The Return Part 14

It stood square and high and dark in a small amphitheatre of verdure.

Roses here and there sprang from the gra.s.s, and a narrow box-edged path led to a small door in a low green-mantled wing, with its one square window above the porch. And while, with vacant mind, Lawford stood waiting, as one stands forebodingly upon the eve of a new experience he heard as if at a distance the sound of falling water. He still paused on the country roadside, scrutinising this strange, still, wooden presence; but at last with an effort he pushed open the gate, followed the winding path, and pulled the old iron hanging bell. There came presently a quiet tread, and Herbert himself opened the door which led into a little square wood-panelled hall, hung with queer old prints and obscure portraits in dark frames.

'Ah, yes, come in, Mr Lawford,' he drawled; 'I was beginning to be afraid you were not coming.'

Lawford laid hat and walking-stick on an oak bench, and followed his churchyard companion up a slightly inclined corridor and a staircase into a high room, covered far up the yellowish walls with old books on shelves and in cases, between which hung in little black frames, mezzo tints, etchings, and antiquated maps. A large table stood a few paces from the deep alcove of the window, which was surrounded by a low, faded, green seat, and was screened from the sunshine by wooden shutters. And here the tranquil surge of falling water shook incessantly on the air, for the three lower cas.e.m.e.nts stood open to the fading sunset. On a smaller table were spread cups, old earthenware dishes of fruit, and a big bowl of damask roses.

'Please sit down; I shan't be a moment; I am not sure that my sister is in; but if so, I will tell her we are ready for tea.' Left to himself in this quiet, strange old room, Lawford forgot for a while everything else, he was for the moment so taken up with his surroundings.

What seized on his fancy and strangely affected his mind was this incessant changing roar of falling water. It must be the Widder, he said to himself, flowing close to the walls. But not until he had had the boldness to lean head and shoulders out of the nearest window did he fully realize how close indeed the Widder was. It came sweeping dark and deep and begreened and full with the early autumnal rains, actually against the lower walls of the house itself, and in the middle suddenly swerved in a black, smooth arch, and tumbled headlong into a great pool, nodding with tall slender water-weeds, and charged in its bubbled blackness here and there with the last crimson of the setting sun. To the left of the house, where the waters floated free again, stood vast, still trees above the cl.u.s.tering rushes; and in glimpses between their spreading boughs lay the far-stretching countryside, now dimmed with the first mists of approaching evening. So absorbed he became as he stood leaning over the wooden sill above the falling water, that eye and ear became enslaved by the roar and stillness. And in the faint atmosphere of age that seemed like a veil to hang about the odd old house and these prodigious branches, he fell into a kind of waking dream.

When at last he did draw back into the room it was perceptibly darker, and a thin keen shaft of recollection struck across his mind--the recollection of what he was, and of how he came to be there, his reasons for coming and of that dark indefinable presence which like a raven had begun to build its dwelling in his mind. He sat on, his eyes restlessly wandering, his face leaning on his hands; and in a while the door opened and Herbert returned, carrying an old crimson and green teapot and a dish of hot cakes.

'They're all out,' he said; 'sister, Sallie, and boy; but these were in the oven, so we won't wait. I hope you haven't been very much bored.'

Lawford dropped his hands from his face and smiled. 'I have been looking at the water,' he said.

'My sister's favorite occupation; she sits for hours and hours, with not even a book for an apology, staring down into the black old roaring pot.

It has a sort of hypnotic effect after a time. And you'd be surprised how quickly one gets used to the noise. To me it's even less distracting than sheer silence. You don't know, after all, what on earth sheer silence means--even at Widderstone. But one can just realize a water-nymph. They chatter; but, thank Heaven, it's not articulate.' He handed Lawford a cup with a certain niceness and self-consciousness, lifting his eyebrows slightly as he turned.

Lawford found himself listening out of a peculiar stillness of mind to the voice of this suave and rather inscrutable acquaintance. 'The curious thing is, do you know,' he began rather nervously, 'that though I must have pa.s.sed your gate at least twice in the last few months, I have never noticed it before, never even caught the sound of the water.'

'No, that's the best of it; n.o.body ever does. We are just buried alive.

We have lived here for years, and scarcely know a soul--not even our own, perhaps. Why on earth should one? Acquaintances, after all, are little else than a bad habit.'

'But then, what about me?' said Lawford.

'But that's just it,' said Herbert. 'I said ACQUAINTANCES; that's just exactly what I'm going to prove--what very old friends we are. You've no idea! It really is rather queer.' He took up his cup and sauntered over to the window.

Lawford eyed him vacantly for a moment, and, following rather his own curious thoughts than seeking any light on this somewhat vague explanation, again broke the silence. 'It's odd, I suppose, but this house affects me much in the same way as Widderstone does. I'm not particularly fanciful--at least, I used not to be. But sitting here I seem, I hope it isn't a very frantic remark, it seems as though, if only my ears would let me, I should hear--well, voices. It's just what you said about the silence. I suppose it's the age of the place; it IS very old?'

'Pretty old, I suppose; it's worm-eaten and rat-eaten and tindery enough in all conscience; and the damp doesn't exactly foster it. It's a queer old shanty. There are two or three accounts of it in some old local stuff I have. And of course there's a ghost.'

'A ghost?' echoed Lawford, looking up.

CHAPTER TWELVE

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 a.s.sure 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 sh.e.l.ling 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 G.o.dsend 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 mult.i.tudinous tumult as of countless inarticulate, echoing voices.

'"Bizarre," you said; G.o.d 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.