“You are a doctor—you’ll understand—don’t leave me alone—don’t let
me stop here!”
“Now listen,” I said; “listen, and control yourself. Do you hear? I
have come _prepared_ to take you away. I’ll explain why presently.”
“I thought at first it was my fault,” she wept distressfully,
“working, perhaps, until I grew light-headed” (Ah, hunger and
loneliness and that grinding labour!); “but when I was sure of myself,
still it went on, and I could not do my tasks to earn money. Then I
thought—how can God let such things be!—that the instrument itself
must be haunted. It took to going at night; and in the morning”—she
gripped my hands—“I burnt them. I tried to think I had done it myself
in my sleep, and I always burnt them. But it didn’t stop, and at last
I made up my mind to take it back and ask for another—another—you
remember?”
She pressed closer to me, and looked fearfully over her shoulder.
“It does the same,” she whispered, gulping. “It wasn’t the machine at
all. It’s the place—itself—that’s haunted.”
I confess a tremor ran through me. The room was dusking—hugging
itself into secrecy over its own sordid details. Out near the window,
the type-writer, like a watchful sentient thing, seemed grinning at us
with all its ivory teeth. She had carried it there, that it might be
as far from herself as possible.
“First let me light the gas,” I said, gently but resolutely detaching
her hands.
“There is none,” she murmured.
None. It was beyond her means. This poor creature kept her deadly
vigils with a couple of candles. I lit them—they served but to make
the gloom more visible—and went to pull down the blind.
“O, take care of it!” she whispered fearfully, meaning the
type-writer. “It is awful to shut out the daylight so soon.”
God in heaven, what she must have suffered! But I admitted nothing,
and took her determinedly in hand.
“Now,” I said, returning to her, “tell me plainly and distinctly what
it is that the machine does.”
She did not answer. I repeated my question.
“It writes things,” she muttered—“things that don’t come from me. Day
and night it’s the same. The words on the paper aren’t the words that
come from my fingers.”
“But that is impossible, you know.”
“So _I_ should have thought once. Perhaps—what is it to be possessed?
There was another type-writer—another girl—lived in these rooms
before me.”
“Indeed! And what became of her?”
“She disappeared mysteriously—no one knows why or where. Maria, my
little maid, told me about her. Her name was Lucy Rivers, and—she
just disappeared. The landlord advertised her effects, to be claimed,
or sold to pay the rent; and that was done, and she made no sign. It
was about two months ago.”
“Well, will you now practically demonstrate to me this reprehensible
eccentricity on the part of your instrument?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t dare.”
“I would do it myself; but of course you will understand that a more
satisfactory conclusion would be come to by my watching your fingers.
Make an effort—you needn’t even look at the result—and I will take
you away immediately after.”
“You are very good,” she answered pathetically; “but I don’t know that
I ought to accept. Where to, please? And—and I don’t even know your
name.”
“Well, I have my own reasons for withholding it.”
“It is all so horrible,” she said; “and I am in your hands.”
“They are waiting to transfer you to mamma’s,” said I.
The name seemed an instant inspiration and solace to her. She looked
at me, without a word, full of wonder and gratitude; then asked me to
bring the candles, and she would acquit herself of her task. She
showed the best pluck over it, though her face was ashy, and her mouth
a line, and her little nostrils pulsing the whole time she was at
work.
I had got her down to one of my circulars, and, watching her fingers
intently, was as sure as observer could be that she had followed the
text verbatim.
“Now,” I said, when she came to a pause, “give me a hint how to remove
this paper, and go you to the other end of the room.”
She flicked up a catch. “You have only to pull it off the roller,” she
said; and rose and obeyed. The moment she was away I followed my
instructions, and drew forth the printed sheet and looked at it.
It may have occupied me longer than I intended. But I was folding it
very deliberately, and putting it away in my pocket when I walked
across to her with a smile. She gazed at me one intent moment, and
dropped her eyes.
“Yes,” she said; and I knew that she had satisfied herself. “Will you
take me away now, at once, please?”
The idea of escape, of liberty once realized, it would have been
dangerous to balk her by a moment. I had acquainted mamma that I might
possibly bring her a visitor. Well, it simply meant that the suggested
visit must be indefinitely prolonged.
Miss Gray accompanied me home, where certain surprises, in addition to
the tenderest of ministrations, were awaiting her. All that becomes
private history, and outside my story. I am not a man of sentiment;
and if people choose to write poems and make general asses of
themselves, why—God bless them!
The problem I had set _my_self to unravel was what looked deucedly
like a tough psychologic poser. But I was resolute to face it, and had
formed my plan. It was no unusual thing for me to be out all night.
That night, after dining, I spent in the “converted” flat in West
Kensington.
I had brought with me—I confess to so much weakness—one of your
portable electric lamps. The moment I was shut in and established, I
pulled out the paper Miss Gray had typed for me, spread it under the
glow and stared at it. Was it a copy of my circular? Would a sober
“First Aid Society” Secretary be likely, do you think, to require
circulars containing such expressions as “_William! William! Come back
to me! O, William, in God’s name! William! William! William!_”—in
monstrous iteration—the one cry, or the gist of it, for lines and
lines in succession?
I am at the other end from humour in saying this. It is heaven’s
truth. Line after line, half down the page, went that monotonous,
heart-breaking appeal. It was so piercingly moving, my human terror of
its unearthliness was all drowned, absorbed in an overflowing pity.
I am not going to record the experiences of that night. That
unchanging mood of mine upheld me through consciousnesses and
sub-consciousnesses which shall be sacred. Sometimes, submerged in
these, I seemed to hear the clack of the instrument in the window, but
at a vast distance. I may have seen—I may have dreamt—I accepted it
all. Awaking in the chill grey of morning, I felt no surprise at
seeing some loose sheets of paper lying on the floor. “_William!
William!_” their text ran down, “_Come back to me!_” It was all that
same wail of a broken heart. I followed Miss Gray’s example. I took
out my match-box, and reverently, reverently burned them.
An hour or two later I was at Paul’s Exchange, privately interviewing
my manager.
“Did you ever employ a Miss Lucy Rivers?”
“Certainly we did. Poor Lucy Rivers! She rented a machine of us. In
fact——”
He paused.
“Well?”
“Well—it is a mere matter of business—she ‘flitted,’ and we had to
reclaim our instrument. As it happens, it was the very one purchased
by the young lady who so interested you here two days ago.”
“The first machine, you mean?”
“The first—_and_ the second.” He smiled. “As a matter of fact, she
took away again what she brought.”
“Miss Rivers’s?”
He nodded.
“There was absolutely nothing wrong with it—mere fad. Women start
these fancies. The click of the thing gets on their nerves, I suppose.
We must protect ourselves, you see; and I’ll warrant she finds it
perfection now.”
“Perhaps she does. What was Miss Rivers’s address?”
He gave me, with a positive grin this time, the “converted” flat.
“But that was only latterly,” he said. “She had moved from——”
He directed me elsewhere.
“Why,” said I, taking up my hat, “did you call her ‘poor Lucy
Rivers’?”
“O, I don’t know!” he said. “She was rather an attractive young lady.
But we had to discontinue our patronage. She developed the most
extraordinary—but it’s no business of mine. She was one of the
submerged tenth; and she’s gone under for good, I suppose.”
I made my way to the _other_ address—a little lodging in a
shabby-genteel street. A bitter-faced landlady, one of the
“preordained” sort, greeted me with resignation when she thought I
came for rooms, and with acerbity when she heard that my sole mission
was to inquire about a Miss Lucy Rivers.
“I won’t deceive you, sir,” she said. “When it come to receiving
gentlemen privately, I told her she must go.”
“Gentlemen!”
“I won’t do Miss Rivers an injustice,” she said. “It was _ha_
gentleman.”
“Was that latterly?”
“It was not latterly, sir. But it was the effects of its not being
latterly which made her take to things.”
“What things?”
“Well, sir, she grew strange company, and took to the roof.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Just precisely what I say, sir; through the trap-door by the steps,
and up among the chimney-pots. _He’d_ been there with her before, and
perhaps she thought she’d find him hiding among the stacks. He called
himself an astronomer; but it’s my belief it was another sort of
star-gazing. I couldn’t stand it at last, and I had to give her
notice.”
It was falling near a gloomy midday when I again entered the flat, and
shut myself in with its ghosts and echoes. I had a set conviction, a
set purpose in my mind. There was that which seemed to scuttle, like a
little demon of laughter, in my wake, now urging me on, now slipping
round and above to trip me as I mounted. I went steadily on and up,
past the sitting-room door, to the floor above. And here, for the
first time, a thrill in my blood seemed to shock and hold me for a
moment. Before my eyes, rising to a skylight, now dark and choked with
snow, went a flight of steps. Pulling myself together, I mounted
these, and with a huge effort (_the bolt was not shot_) shouldered the
trap open. There were a fall and rustle without; daylight entered;
and, levering the door over, I emerged upon the roof.
Snow, grim and grimy and knee-deep, was over everything, muffling the
contours of the chimneys, the parapets, the irregularities of the
leads. The dull thunder of the streets came up to me; a fog of thaw
was in the air; a thin drizzle was already falling. I drove my foot
forward into a mound, and hitched it on something. In an instant I was
down on my knees, scattering the sodden raff right and left, and—my
God!—a face!
She lay there as she had been overwhelmed, and frozen, and preserved
these two months. She had closed the trap behind her, and nobody had
known. Pure as wax—pitiful as hunger—dead! Poor Lucy Rivers!
Who was she, and who the man? We could never learn. She had woven his
name, his desertion, her own ruin and despair into the texture of her
broken life. Only on the great day of retribution shall he answer to
that agonized cry.