may be this face, working in! God
knows. I find it easy to speak to you—this cold, clear sense, you know.
The others feel too much, or are afraid, or—Let me think—yes, I was
going to ask you a question. But no one can answer it.’ He peered
darkly, with white face suddenly revealed between his hands. ‘What
remains now? Where do _I_ come in? What is there left for _me_ to do?’
And at that moment there sounded, even above the monotonous roar of the
water beyond the window—there fell the sound of a light footfall
approaching along the corridor.
‘Listen,’ said Herbert; ‘here’s my sister coming; we’ll ask her.’