DarkEcho Horror
presents
Treats
An E-Anthology
of Classic Terror Tales
Compiled by and with Graphics by Paula Guran
Design, Conception & Original Material © 2002 Paula Guran
darkecho@darkecho.com
www.darkecho.com
Contents
Introduction by Paula Guran
iii
Rats by M.R. James
1
A Note on M.R. James and Rats
8
Afterward by Edith Wharton
10
A Note on Edith Wharton and Afterward
44
Sredni Vashtar by Saki
46
A Note on Saki and Sredni Vashtar
52
The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
55
A Note on Edgar Allan Poe and The Tell-Tale Heart
61
The White People by Arthur Machen
63
A Note on Arthur Machen and The White People
103
The Dead and the Countess by Gertrude Atherton
105
A Note on Gertrude Atherton and The Dead and The Countess 120
Introduction
A lot of folks my age (we needn’t be too specific about just what that age is) were introduced to horror through comic books or films or the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Not me. I wasn’t allowed
to go to scary movies and rarely got a glimpse of The Twilight Zone on TV. I never saw an issue of Famous
Monsters or any other horror magazine and the places I bought comic books didn’t stock anything other
than super-heroes and Classics Illustrated. I found my way to the dark side of literature – and probably
just about everything else – through books, mostly books from the library. Great Tales of Terror and the
Supernatural edited by Phyllis Cerf and Herbert Wise and anthologies of ghost stories and science fiction
with now-forgotten titles; fairy tales; collections of Saki and Poe; “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” books like
Stories for Late at Night, Stories My Mother Never Told Me, Stories Not for the Nervous. Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Rebecca by Daphne
DuMaurier, Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and Gather Darkness. Then came that ultimate corrupter of youth:
Harlan Ellison’s anthology Dangerous Visions. Lovecraft came later still when he’d been resurrected in
paperback as “psychedelic.”
So – along with science fiction and mysteries and fantasy and history and philosophy and a lot of
whatever I else I know anything about – my grounding in horror literature came haphazardly and thanks to
the public libraries.
Now we have a vast new type of library with the Internet and everything that’s come along because
of it. This little e-anthology is just another way that you can rediscover or wander into some classic tales of
terror – but the Internet is no substitute for libraries so don’t forget they need your support.
Happy Halloween!
Paula Guran
October 2002
darkecho@darkecho.com
www.darkecho.com
iii
'And if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you'd see the ragged,
mouldy bedclothes a-heaving and a-heaving like seas.'' And a-heaving
and a-heaving with what?' he says. 'Why, with the rats under 'em.'
But was it with the rats? I ask, because in another case it was not. I cannot put a date to the story,
but I was young when I heard it, and the teller was old. It is an ill-proportioned tale, but that is my fault,
not his.
It happened in Suffolk, near the coast. In a place where the road makes a sudden dip and then a sudden rise; as you go northward, at the top of that rise, stands a house on the left of the road. It is a tall redbrick house, narrow for its height; perhaps it was built around 1770. The top of the front has a low triangular pediment with a round window in the centre. Behind it are stables and offices, and such garden as it has
is behind them. Scraggy scotch firs are near it; an expanse of gorse-covered land stretches away from it. It
commands a view of the distant sea from the upper windows of the front. A sign on a post stands before the
door; or did so stand, for though it was an inn of repute once, I believe it is so no longer.
To this inn came my acquaintance, Mr Thomson, when he was a young man, on a fine spring day,
coming from the University of Cambridge, and desirous of solitude in tolerable quarters and time for read2
ing. These he found, for the landlord and his wife had been in service and could make a visitor comfortable,
and there was no one else staying at the inn. He had a large room on the first floor commanding the road
and the view, if it faced east, why that could not be helped; the house was well built and warm.
He spent very tranquil and uneventful days: work all the morning, and afternoon perambulation of
the country round, a little conversation with country company or the people of the inn in the evening over
the then fashionable drink of brandy and water, a little more reading and writing, and bed; and he would
have been content that this should continue for the full month he had at disposal, so well was his work progressing, and so fine was the April of that year – which I have reason to believe was that which Orlando
Whistlecraft chronicles in his weather record as the 'Charming Year'.
One of his walks took him along the northern road, which stands high and traverses a wide common,
called a heath. On the bright afternoon when he first chose this direction his eye caught a white object some
hundreds of yards to the left of the road, and he felt it necessary to make sure what this might be.It was not
long before he was standing by it, and found himself looking at a square block of white stone fashioned
somewhat like the base of a pillar, with a square hole in the upper surface. Just such another you may see
this day on Thetford Heath. After taking stock of it he contemplated for a few minutes the view, which
offered a church tower or two, some red roofs of cottages and windows winking in the sun,and the expanse
of sea – also with an occasional wink and gleam upon it - and so pursued his way.
In the desultory evening talk in the bar, he asked why the white stone was there on the common.
'A old-fashioned thing, that is,' said the landlord (Mr Betts) 'we was none of us alive when that was
put there.'
'That's right,'said another. 'It stands pretty high, 'said Mr Thomson, 'I dare say a sea-mark was on it
some time back.''Ah! yes,' Mr Betts agreed, I 'ave heard they could see it from the boats; but whatever there
was, it's fell to bits this long time.'Good job too,' said a third, 'twar'nt a lucky mark, by what the old men
used to say; not lucky for the fishin' I mean to say. 'Why ever not?' said Thomson.'Well, I never see it
myself,' was the answer,' but they 'ad some funny ideas, what I mean, peculiar, them old chaps, and I
shouldn't wonder but what they made away with it theirselves.'
3
It was impossible to get anything clearer than this: the company, never very voluble, fell silent, and
when next someone spoke it was of village affairs and crops. Mr Betts was the speaker.
Not every day did Thomson consult his health by taking a county walk. One very fine afternoon
found him busily writing at three o'clock. Then he stretched himself and rose, and walked out of his room
into the passage. Facing him was another room, then the stairhead, then two more rooms, one looking out
to the back, and the other to the south. At the south end of the passage was a window, to which he went,
considering to himself that it was rather a shame to waste e such a fine afternoon.However, work was paramount just at the moment; he thought he would just take five minute off and go back to it, and those five
minutes he would employ – the Bettses could not possibly object – to looking at the other rooms in the passage, which he had never seen. Nobody at all, it seemed, was indoors; probably, as it was market day, they
were all gone to the town, except perhaps a maid in the bar. Very still the house was, and the sun shone
really hot; early flies buzzed in the window-panes. So he explored. The room facing his was undistinguished
except for an old print of Bury St Edmunds; the two next him on his side of the passage were gay and clean,
with one window apiece, whereas his had two. Remained the south-west room, opposite to the last which
he had entered. This was locked; but Thomson was in a mood of quite indefensible curiosity, and feeling
confident that there could be no damaging secrets in a place so easily got at, he proceeded to fetch the key
of his own room, and when that did not answer, to collect the keys of the other three. One of them fitted,
and he opened the door.The room had two windows looking south and west, so it was as bright and the sun
as hot upon it as it could be. Here there was no carpet, but bare boards; no pictures, no washing-stand, only
a bed, in the farther corner; an iron bed, with with mattress and bolster, covered with a bluish check counterpane. As featureless a room as you can well imagine, and yet there was something that made Thomson
close the door again very quickly and yet quietly behind him and lean against the window-sill in the passage, actually quivering all over. It was this, that under the counterpane someone lay, and not only lay, but
stirred.That it was some one and not some thing was certain, because the shape of a head was unmistakable
on the bolster; and yet it was all covered, and no one lies with covered head but a dead person; and this was
not dead, not truly dead, because it heaved and shivered. If he had seen these things in dusk or by the light
of a flickering candle, Thomson could have comforted himself and talked of fancy. On this bright day that
4
was impossible. What was to be done? First, lock the door at all costs . Very gingerly he approached it and
bending down listened, holding his breath; perhaps there might be a sound of heavy breathing, and a prosaic explanation. There was absolute silence. But, as, with a rather tremulous hand, he put the key into its
hole and turned it, it rattled, and on the instant a stumbling padded tread was heard coming towards the
door. Thomson fled like a rabbit to his room and and locked himself in; futile enough, he knew it was;
would doors and locks be any obstacle to what he suspected? but it was all he could think of at the moment,
and in fact nothing happened; only there was a time of acute suspense – followed by a misery of doubt as to
what to do. The impulse, of course, was to slip away as soon as possible from a house which contained such
an inmate.But only the day before he had said he should be staying for at least a week more, and how if he
changed plans could he avoid the suspicion of having pried into places where he certainly had no business?
Moreover, either the Bettses knew all about the inmate, and yet did not leave the house, or knew nothing,
which equally meant there was nothing to be afraid of, or knew just enough to make them shut up the
room, but not enough to weigh on their spirits; in any of these cases it seemed that not much was to be
feared, and certainly so far he had had no sort of ugly experience. On the whole the line of least resistance
was to stay.
Well, he stayed out his week. Nothing took him past that door, and, often as he would pause in a
quiet hour of day or night in the passage and listen, and listen, no sound whatever issued from that direction. You might have thought that Thomson would have made some attempt at ferreting out stories connected with the inn – hardly perhaps from Betts, but from the parson of the parish, or old people in the village; but no the reticence which commonly falls on people who have had strange experiences, and believe in
them, was upon him. Nevertheless, as the end of his stay drew near, his yearning after some kind of explanation grew more and more acute. On his solitary walks he persisted in planning out some way, the least
obtrusive, of getting another daylight glimpse into that room, and eventually arrived at this scheme. He
would leave by an afternoon train – about four o'clock. When his fly was waiting, and his luggage on it, he
would make one last expedition upstairs to look round his own room and see if anything was left unpacked,
and then, with that key, which he had contrived to oil, (as if that made any difference!) the door should
once more be opened, for a moment, and shut.
5
So it worked out. The bill was paid, the consequent small talk gone through while the fly was loaded:
'pleasant part of the country – been very comfortable, thanks to you and Mrs Betts – hope to come back
some time', one one side: on the other, 'very glad you've found satisfaction, sir, done our best – always glad
to 'ave your good word – very much favoured we've been with the weather , to be sure.' Then, 'I'll just take a
look upstairs in case I've left a book or something out – no, don't trouble, I'll be back in a minute.'And as
noiselessly as possible he stole to the door and opened it.T he shattering of the illusion! Propped, or you
might say sitting, on the edge of the bed was – nothing in the round world but a scarecrow! A scarecrow out
of the garden, of course, dumped into the deserted room... Yes; but here amusement ceased. Have scarecrows bare bony feet? Do their heads loll on their shoulders? Have they iron collars and links of chain
about their necks? Can they get up and move, if never so stiffly, across a floor, with wagging heads and
arms close at their sides? and shiver?
The slam of the door, the dash to the stair-head, the leap downstairs, were followed by a faint.
Awakening, Thomson saw Betts standing over him with the brandy bottle and a very reproachful face. 'You
shouldn't a done so, sir, really you shouldn't. It ain't a kind way to act by persons as done the best they
could for you.' Thomson heard words of this kind, but what he said in reply he did not know.Mr Betts, and
perhaps even more Mrs Betts, found it hard to accept his apologies and his assurances that he would say no
word that could damage the good name of the house. However, they were accepted. Since the train could
not now be caught, it was arranged that Thomson should be driven to the town to sleep there. Before he
went the Bettses told him what little they knew. 'They say he was a landlord 'ere a long time back, and was
in with the 'ighwaymen that 'ad their beat about the 'eath. That's how he come by his end; 'ung in chains,
they say, up where you see that stone what the gallus stood in. Yes, the fishermen made away with that,I
believe, because they see it out at sea and it kep' the fish off, according to their idea. Yes, we 'ad the account
from the people that 'ad the 'ouse before we come. "You keep that room shut up," they says, "but don't
move the bed out, and you'll find there won't be no trouble." And no more there 'as been; not once he
haven't come out into the 'ouse, though what he may do now there ain't no sayin'. Anyway, you're the first I
know that's seen him since we've been 'ere; I never set eyes on him myself, nor don't want. And ever since
we've made the servants rooms in the stablin', we ain't 'ad no difficulty that way. Only I do 'ope, sir, as
you'll keep a close tongue, considerin' 'ow an 'ouse do get talked about': with more to this effect.
6
The promise of silence was kept for many years. The occasion of my hearing the story at last was
this: that when Mr Thomson came to stay with my father it fell to me to show him to his room, and instead
of letting me open the door for him he stepped forward and threw it open himself, and then for some
moments stood in the doorway holding up his candle and looking narrowly into the interior. Then he
seemed to recollect himself and said; 'I beg your pardon. Very absurd, but I can't help doing that, for a particular reason.' What that reason was I heard some days afterwards, and you have heard now.
The End
7
A Note on M.R. James and “Rats”
According to a 1995 Ghosts & Scholars M.R. James Newsletter
(http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html) survey, “Rats” (first published: 1929) is one of the
least popular of M.R. James’s stories. Although certainly not his very best, I'm not sure why it is so unpopular. Is it the playfully misleading title? Perhaps it is because he reveals and describes its ghost — usually
James left the horror up to the reader to imagine. Or the fault may lie in the story itself, as its narrator
explains, “It is an ill-proportioned tale, but that is my fault...” Although it’s more of a giggler than a chiller, I
still enjoy “Rats” and I think that’s because I suspect Mr James is pulling our literary legs a bit.
The story's epigraph comes from one of Charles Dickens’s “Christmas” short stories, “Tom Tiddler’s
Ground.”[1] It’s a tale (based on a real nineteenth century eccentric lunatic Dickens once visited) of a wellto-do man who chooses to live in squalor and filth. Dickens calls his fictional filthy hermit Mr Mopes. His
place is so disgusting, it is explained (perhaps inaccurately, we are told): “’When Tom shut up the house,
mate, to go to rack, the beds was left, all made, like as if somebody was a-going to sleep in every bed. And
if you was to walk through the bedrooms now, you’d see the ragged mouldy bedclothes a heaving and a
heaving like seas. And a heaving and a heaving with what?’ he says. ‘Why, with the rats under ‘em.’”
As the Tinker, a character in the story, puts it, Mr Mopes is a “maskerading, mountebanking, in what
is the real hard lot of thousands and thousands! Why, then I say it’s a unbearable and nonsensical piece of
inconsistency, and I’m disgusted. I’m ashamed and disgusted! I’ve lived myself in desolation and ruination;
I knows many a fellow-creetur that’s forced to live life long in desolation and ruination...” At the story’s end
we are presented a “moral with which the Tinker dismissed the subject... he said in his trade that metal that
rotted for want of use, had better be left to rot, and couldn’t rot too soon, considering how much true metal
rotted from over-use and hard service.”
In another section of the tale, a young girl — Kitty — is held up to Mopes as an example of both the
danger of solitude and its solution. Left alone at her school she at first becomes a nervous and checks
8
under beds for possible bogeymen. She then allows her fears to grow and imagination to run wild. This
turns into what we would call paranoia. She has, however, the presence of mind to escape by realizing
what is happening and getting (literally) away from the situation.
“The art of Dr. James,” wrote H.P. Lovecraft, “is by no means haphazard.” I don’t think his choice of
quotation was haphazard. Does he mean to poke fun at the young scholar who seeks solitude then sticks
to his commitment to stay on and eventually keep the secret to himself? Is there some aspect to the story
that we miss?[2] Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), although now remembered for his superb and
influential supernatural fiction, was a brilliant and notable scholar of his day. I’m sure I can not come close
to matching wits with him. So, although I still don’t quite “get” the joke, I do think there’s one there. It’s
become an intriguing little mystery I’d like to decipher.
____________________________
[1] You can read "Tom Tiddler's Grounds" in several places on the Web, including
Project Gutenberg Versions of the story usually omit chapters two through five since Dickens
did not write them. The chapters were written by Willie Collins, a writer closely tied to Dickens
who we now see as important to the early beginnings of detective and horror fiction. I have no
idea how his story-portion tied in with the rest. It was first published as "Picking up Waifs at
Sea" in "Tom Tiddler’s Ground" and tells of two infants whose identities are confused. The
heavier of the two infants is assigned to a prosperous family and prospers in the world. The
lighter baby is given to a poor family and fails in the world. Thus, because of a matter of
ounces is destiny set. for "such is destiny, and such is life." Retitled "The Fatal Cradle" Collins
later published it as a separate story.
[2] Some of the clues may involve the phrase "Tom Tiddler’s ground." It is from an old
nursery rhyme and came to mean a place where you can pick up gold and silver (or riches)
easily.
9
Afterward
By Edith Wharton
Chapter 1
“Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June
garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the
December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne,
in reference to the very house of which the library in question was the central, the pivotal “feature.” Mary
Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had,
on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in
her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: “Well, there’s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo’s cousins, and you can
get it for a song.”
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms — its remoteness from a station, its lack
of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities — were exactly those pleading in its favor with
two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their
tradition, with unusual architectural felicities.
11
“I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable,” Ned
Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted; “the least hint of ‘convenience’ would make
me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again.” And they
had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to
believe that the house their cousin recommended was really Tudor till they learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply.
“It’s too uncomfortable to be true!” Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse
to distrust: “And the ghost? You’ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!”
Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of several
sets of independent perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida’s answering hilarity.
“Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.”
“Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to
see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?”
His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back tantalizingly: “Oh,
there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
“Never know it?” Boyne pulled her up. “But what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of
its being known for one?”
“I can’t say. But that’s the story.”
“That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?”
“Well — not till afterward, at any rate.”
12
“Till afterward?”
“Not till long, long afterward.”
“But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t its
signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?”
Alida could only shake her head. “Don’t ask me. But it has.”
“And then suddenly — “ Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of divination — “suddenly,
long afterward, one says to one’s self, ‘That was it?’”
She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the banter of the other
two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida’s clear pupils. “I suppose so. One just has
to wait.”
“Oh, hang waiting!” Ned broke in. “Life’s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect.
Can’t we do better than that, Mary?”
But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had actually begun for them.
It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded fireplace, under just such black
oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude:
it was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen
years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had
put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant
their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities. She
13
had her vision of painting and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the production of his long-planned book on the “Economic Basis of Culture”; and with such absorbing work ahead no
existence could be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough
into the past.
Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of remoteness out of all proportion to
its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island — a nest of counties, as they put it — that for the production of its effects so little of a
given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.
“It’s that,” Ned had once enthusiastically explained, “that gives such depth to their effects, such relief
to their least contrasts. They’ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful.”
The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house, hidden under a shoulder of
the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was
neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in its special sense — the sense
of having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid
order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell,
hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the
occasional brush of an intenser memory.
The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when, waiting in the library for
the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had
gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred
to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude
the problems left from the morning’s work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been there in his engineering days.
Then he had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of “worry” had never branded
14
his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her — the introduction, and a synopsis of the opening
chapter — gave evidences of a firm possession of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.
The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with “business” and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health,
then? But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only within a week that she had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless in
his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a secret to keep from him!
The thought that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden smart rap of
wonder, and she looked about her down the dim, long room.
“Can it be the house?” she mused.
The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling
themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the
dusky walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.
“Why, of course — the house is haunted!” she reflected.
The ghost — Alida’s imperceptible ghost — after figuring largely in the banter of their first month or
two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as
became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but,
beyond a vague, “They du say so, Ma’am,” the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had
apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had
laughingly set the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few
houses good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.
“And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that’s why it beats its beautiful wings in vain in the void,”
Mary had laughingly concluded.
15
“Or, rather,” Ned answered, in the same strain, “why, amid so much that’s ghostly, it can never
affirm its separate existence as the ghost.” And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out
of their references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.
Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her with a new sense
of its meaning — a sense gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but
secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close enough communion with the house, one
might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on one’s own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary
hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired it already,
and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in
the code of the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to do so was
almost as great a breach of good-breeding as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really
satisfy her. “What, after all, except for the fun of the frisson,” she reflected, “would he really care for any of
their old ghosts?” And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that
one’s greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when
one did see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it.
“Not till long afterward,” Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned had seen one when they first
came, and had known only within the last week what had happened to him? More and more under the spell
of the hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the early days of their tenancy, but at first only to
recall a gay confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the house as treasure after treasure of their habitation revealed itself to them. It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing
from the first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had pressed (like
a novel heroine) a panel that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to an unsuspected flat
ledge of the roof — the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
practised feet to scale.
16
The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down to snatch Ned from his
papers and give him the freedom of her discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge,
he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and
then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow
of the cedar on the lawn.
“And now the other way,” he had said, gently turning her about within his arm; and closely pressed
to him, she had absorbed, like some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled court, the squat
lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the highroad under the downs.
It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt his arm relax, and heard a
sharp “Hullo!” that made her turn to glance at him.
Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow of anxiety, of perplexity,
rather, fall across his face; and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man — a man in loose, grayish
clothes, as it appeared to her — who was sauntering down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative
gait of a stranger seeking his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness and grayness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its garb; but her
husband had apparently seen more — seen enough to make him push past her with a sharp “Wait!” and
dash down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for the descent.
A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch at the chimney against which
they had been leaning, to follow him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the attic landing she
paused again for a less definite reason, leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the silence
of the brown, sun-flecked depths below. She lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the
closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow flights of steps till she reached
the lower hall.
The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and hall and court were empty. The
library door was open, too, and after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she quickly crossed
17
the threshold, and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.
He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the shadow of anxiety had passed from
his face, leaving it even, as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.
“What was it? Who was it?” she asked.
“Who?” he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.
“The man we saw coming toward the house.”
He seemed honestly to reflect. “The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters; I dashed after him to say a
word about the stable-drains, but he had disappeared before I could get down.”
“Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.”
Boyne shrugged his shoulders. “So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the interval. What do
you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?”
That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing, had, indeed, been immediately
obliterated by the magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was
the mere fact of the other incident’s having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept
it stored away in the unconscious fold of association from which it now emerged; for in itself it had no mark
of the portentous. At the moment there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash
himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they were always on the
watch for one or the other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for them, and
dashing out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the distance the gray figure
had looked like Peters.
Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband’s explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious?
18
Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with that authority on the subject of the stabledrains, had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one of these
considerations had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now marshaled
themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that they must all along have been there, waiting their
hour.
Chapter 2
Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library was now completely dark, and
she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world still held.
As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in the tapering perspective of bare
lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her
heart thumped to the thought, “It’s the ghost!”
She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two months earlier, she
had a brief distant vision from the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not
having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the
next tick of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak
sight as her husband’s; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly.
“It’s really too absurd,” she laughed out from the threshold, “but I never can remember!”
“Remember what?” Boyne questioned as they drew together.
“That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.”
Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his gesture or in the lines
of his fagged, preoccupied face.
“Did you think you’d seen it?” he asked, after an appreciable interval.
19
“Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!”
“Me — just now?” His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo of her laugh.
“Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if that’s the best you can do.”
“Yes, I give it up — I give it up. Have you?” she asked, turning round on him abruptly.
The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne’s face as he
bent above the tray she presented.
“Have you?” Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination.
“Have I what?” he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his
brows as he turned over the letters.
“Given up trying to see the ghost.” Her heart beat a little at the experiment she was making.
Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the hearth.
“I never tried,” he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.
“Well, of course,” Mary persisted, “the exasperating thing is that there’s no use trying, since one can’t
be sure till so long afterward.”
He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a pause, during which the sheets
rustled spasmodically between his hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, “Have you any idea how long?”
Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat she looked up, startled, at her
husband’s profile, which was darkly projected against the circle of lamplight.
20
“No; none. Have you?” she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added keenness of intention.
Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned back with it toward the
lamp.
“Lord, no! I only meant,” he explained, with a faint tinge of impatience, “is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?”
“Not that I know of,” she answered; but the impulse to add, “What makes you ask?” was checked by
the reappearance of the parlor-maid with tea and a second lamp.
With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her solitary afternoon.
For a few moments she gave herself silently to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she
was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her husband’s face. He had seated himself near
the farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something he had found in them,
or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The
longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The lines of painful tension had vanished,
and such traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort. He
glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.
“I’m dying for my tea, you know; and here’s a letter for you,” he said.
She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she proffered him, and, returning to her seat,
broke the seal with the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all inclosed in the circle of one
cherished presence.
Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the letter falling to them as she rose,
while she held out to her husband a long newspaper clipping.
21
“Ned! What’s this? What does it mean?”
He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage, across the
space between her chair and his desk.
“What’s what? You fairly made me jump!” Boyne said at length, moving toward her with a sudden,
half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.
Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.
“This article — from the ‘Waukesha Sentinel’ — that a man named Elwell has brought suit against
you — that there was something wrong about the Blue Star Mine. I can’t understand more than half.”
They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment, she saw that her words had
the almost immediate effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.
“Oh, that!” He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with the gesture of one who handles
something harmless and familiar. “What’s the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you’d got
bad news.”
She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under the reassuring touch of his
composure.
“You knew about this, then — it’s all right?”
“Certainly I knew about it; and it’s all right.”
“But what is it? I don’t understand. What does this man accuse you of?”
“Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.” Boyne had tossed the clipping down, and thrown
22
himself comfortably into an arm-chair near the fire. “Do you want to hear the story? It’s not particularly
interesting — just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star.”
“But who is this Elwell? I don’t know the name.”
“Oh, he’s a fellow I put into it — gave him a hand up. I told you all about him at the time.”
“I daresay. I must have forgotten.” Vainly she strained back among her memories. “But if you helped
him, why does he make this return?”
“Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over. It’s all rather technical and
complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.”
His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife’s detachment
from her husband’s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne’s report of the transactions in which his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt
from the first that, in a community where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
efforts as arduous as her husband’s professional labors, such brief leisure as they could command should be
used as an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once
or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if she
had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of an
active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was built.
She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure of his face; yet she felt the
need of more definite grounds for her reassurance.
“But doesn’t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about it?”
He answered both questions at once: “I didn’t speak of it at first because it did worry me — annoyed
me, rather. But it’s all ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of the
‘Sentinel.’”
23
She felt a quick thrill of relief. “You mean it’s over? He’s lost his case?”
There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne’s reply. “The suit’s been withdrawn — that’s all.”
But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of being too easily put off.
“Withdrawn because he saw he had no chance?”
“Oh, he had no chance,” Boyne answered.
She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts.
“How long ago was it withdrawn?”
He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. “I’ve just had the news now; but I’ve
been expecting it.”
“Just now — in one of your letters?”
“Yes; in one of my letters.”
She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of waiting, that he had risen, and
strolling across the room, had placed himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm
about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek,
she met the smiling clearness of his eyes.
“It’s all right — it’s all right?” she questioned, through the flood of her dissolving doubts; and “I give
you my word it never was righter!” he laughed back at her, holding her close.
Chapter 3
One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the next day’s incredible strangeness
was the sudden and complete recovery of her sense of security.
24
It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it accompanied her down-stairs to
the breakfast-table, flashed out at her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the
urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused
apprehensions of the previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper article,
as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past, – had between them liquidated
the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband’s affairs, it
was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and
his right to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and suspicion. She had
never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the
cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking
doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.
It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that surprised her almost with a touch of
summer when she issued from the house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk,
indulging herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his
mouth, above his papers, and now she had her own morning’s task to perform. The task involved on such
charmed winter days almost as much delighted loitering about the different quarters of her demesne as if
spring were already at work on shrubs and borders. There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before
her, such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place, without a single irreverent touch of
alteration, that the winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her
recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the sweet,
still place. She went first to the kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns
on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was
something wrong about the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester,
who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp
heat of the greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned exotics, -- even
the flora of Lyng was in the note! -- she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day being too
rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again and paced slowly along the springy turf of the
bowling-green to the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass terrace, commanding, over
25
the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a view of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and the
blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale gold moisture of the air.
Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its
open windows and hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly
ripened on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it,
such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, “for one’s good,” so complete a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned’s into the harmonious pattern of the long, long story
it sat there weaving in the sun.
She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener, accompanied by the engineer
from Dorchester. But only one figure was in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man, who, for reasons
she could not on the spot have specified, did not remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority
on hot-house boilers. The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a gentleman
— perhaps a traveler — desirous of having it immediately known that his intrusion is involuntary. The local
fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the
stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing it. But he made no gesture of any sort,
and after a moment she asked, in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his attitude: “Is there
any one you wish to see?”
“I came to see Mr. Boyne,” he replied. His intonation, rather than his accent, was faintly American,
and Mary, at the familiar note, looked at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his
face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving “on
business,” and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.
Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but she was jealous of her husband’s
morning hours, and doubtful of his having given any one the right to intrude on them.
“Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?” she asked.
He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.
26
“Not exactly an appointment,” he replied.
“Then I’m afraid, this being his working-time, that he can’t receive you now. Will you give me a message, or come back later?”
The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would come back later, and walked away, as if
to regain the front of the house. As his figure receded down the walk between the yew hedges, Mary saw
him pause and look up an instant at the peaceful house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck
her, with a tardy touch of compunction, that it would have been more humane to ask if he had come from a
distance, and to offer, in that case, to inquire if her husband could receive him. But as the thought occurred
to her he passed out of sight behind a pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was distracted
by the approach of the gardener, attended by the bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from
Dorchester.
The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues that they resulted in his finding it
expedient to ignore his train, and beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed
confabulation among the greenhouses. She was startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly
luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to
meet her. But she found no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and the hall, when
she entered it, was so silent that she guessed Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.
Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there, at her writing-table, lost
herself in renewed calculations of the outlay to which the morning’s conference had committed her. The
knowledge that she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast
to the vague apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the
sense that, as Ned had said, things in general had never been “righter.”
She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused
her with a dubiously worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their jokes that
Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers,
merely murmured an absent-minded assent.
27
She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed
the hall, and went to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb
her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his normal measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, the esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus
impelled, opened the door and went into the library.
Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him at the book-shelves,
somewhere down the length of the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to
her that he was not in the library.
She turned back to the parlor-maid.
“Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.”
The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obeying
orders and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid upon her. The struggle
resulted in her saying doubtfully, “If you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne’s not up-stairs.”
“Not in his room? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Madam.”
Mary consulted the clock. “Where is he, then?”
“He’s gone out,” Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has respectfully waited for the
question that a well-ordered mind would have first propounded.
Mary’s previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to the gardens to meet her,
and since she had missed him, it was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of
going round to the court. She crossed the hall to the glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but
28
the parlor-maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out recklessly, “Please, Madam,
Mr. Boyne didn’t go that way.”
Mary turned back. “Where did he go? And when?”
“He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam.” It was a matter of principle with Trimmle
never to answer more than one question at a time.
“Up the drive? At this hour?” Mary went to the door herself, and glanced across the court through
the long tunnel of bare limes. But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering the
house.
“Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?” she asked.
Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos.
“No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman.”
“The gentleman? What gentleman?” Mary wheeled about, as if to front this
new factor.
“The gentleman who called, Madam,” said Trimmle, resignedly.
“When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!”
Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult her husband about the
greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she
was detached enough to note in Trimmle’s eye the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who has
been pressed too hard.
“I couldn’t exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn’t let the gentleman in,” she replied, with the
air of magnanimously ignoring the irregularity of her mistress’s course.
29
“You didn’t let him in?”
“No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes —”
“Go and ask Agnes, then,” Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her look of patient magnanimity.
“Agnes would not know, Madam, for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of the new
lamp from town — “ Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new lamp — “and so
Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.”
Mary looked again at the clock. “It’s after two! Go and ask the kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any
word.”
She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought her there the kitchenmaid’s statement that the gentleman had called about one o’clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with him
without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller’s name, for he had written it
on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr.
Boyne.
Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over, and Trimmle had brought the
coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike
Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the
visitor whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary
Boyne’s experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep irregular
hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne’s withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years,
with their “stand-up” lunches and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he cultivated the
last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife’s fancy for the unexpected; and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.
Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne’s
precautions would sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome
visit by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.
30
This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her
conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she
turned toward home, the early twilight was setting in.
She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had probably returned from
the station by the highroad, there was little likelihood of their meeting on the way. She felt sure, however,
of his having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without even pausing
to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an
unwonted precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the papers on her husband’s desk lay
precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to luncheon.
Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind
her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape
and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained
through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the
recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate
pull.
The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and Mary breathed
again at this sobering reappearance of the usual.
“You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in,” she said, to justify her ring.
“Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in,” said Trimmle, putting down the
lamp.
“Not in? You mean he’s come back and gone out again?”
“No, Madam. He’s never been back.”
The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.
“Not since he went out with — the gentleman?”
31
“Not since he went out with the gentleman.”
“But who was the gentleman?” Mary gasped out, with the sharp note of some one trying to be heard
through a confusion of meaningless noises.
“That I couldn’t say, Madam.” Trimmle, standing there by the lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less
round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.
“But the kitchen-maid knows — wasn’t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?”
“She doesn’t know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded paper.”
Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating the unknown visitor by a
vague pronoun, instead of the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the
bounds of custom. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.
“But he must have a name! Where is the paper?”
She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered documents that littered it. The first that
caught her eye was an unfinished letter in her husband’s hand, with his pen lying across it, as though
dropped there at a sudden summons.
“My dear Parvis,” — who was Parvis? -- “I have just received your letter announcing Elwell’s death,
and while I suppose there is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer —”
She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded paper was discoverable among
the letters and pages of manuscript which had been swept together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.
“But the kitchen-maid saw him. Send her here,” she commanded, wondering at her dullness in not
thinking sooner of so simple a solution.
32
Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her questions
pat.
The gentleman was a stranger, yes — that she understood. But what had he said? And, above all,
what had he looked like? The first question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that
he had said so little — had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling something on a bit of paper, had
requested that it should at once be carried in to him.
“Then you don’t know what he wrote? You’re not sure it was his name?”
The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written it in answer to her inquiry
as to whom she should announce.
“And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?”
The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but she could not be sure, for just
as she had handed him the paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen together.
“But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they went out of the house?”
This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by
Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross
the hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front
door together.
“Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what he looked like.”
But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became clear that the limit of the kitchenmaid’s endurance had been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to “show in” a visitor was in
itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless disar33
ray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting efforts at evocation, “His hat, mum, was different-like, as you might say —”
“Different? How different?” Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in the same instant, leaping back
to an image left on it that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent impressions.
“His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale — a youngish face?” Mary pressed her,
with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this
challenge, it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger
– the stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her
that it was he who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he, and why had
Boyne obeyed his call?
Chapter 4
It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they had often called England so little—
“such a confoundedly hard place to get lost in.”
A confoundedly hard place to get lost in! That had been her husband’s phrase. And now, with the
whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne’s name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that
wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact,
populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of
abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife’s anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something they would never know!
In the fortnight since Boyne’s disappearance there had been no word of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid had seen him leave the house, and no one else had seen “the
gentleman” who accompanied him. All inquiries in the neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a
stranger’s presence that day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either alone
34
or in company, in any of the neighboring villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the local
railway-stations. The sunny English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into
Cimmerian night.
Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its highest pressure, had ransacked
her husband’s papers for any trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown
to her, that might throw a faint ray into the darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of
Boyne’s life, they had disappeared as completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his
name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except — if it were indeed an exception — the letter
which Boyne had apparently been in the act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter, read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded little enough for conjecture to
feed on.
“I have just heard of Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther risk of trouble, it
might be safer — “That was all. The “risk of trouble” was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which
had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote it,
to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he had assured his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself declared that the plaintiff was dead. It took several weeks of exhaustive
cabling to fix the identity of the “Parvis” to whom the fragmentary communication was addressed, but even
after these inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the Elwell suit were
elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely
as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable to divine with what object
Boyne intended to seek his assistance.
This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight’s feverish search, was not increased by a jot
during the slow weeks that followed. Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she
had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It was as
though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance
as the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal gait. And so with the human imagina35
tions at work on the dark event. No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew
less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.
Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It still swayed with
the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were
moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but
holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence
as one of the fixed conditions of life.
These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence.
She watched the familiar routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless
processes of civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the
routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in
which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of “change.” Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her
husband would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up
about this imaginary state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish inclosing
her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had
gone out of her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold. She had even
renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the press,
the police, and her own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of
horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.
No, she would never know what had become of him — no one would ever know. But the house
knew; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had
been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and
follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were
moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out into some
36
audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng
was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its very legend proved
that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised.
And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any
human means.
Chapter 5
“I don’t say it wasn’t straight, yet don’t say it was straight. It was business.”
Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at the speaker.
When, half an hour before, a card with “Mr. Parvis” on it had been brought up to her, she had been
immediately aware that the name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the
head of Boyne’s unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with
a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person
to whom her husband’s last known thought had been directed.
Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble – in the manner of a man who has his watch in his hand –
had set forth the object of his visit. He had “run over” to England on business, and finding himself in the
neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without
asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell’s family.
The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary’s bosom. Did her visitor, after all,
know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and
noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject. Was it possible that she
really knew as little as she said?
“I know nothing — you must tell me,” she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to
unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare
on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant specu37
lation at the cost of “getting ahead” of some one less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity
was young Robert Elwell, who had “put him on” to the Blue Star scheme.
Parvis, at Mary’s first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his impartial glasses.
“Bob Elwell wasn’t smart enough, that’s all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served
Boyne the same way. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it’s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest,” said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.
Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame; it was as though the words
on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.
“But then — you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?”
Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. “Oh, no, I don’t. I don’t even say it wasn’t
straight.” He glanced up and down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with
the definition he sought. “I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.”
After all, no definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.
Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.
“But Mr. Elwell’s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I suppose the suit was withdrawn
by their advice.”
“Oh, yes, they knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, technically. It was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You see, he’d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and
he was up a tree. That’s why he shot himself when they told him he had no show.”
The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.
“He shot himself? He killed himself because of that?”
38
“Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.” Parvis emitted the
statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its “record.”
“You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?”
“Oh, he didn’t have to try again,” said Parvis, grimly.
They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glass thoughtfully about his finger, she,
motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.
“But if you knew all this,” she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, “how is
it that when I wrote you at the time of my husband’s disappearance you said you didn’t understand his letter?”
Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. “Why, I didn’t understand it — strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.”
Mary continued to scrutinize him. “Then why are you telling me now?”
Still Parvis did not hesitate. “Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to — I
mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s
been raked up again. And I thought, if you didn’t know, you ought to.”
She remained silent, and he continued: “You see, it’s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell’s
affairs were in. His wife’s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and
taking sewing at home, when she got too sick — something with the heart, I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help.
That attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody
out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and
people began to wonder why —”
39
Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. “Here,” he continued, “here’s an account of the whole
thing from the ‘Sentinel’ — a little sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.”
He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening
when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the “Sentinel” had first shaken the depths of her
security.
As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring head-lines, “Widow of Boyne’s Victim
Forced to Appeal for Aid,” ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that
she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the
sharpness of the pain.
“I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down —” she heard Parvis continue.
She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man,
slightly built, in rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim.
Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and
ears. Then she gave a cry.
“This is the man — the man who came for my husband!”
She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner
of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself,
and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.
“It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a
scream.
Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless, fog-muffled windings.
40
“Mrs. Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a glass of water?”
“No, no, no!” She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically clenching the newspaper. “I tell you,
it’s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!”
Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. “It can’t be, Mrs. Boyne. It’s
Robert Elwell.”
“Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space. “Then it was Robert Elwell who came
for him.”
“Came for Boyne? The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying
a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. “Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you
remember?”
Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.
“Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me — the one you found on his desk that day? It
was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.” She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice.
“Surely you remember that!” he urged her.
Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to
her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words — words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or
had imagined that they might one day live there.
“This was the man who spoke to me,” she repeated.
She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he imagined to be
41
an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. “He thinks me mad; but I’m
not mad,” she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.
She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice to keep its
habitual level; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: “Will you answer me one question, please? When
was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?”
“When — when?” Parvis stammered.
“Yes; the date. Please try to remember.”
She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. “I have a reason,” she insisted gently.
“Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.”
“I want the date,” she repeated.
Parvis picked up the newspaper. “We might see here,” he said, still humoring her. He ran his eyes
down the page. “Here it is. Last October — the —”
She caught the words from him. “The 20th, wasn’t it?” With a sharp look at her, he verified. “Yes, the
20th. Then you did know?”
“I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday, the 20th — that was the day he
came first.”
Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came here first?”
“Yes.”
“You saw him twice, then?”
“Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first on the 20th of October. I
remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.” She felt a faint gasp
42
of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.
Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.
“We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the lime-avenue toward the house. He
was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead
of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.”
“Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.
“Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t think what had happened. I see
now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough – he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two
months; and then he came back again — and Ned went with him.”
She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully worked out a difficult
puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.
“Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned — I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!” she screamed
out.
She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long
way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch,
she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida
Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.
“You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”
The End
43
A Note on Edith Wharton and “Afterward”
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) is considered a "major literary writer" for her elegantly written, tightlyplotted novels about the very rich, but she also produced a small but superior sheaf of supernatural stories.
But she did not always care for ghost stories herself. Wharton claimed she was overwhelmingly frightened
of horror stories until early in her twenties. She could not sleep in a room that contained a volume of scary
stories and even burned books to rid herself of dread. Later influenced by her friend and mentor Henry
James, Wharton became one of the best ghost story writers herself.
Her ghost stories and her "literary" works had one thing in common other than her pleasing prose –
the theme of women who were restricted in their choices, options, movements, and ability to lead meaningful lives. Many of her female protagonists are like Mary Boyne in "Afterward" – privileged but trapped.
Although her marriage is apparently perfect, Mary actually shares little of true importance with her husband, Ned, and knows nothing of his life or of the material foundation on which her happiness is built.
This forced innocence leaves Mary completely dependent – and her dependency leads to selfdeception. We discover there are many ghosts in the Boynes's lives, ghosts that Mary never realizes are
there "till long, long afterward." Wharton also leaves us with a question concerning Mary's self-declared
assumption of guilt in her husband's disappearance: "Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned – I told him where to
go! I sent him to this room!" Mary did not tell the mysterious man where to find Ned. She told him only,
"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't receive you now. Will you give me a message, or
come back later?" It is the kitchen-maid who takes the message from the stranger to Mr Boyne and she
who the visitor "followed" into the library.
Wharton's own life was an example that even a woman of remarkable intelligence, talent, and more
than adequate means had to overcome near-impossible barriers in order to work and lead a rewarding life.
Born Edith Newbold Jones into a New England family of wealth and social prominence, she read extensively on her own from her father's library and was also tutored by governesses. An exceptionally bright
child, she made up her own stories and began writing as an adolescent.
44
At age twenty-three, she married Edward ("Teddy") Wharton, a fellow upper-crust socialite. But
Teddy had little in common with the creative and intellectual wife and the marriage was a disaster. (In later
years his mental instability also became apparent.)
Wharton found writing difficult after marriage and did not publish her first book of fiction until she
was thirty-six. Greatly conflicted in her dual roles of professional writer and society matron, she suffered
from a depression for which she was treated in the 1890s.
She eventually settled in France where writers and artists socialized with the well-to-do and wellborne and where women played a major role in creative circles. In 1908 Wharton began an intellectually
and sexually fulfilling affair with Morton Fullerton, a journalist friend of Henry James's. (She eventually
divorced Teddy Wharton in 1913.) During World War I she headed the Children of Flanders Rescue
Committee, which enabled 600 orphans to escape from Belgium. She received the French Legion of Honor
for this work. Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Age of Innocence in 1920. She also was the
first woman (1923) to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale.
45
( . .
)
Conradin was ten years old, and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy
would not live another five years. The doctor was silky and effete, and counted for little, but his opinion was
endorsed by Mrs. De Ropp, who counted for nearly everything. Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin's cousin and
guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable
and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his
imagination. One of these days Conradin supposed he would succumb to the mastering pressure of wearisome necessary things – such as illnesses and coddling restrictions and drawn-out dulness. Without his
imagination, which was rampant under the spur of loneliness, he would have succumbed long ago.
Mrs. De Ropp would never, in her honestest moments, have confessed to herself that she disliked
Conradin, though she might have been dimly aware that thwarting him ``for his good'' was a duty which
she did not find particularly irksome. Conradin hated her with a desperate sincerity which he was perfectly
able to mask. Such few pleasures as he could contrive for himself gained an added relish from the likelihood
that they would be displeasing to his guardian, and from the realm of his imagination she was locked out--an unclean thing, which should find no entrance.
In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction. The few fruittrees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of
their kind blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a market-gardener who
would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce. In a forgotten corner, however, almost hid47
den behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its walls
Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral. He had
peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history and partly from his
own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood. In one corner lived a ragged-plumaged
Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet. Further back in the
gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars.
This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all,
into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver. Conradin was dreadfully
afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession. Its very presence in the
tool-shed was a secret and fearful joy, to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the Woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin. And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful
name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion. The Woman indulged in religion once a
week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the
House of Rimmon. Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with
mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret. Red
flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god
who laid some special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman's religion,
which, as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction. And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of his hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the
nutmeg had to be stolen. These festivals were of irregular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event. On one occasion, when Mrs. De Ropp suffered from acute toothache for three
days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that Sredni Vashtar was personally responsible for the toothache. If the malady had lasted for another
day the supply of nutmeg would have given out.
The Houdan hen was never drawn into the cult of Sredni Vashtar. Conradin had long ago settled that
she was an Anabaptist. He did not pretend to have the remotest knowledge as to what an Anabaptist was,
but he privately hoped that it was dashing and not very respectable. Mrs. De Ropp was the ground plan on
which he based and detested all respectability.
48
After a while Conradin's absorption in the tool-shed began to attract the notice of his guardian. `It is
not good for him to be pottering down there in all weathers,'' she promptly decided, and at breakfast one
morning she announced that the Houdan hen had been sold and taken away overnight. With her shortsighted eyes she peered at Conradin, waiting for an outbreak of rage and sorrow, which she was ready to
rebuke with a flow of excellent precepts and reasoning. But Conradin said nothing: there was nothing to be
said. Something perhaps in his white set face gave her a momentary qualm, for at tea that afternoon there
was toast on the table, a delicacy which she usually banned on the ground that it was bad for him; also
because the making of it “gave trouble,” a deadly offence in the middle-class feminine eye.
“I thought you liked toast”' she exclaimed, with an injured air, observing that he did not touch it.
“Sometimes,” said Conradin.
In the shed that evening there was an innovation in the worship of the hutch-god. Conradin had
been wont to chant his praises, tonight be asked a boon.
“Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
The thing was not specified. As Sredni Vashtar was a god he must be supposed to know. And choking
back a sob as he looked at that other empty comer, Conradin went back to the world he so hated.
And every night, in the welcome darkness of his bedroom, and every evening in the dusk of the toolshed, Conradin's bitter litany went up: “Do one thing for me, Sredni Vashtar.”
Mrs. De Ropp noticed that the visits to the shed did not cease, and one day she made a further journey of inspection.
“What are you keeping in that locked hutch?” she asked. “I believe it’s guinea-pigs. I'll have them all
cleared away.”
49
Conradin shut his lips tight, but the Woman ransacked his bedroom till she found the carefully hidden key, and forthwith marched down to the shed to complete her discovery. It was a cold afternoon, and
Conradin had been bidden to keep to the house. From the furthest window of the dining-room the door of
the shed could just be seen beyond the corner of the shrubbery, and there Conradin stationed himself. He
saw the Woman enter, and then be imagined her opening the door of the sacred hutch and peering down
with her short-sighted eyes into the thick straw bed where his god lay hidden. Perhaps she would prod at
the straw in her clumsy impatience. And Conradin fervently breathed his prayer for the last time. But he
knew as he prayed that he did not believe. He knew that the Woman would come out presently with that
pursed smile he loathed so well on her face, and that in an hour or two the gardener would carry away his
wonderful god, a god no longer, but a simple brown ferret in a hutch. And he knew that the Woman would
triumph always as she triumphed now, and that he would grow ever more sickly under her pestering and
domineering and superior wisdom, till one day nothing would matter much more with him, and the doctor
would be proved right. And in the sting and misery of his defeat, he began to chant loudly and defiantly the
hymn of his threatened idol:
Sredni Vashtar went forth,
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death.
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.
And then of a sudden he stopped his chanting and drew closer to the window-pane. The door of the
shed still stood ajar as it had been left, and the minutes were slipping by. They were long minutes, but they
slipped by nevertheless. He watched the starlings running and flying in little parties across the lawn; he
counted them over and over again, with one eye always on that swinging door. A sour-faced maid came in
to lay the table for tea, and still Conradin stood and waited and watched. Hope had crept by inches into his
heart, and now a look of triumph began to blaze in his eyes that had only known the wistful patience of
defeat. Under his breath, with a furtive exultation, he began once again the pæan of victory and devastation.
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And presently his eyes were rewarded: out through that doorway came a long, low, yellow-and-brown beast,
with eyes a-blink at the waning daylight, and dark wet stains around the fur of jaws and throat. Conradin
dropped on his knees. The great polecat-ferret made its way down to a small brook at the foot of the garden, drank for a moment, then crossed a little plank bridge and was lost to sight in the bushes. Such was
the passing of Sredni Vashtar.
“Tea is ready,” said the sour-faced maid; “where is the mistress?”
“She went down to the shed some time ago,” said Conradin. And while the maid went to summon
her mistress to tea, Conradin fished a toasting-fork out of the sideboard drawer and proceeded to toast
himself a piece of bread. And during the toasting of it and the buttering of it with much butter and the slow
enjoyment of eating it, Conradin listened to the noises and silences which fell in quick spasms beyond the
dining-room door. The loud foolish screaming of the maid, the answering chorus of wondering ejaculations
from the kitchen region, the scuttering footsteps and hurried embassies for outside help, and then, after a
lull, the scared sobbings and the shuffling tread of those who bore a heavy burden into the house.
“Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn’t for the life of me!” exclaimed a shrill voice. And
while they debated the matter among themselves, Conradin made himself another piece of toast.
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A Note on Saki and “Sredni Vashtar”
I'm not sure how old I was when I first read "Sredni Vashtar," but it was young enough not to have a
clue as to what a polecat-ferret was. (Ferrets were not common house pets in those days, at least not
where I grew up.) Having only a vague notion it was some sort of vicious beast that a butcher's boy once
owned made the story even more delicious. It also made it slightly more decadent – I half-believed the
mysterious animal really did have godlike powers. As for the aunt, like all wicked stepmothers and cruel
guardians, she deserved a bloody end.
Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pen name of "Saki," was raised, along with his brother
and sister, by a pair of aunts who evidently were almost as awful as Conradin's aunt. They frequently used
the birch rod and whip to inforce their strict rules. Perhaps with "Sredni Vashtar," one of his best-known
short stories, Munro gained a measure of karmic revenge.
The true story of H.H. Munro is almost as colorful as his fiction and ends in one of the true horrors
on the 20th century. He was born in 1870 in Akyab, Burma (now Myamar). Young Hector was the son of a
Scottish inspector-general for the Burma police and his mother died when he was an infant. He and his
older siblings were eventually sent to North Devon to be raised by the two aunts. In 1893 Munro went back
to Burma as an officer in the Colonial Burmese Military Police, but after a bout with malaria, he returned to
England where he started a career as a journalist.
Munro began writing political sketches to accompany the cartoons of Francis Carruthers Gould in
The Westminster Gazette. These satires parodied politicians such as Gladstone, Lloyd George, Arthur
James Balfour, and others. They were later collected and published as The Westminster Alice (the public
characters were depicted as Alice in Wonderland) in 1902. It was at this time Munro adopted the pseudonym "Saki." In the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Saki was the cup bearer to the gods and, as A.J. Langguth
points out in Saki: A Life of H.H. Munro (1981), "when critics searched for the meaning in [his] choice for a
pen name, they quoted only the second and third stanzas. . . " They missed the military meaning of the
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"call to courage in the face of death," which Munro later showed admirably. From 1902 to 1908 he served
as a foreign correspondent in Russia and the Balkans.
His first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire (1900), was a historical study that American critics
greeted with hostility. A collection of short stories, Not-So-Stories came out in 1902 and was followed by
collections Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914),
The Toys of Peace (1919), and The Square Egg (1924); novel The Unbearable Bassington was published
in 1912. Most of his satiric short stories were first published in newspapers.
In the early years of the 20th century, Munro watched the growth of Germany and predicted
inevitable war with the Kaiser. In 1913, he published the novel When William Came, hoping to alert his
countrymen to the threat by showing the consequences of an English defeat.
His more macabre short stories are the most frequently read of his work today, but but the majority
of his writing attacked the Edwardian upper crust with devastatingly acidic wit. The vain foppish Reginald
and Clovis, two of his most famous "heroes,” appeared in a series of stories in which the they trample on
the dying embers of Empire and societal convention. The quips are memorable: "People may say what
they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never
really die." "You can't expect a boy to be vicious until he's been to a good school." "Never be a pioneer. It's
the early Christian that gets the fattest lion." "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation."
According to Noël Coward, who became an admirer of Munro's in the 30s, Saki's "articulate
duchesses sipping China tea on impeccable lawns, his witty, effete young heroes. . . with their gaily irreverent clothing and their preoccupation with oysters, caviar and personal adornment, finally disappeared in the
gunsmoke of 1914." Munro himself disappeared in the smoke of World War I.
After the outbreak of war, the 44-year-old, Munro volunteered in the army as an ordinary soldier. He
refused several offers of a commission, claiming that he could not expect soldiers to follow him unless he
had experience of battle. He wrote his darkly humorous short pieces throughout his time in the trenches. In
September 1916, Munro finally accepted a promotion to Lance Sergeant (full Corporal). The next month,
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October, he was hospitalized by a flare-up of malaria. He spent about a month in the battalion hospital, but
when he heard of an impending attack on the French town of Beaumont-Hamel he returned – still weak
from his illness – to his battalion.
The British had tried to take Beaumont-Hamel beginning July 1 as part of the offensive that became
known as the Battle of the Somme. The assault that day became the bloodiest day of the war. They suffered 57,470 casualties of which 19,240 were fatal. (German dead or wounded totalled 8,000.)
A second major offensive at the Somme was started in mid-September. Over the summer Germans
had strengthened their forces of their apparently impregnable position. The autumn weather – constant
rain and resulting mud – turned the trenches into unendurable mires.
On November 13 at 1:30 A.M., Munro’s battalion the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, marched through the
darkness to their position in the trenches. Just before 6 A.M., the British began their attack.
Around 4 A.M. on the morning of November 14 Munro’s company was ordered out of the trenches to
flank the advancing line. The ground behind them was a deep marsh where soldiers were sinking bellydeep in mud, unable to progress further forward. Munro found a shallow shell crater in which to shelter. A
silence followed the sound on the German barrage and the troops began to relax. One of the men lit a cigarette. Munro shouted, "Put that bloody cigarette out." His voice was followed by the sound of a German
sniper shot. Munro was killed instantly by the bullet through his brain.
In the aftermath, H.H. Munro’s body was never found.
The brutal Somme campaign finally ended on November 16. In the end, only 125 square miles of
bloody mud were gained from the Germans at the cost of 400,000 British Imperial from every nation of the
Commonwealth and 200,000 French casualties. The Germans suffered 450,000 casualties. Somme and
Battle of Verdun were the two greatest military follies of history.
54
By Edgar Allan Poe
TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! but why will you say that I am
mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was the sense of
hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am
I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to tell how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day
and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me.
He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his
eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood
ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus
rid myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You
should have seen how wisely I proceeded – with what caution – with what foresight – with what dissimulation I went to work!
I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night,
about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it – oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an
opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and
then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly
– very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole
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head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! – would a madman have
been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously – oh, so
cautiously – cautiously (for the hinges creaked) – I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the
vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights – every night just at midnight – but I found the eye always
closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye.
And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him,
calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see he would have
been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him
while he slept.
Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand
moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers – of my
sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little
by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps
he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back – but
no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness (for the shutters were close fastened, through
fear of robbers), and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on
steadily, steadily.
I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening,
and the old man sprang up in bed, crying out: "Who's there?"
I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I
did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening; – just as I have done, night after
night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.
Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of
pain or grief – oh no! – it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has
welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I
knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had
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been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever
since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to
himself: "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney – it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "it is merely a
cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions;
but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him. had stalked with his black
shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel – although he neither saw nor heard – to feel the presence of my head within the
room.
When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little – a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it – you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily –
until, at length, a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and full upon the
vulture eye.
It was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see
nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray, as if by instinct, precisely upon the
damned spot.
And now – have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in
cotton. I knew that sound well too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the
beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.
But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how
steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew
quicker and quicker' and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It
grew louder, I say, louder every moment! – do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I
am. And now at the dead hour of night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as
this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the
beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me – the sound
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would be heard by a neighbor! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and
leaped into the room. He shrieked once – once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the
heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat
on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it
ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead.
I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone
dead. His eye would trouble me no more.
If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for
the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.
I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye – not even his – could have
detected anything wrong. There was nothing to wash out – no stain of any kind – no blood-spot whatever. I
had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all – ha! ha!
When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clock – still dark as midnight. As the bell
sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart – for
what had I now to fear? There entered three men, whointroduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbor during the night: suspicion of foul play had been
aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to
search the premises.
I smiled – for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a
dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade
them search – search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure,
undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to
rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat
upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.
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The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and
while I answered cheerily, they chatted familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished
them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct: – it continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the
feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness – until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my
ears.
No doubt I now grew very pale, – but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the
sound increased – and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound – much such a sound as a watch
makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath – and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more
quickly – more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor
to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observation of the men – but the noise steadily
increased. Oh, God; what could I do? I foamed – I raved – I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had
been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew
louder – louder – louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not?
Almighty God! – no, no! They heard! – they suspected – they knew! – they were making a mockery of my
horror! – this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! –
and now – again! – hark! louder! louder! louder!
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! – here, here! – it
is the beating of his hideous heart!"
The End
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A Note on Edgar Allan Poe and “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Excerpted from from an essay, “Poe’s Enduring Fame” on the E.A. Poe Society Web Site
(http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poesfame.htm):
“Given the fickle nature of popularity, we are left to wonder why we continue to read
Poe and why we should we study his works. The answers even to such deceptively simple
questions are rather complicated and subject to a great deal of opinion. One reason Poe is
read so widely is that there is something in his writings for everyone. His works span the
range of human emotions -- joy, passion, hope, rage, despair and, of course, fear. Also, he
appeals to us on many different levels. His superb control of technique is often the most obvious and the most superficial level, one which the majority of Poe's readers unfortunately
never seem to get beyond. In some ways, particularly in his poetry, the technique is such a
strong element that it discourages deeper evaluation. More often, we carelessly think that we
have seen all there is to see in Poe and feel at some point that we have outgrown him.
“Poe is often first encountered in childhood, usually one's early teens, when his notions
of the imminent nature of death and the sweet and sour of existence are generally outside of
the reader's very narrow set of experiences. At that age, it is the mystery, the adventure and
the thrill of a good scare that draw us to Poe. It only takes a few stories, however, to discover
that Poe is not easy to read. Indeed, he demands great effort from his reader, particularly
today where we are accustomed to having our entertainment spoon-fed to us. Some readers
quickly become discouraged by having to look up so many words and because they do not
understand all of Poe's references to classical literature. Others are confused when they discover that Poe's narrators are not always reliable witnesses to the events they describe –
they may be lying, mistaken or even insane. If we stay with Poe or return to his works as
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adults, our changing perspectives may show us a very different view of the same stories. We
begin life full of hope and expectation -- all before us is promise. As we proceed, the bitterness of disappointment grows as many of these promises are not (indeed often cannot) be
met. We are somewhat bolstered by the discovery of unexpected pleasures, but inevitably the
heavy hand of fate must be apparent. All of this can be found in Poe's writings.”
Think Edgar Allan Poe no longer holds any terror for children these days? Try reading "The Tell-Tale
Heart" aloud with a little dramatic flare – it is, after all, a monologue – to some (not too young) children.
Trust me, it still works.
62
The White People
by Arthur Machen
PROLOGUE
“SORCERY and sanctity,” said Ambrose, “these are the only realities. Each is an ecstasy, a withdrawal from the common life.”
Cotgrave listened, interested. He had been brought by a friend to this mouldering house in a northern suburb, through an old garden to the room where Ambrose the recluse dozed and dreamed over his
books.
“Yes,” he went on, “magic is justified of her children. I There are many, I think, who eat dry crusts
and drink water, with a joy infinitely sharper than anything within the experience of the ‘practical’ epicure.”
“You are speaking of the saints?”
“Yes, and of the sinners, too. I think you are falling into the very general error of confining the spiritual world to the supremely good; but the supremely wicked, necessarily, have their portion in it. The merely carnal, sensual man can no more be a great sinner than he can be a great saint. Most of us are just indifferent, mixed-up creatures; we muddle through the world without realizing the meaning and the inner
sense of things, and, consequently, our wickedness and our goodness are alike second-rate, unimportant.”
“And you think the great sinner, then, will be an ascetic, as well as the great saint?”
“Great people of all kinds forsake the imperfect copies and go to the perfect originals. I have no
doubt but that many of the very highest among the saints have never done a ‘good action’ (using the words
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in their ordinary sense). And, on the other hand, there have been those who have sounded the very depths
of sin, who all their lives have never done an ‘ill deed.’”
He went out of the room for a moment, and Cotgrave, in high delight, turned to his friend and
thanked him for the introduction.
“He’s grand,” he said. “I never saw that kind of lunatic before.”
Ambrose returned with more whisky and helped the two men in a liberal manner. He abused the teatotal sect with ferocity, as he handed the seltzer, and pouring out a glass of water for himself, was about to
resume his monologue, when Cotgrave broke in “I can’t stand it, you know,” he said, “your paradoxes are too monstrous. A man may be a great sinner and yet never do anything sinful! Come!”
“You’re quite wrong,” said Ambrose. “I never make paradoxes; I wish I could. I merely said that a
man may have an exquisite taste in Romanée Conti, and yet never have even smelt four ale. That’s all, and
it’s more like a truism than a paradox, isn’t it? Your surprise at my remark is due to the fact that you
haven’t realized what sin is. Oh, yes, there is a sort of connexion between Sin with the capital letter, and
actions which are commonly called sinful: with murder, theft, adultery, and so forth. Much the same connexion that there is between the A, B, C and fine literature. But I believe that the misconception - it is all
but universal - arises in great measure from our looking at the matter through social spectacles. We think
that a man who does evil to us and to his neighbours must be very evil. So he is, from a social standpoint;
but can’t you realize that Evil in its essence is a lonely thing, a passion of the solitary, individual soul?
Really, the average murderer, quâ murderer, is not by any means a sinner in the true sense of the word. He
is simply a wild beast that we have to get rid of to save our own necks from his knife. I should class him
rather with tigers than with sinners.”
“It seems a little strange.”
“I think not. The murderer murders not from positive qualities, but from negative ones; he lacks
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something which non-murderers possess. Evil, of course, is wholly positive - only it is on the wrong side.
You may believe me that sin in its proper sense is very rare; it is probable that there have been far fewer
sinners than saints. Yes, your standpoint is all very well for practical, social purposes; we are naturally
inclined to think that a person who is very disagreeable to us must be a very great sinner! It is very disagreeable to have one’s pocket picked, and we pronounce the thief to be a very great sinner. In truth, he is
merely an undeveloped man. He cannot be a saint, of course; but he may be, and often is, an infinitely better creature than thousands who have never broken a single commandment. He is a great nuisance to us, I
admit, and we very properly lock him up if we catch him; but between his troublesome and unsocial action
and evil - Oh, the connexion is of the weakest.”
It was getting very late. The man who had brought Cotgrave had probably heard all this before, since
he assisted with a bland and judicious smile, but Cotgrave began to think that his “lunatic” was turning into
a sage.
“Do you know,” he said, “you interest me immensely? You think, then, that we do not understand the
real nature of evil?”
“No, I don’t think we do. We over-estimate it and we under-estimate it. We take the very numerous
infractions of our social ‘bye-laws’ - the very necessary and very proper regulations which keep the human
company together - and we get frightened at the prevalence of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ But this is really nonsense.
Take theft, for example. Have you any horror at the thought of Robin Hood, of the Highland caterans of the
seventeenth century, of the moss-troopers, of the company promoters of our day?
“Then, on the other hand, we underrate evil. We attach such an enormous importance to the ‘sin’ of
meddling with our pockets (and our wives) that we have quite forgotten the awfulness of real sin.”
“And what is sin?” said Cotgrave.
“I think I must reply to your question by another. What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat
or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed
with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And sup66
pose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at
night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?
“Well, these examples may give you some notion of what sin really is.”
“Look here,” said the third man, hitherto placid, “you two seem pretty well wound up. But I’m going
home. I’ve missed my tram, and I shall have to walk.”
Ambrose and Cotgrave seemed to settle down more profoundly when the other had gone out into the
early misty morning and the pale light of the lamps.
“You astonish me,” said Cotgrave. “I had never thought of that. If that is really so, one must turn
everything upside down. Then the essence of sin really is - “
“In the taking of heaven by storm, it seems to me,” said Ambrose. “It appears to me that it is simply
an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. You can understand why it
is so rare. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed
or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints,
and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint.”
“There is something profoundly unnatural about Sin? Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly. Holiness requires as great, or almost as great, an effort; but holiness works on lines that
were natural once; it is an effort to recover the ecstasy that was before the Fall. But sin is an effort to gain
the ecstasy and the knowledge that pertain alone to angels and in making this effort man becomes a demon.
I told you that the mere murderer is not therefore a sinner; that is true, but the sinner is sometimes a murderer. Gilles de Raiz is an instance. So you see that while the good and the evil are unnatural to man as he
now is - to man the social, civilized being - evil is unnatural in a much deeper sense than good. The saint
endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In
brief, he repeats the Fall.”
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“But are you a Catholic?” said Cotgrave.
“Yes; I am a member of the persecuted Anglican Church.”
“Then, how about those texts which seem to reckon as sin that which you would set down as a mere
trivial dereliction?”
“Yes; but in one place the word ‘sorcerers’ comes in the same sentence, doesn’t it? That seems to me
to give the key-note. Consider: can you imagine for a moment that a false statement which saves an innocent man’s life is a sin? No; very good, then, it is not the mere liar who is excluded by those words; it is,
above all, the ‘sorcerers’ who use the material life, who use the failings incidental to material life as instruments to obtain their infinitely wicked ends. And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we
are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.”
“But shouldn’t we experience a certain horror - a terror such as you hinted we would experience if a
rose tree sang - in the mere presence of an evil man?”
“We should if we were natural: children and women feel this horror you speak of, even animals experience it. But with most of us convention and civilization and education have blinded and deafened and
obscured the natural reason. No, sometimes we may recognize evil by its hatred of the good - one doesn’t
need much penetration to guess at the influence which dictated, quite unconsciously, the ‘Blackwood’
review of Keats - but this is purely incidental; and, as a rule, I suspect that the Hierarchs of Tophet pass
quite unnoticed, or, perhaps, in certain cases, as good but mistaken men.”
“But you used the word ‘unconscious’ just now, of Keats’ reviewers. Is wickedness ever unconscious?”
“Always. It must be so. It is like holiness and genius in this as in other points; it is a certain rapture
or ecstasy of the soul; a transcendent effort to surpass the ordinary bounds. So, surpassing these, it surpasses also the understanding, the faculty that takes note of that which comes before it. No, a man may be
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infinitely and horribly wicked and never suspect it But I tell you, evil in this, its certain and true sense, is
rare, and I think it is growing rarer.”
“I am trying to get hold of it all,” said Cotgrave. From what you say, I gather that the true evil differs
generically from that which we call evil?”
“Quite so. There is, no doubt, an analogy between the two; a resemblance such as enables us to use,
quite legitimately, such terms as the ‘foot of the mountain’ and the ‘leg of the table.’ And, sometimes, of
course, the two speak, as it were, in the same language. The rough miner, or ‘puddler,’ the untrained, undeveloped ‘tiger-man,’ heated by a quart or two above his usual measure, comes home and kicks his irritating
and injudicious wife to death. He is a murderer. And Gilles de Raiz was a murderer. But you see the gulf
that separates the two? The ‘word,’ if I may so speak, is accidentally the same in each case, but the ‘meaning’ is utterly different. It is flagrant ‘Hobson Jobson’ to confuse the two, or rather, it is as if one supposed
that Juggernaut and the Argonauts had something to do etymologically with one another. And no doubt the
same weak likeness, or analogy, runs between all the ‘social’ sins and the real spiritual sins, and in some
cases, perhaps, the lesser may be ‘schoolmasters’ to lead one on to the greater - from the shadow to the
reality. If you are anything of a Theologian, you will see the importance of all this.”
“I am sorry to say,” remarked Cotgrave, “that I have devoted very little of my time to theology.
Indeed, I have often wondered on what grounds theologians have claimed the title of Science of Sciences for
their favourite study; since the ‘theological’ books I have looked into have always seemed to me to be concerned with feeble and obvious pieties, or with the kings of Israel and Judah. I do not care to hear about
those kings.”
Ambrose grinned.
“We must try to avoid theological discussion,” he said. “I perceive that you would be a bitter disputant. But perhaps the ‘dates of the kings’ have as much to do with theology as the hobnails of the murderous puddler with evil.”
“Then, to return to our main subject, you think that sin is an esoteric, occult thing?”
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“Yes. It is the infernal miracle as holiness is the supernal. Now and then it is raised to such a pitch
that we entirely fail to suspect its existence; it is like the note of the great pedal pipes of the organ, which is
so deep that we cannot hear it. In other cases it may lead to the lunatic asylum, or to still stranger issues.
But you must never confuse it with mere social misdoing. Remember how the Apostle, speaking of the
‘other side,’ distinguishes between ‘charitable’ actions and charity. And as one may give all one’s goods to
the poor, and yet lack charity; so, remember, one may avoid every crime and yet be a sinner”
“Your psychology is very strange to me,” said Cotgrave, “but I confess I like it, and I suppose that one
might fairly deduce from your premises the conclusion that the real sinner might very possibly strike the
observer as a harmless personage enough?”
“Certainly, because the true evil has nothing to do with social life or social laws, or if it has, only incidentally and accidentally. It is a lonely passion of the soul - or a passion of the lonely soul - whichever you
like. If, by chance, we understand it, and grasp its full significance, then, indeed, it will fill us with horror
and with awe. But this emotion is widely distinguished from the fear and the disgust with which we regard
the ordinary criminal, since this latter is largely or entirely founded on the regard which we have for our
own skins or purses. We hate a murder, because we know that we should hate to be murdered, or to have
any one that we like murdered. So, on the ‘other side,’ we venerate the saints, but we don’t ‘like’ them as
well as our friends. Can you persuade yourself that you would have ‘enjoyed’ St. Paul’s company? Do you
think that you and I would have ‘got on’ with Sir Galahad?
“So with the sinners, as with the saints. If you met a very evil man, and recognized his evil; he would,
no doubt, fill you with horror and awe; but there is no reason why you should ‘dislike’ him. On the contrary,
it is quite possible that if you could succeed in putting the sin out of your mind you might find the sinner
capital company, and in a little while you might have to reason yourself back into horror. Still, how awful it
is. If the roses and the lilies suddenly sang on this coming morning; if the furniture began to move in procession, as in De Maupassant’s tale!”
“I am glad you have come back to that comparison,” said Cotgrave, “because I wanted to ask you
what it is that corresponds in humanity to these imaginary feats of inanimate things. In a word - what is
sin? You have given me, I know, an abstract definition, but I should like a concrete example.”
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“I told you it was very rare,” said Ambrose, who appeared willing to avoid the giving of a direct
answer. “The materialism of the age, which has done a good deal to suppress sanctity, has done perhaps
more to suppress evil. We find the earth so very comfortable that we have no inclination either for ascents
or descents. It would seem as if the scholar who decided to ‘specialize’ in Tophet, would be reduced to purely antiquarian researches. No paleontologist could show you a live pterodactyl.”
“And yet you, I think, have ‘specialized,’ and I believe that your researches have descended to our
modern times.”
“You are really interested, I see. Well, I confess, that I have dabbled a little, and if you like I can
show you something that bears on the very curious subject we have been discussing.”
Ambrose took a candle and went away to a far, dim corner of the room. Cotgrave saw him open a
venerable bureau that stood there, and from some secret recess he drew out a parcel, and came back to the
window where they had been sitting.
Ambrose undid a wrapping of paper, and produced a green pocket-book.
“You will take care of it?” he said. “Don’t leave it lying about. It is one of the choicer pieces in my collection, and I should be very sorry if it were lost.”
He fondled the faded binding.
“I knew the girl who wrote this,” he said. “When you read it, you will see how it illustrates the talk we
have had to-night. There is a sequel, too, but I won’t talk of that.
“There was an odd article in one of the reviews some months ago,” he began again, with the air of a
man who changes the subject. “It was written by a doctor - Dr. Coryn, I think, was the name. He says that a
lady, watching her little girl playing at the drawing-room window, suddenly saw the heavy sash give way
and fall on the child’s fingers. The lady fainted, I think, but at any rate the doctor was summoned, and
when he had dressed the child’s wounded and maimed fingers he was summoned to the mother. She was
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groaning with pain, and it was found that three fingers of her hand, corresponding with those that had been
injured on the child’s hand, were swollen and inflamed, and later, in the doctor’s language, purulent
sloughing set in.”
Ambrose still handled delicately the green volume.
“Well, here it is,” he said at last, parting with difficulty, it seemed, from his treasure.
“You will bring it back as soon as you have read it,” he said, as they went out into the hall, into the
old garden, faint with the odour of white lilies.
There was a broad red band in the east as Cotgrave turned to go, and from the high ground where he
stood he saw that awful spectacle of London in a dream.
f THE GREEN BOOK f
The morocco binding of the book was faded, and the colour had grown faint, but there were no stains
nor bruises nor marks of usage. The book looked as if it had been bought “on a visit to London” some seventy or eighty years ago, and had somehow been forgotten and suffered to lie away out of sight. There was
an old, delicate, lingering odour about it, such an odour as sometimes haunts an ancient piece of furniture
for a century or more. The end-papers, inside the binding, were oddly decorated with coloured patterns and
faded gold. It looked small, but the paper was fine, and there were many leaves, closely covered with
minute, painfully formed characters.
I found this book (the manuscript began) in a drawer in the old bureau that stands on
the landing. It was a very rainy day and I could not go out, so in the afternoon I got a candle
and rummaged in the bureau. Nearly all the drawers were full of old dresses, but one of the
small ones looked empty, and I found this book hidden right at the back. I wanted a book like
this, so I took it to write in. It is full of secrets.
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I have a great many other books of secrets I have written, hidden in a safe place, and I
am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall
not put down at all. I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I
found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great
beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs. I may write something about all
these things but not the way to do them, for peculiar reasons. And I must not say who the
Nymphs are, or the Dôls, or Jeelo, or what voolas mean. All these are most secret secrets, and
I am glad when I remember what they are, and how many wonderful languages I know, but
there are some things that I call the secrets of the secrets of the secrets that I dare not think of
unless I am quite alone, and then I shut my eyes, and put my hands over them and whisper
the word, and the Alala comes. I only do this at night in my room or in certain woods that I
know, but I must not describe them, as they are secret woods.
Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more
delightful than others - there are the White Ceremonies, and the Green Ceremonies, and the
Scarlet Ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best, but there is only one place where
they can be performed properly, though there is a very nice imitation which I have done in
other places. Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy
sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn’t understand anything about it. I was
very little when I first knew about these things.
When I was very small, and mother was alive, I can remember remembering things
before that, only it has all got confused. But I remember when I was five or six I heard them
talking about me when they thought I was not noticing. They were saying how queer I was a
year or two before, and how nurse had called my mother to come and listen to me talking all
to myself, and I was saying words that nobody could understand. I was speaking the Xu language, but I only remember a very few of the words, as it was about the little white faces that
used to look at me when I was lying in my cradle. They used to talk to me, and I learnt their
language and talked to them in it about some great white place where they lived, where the
trees and the grass were all white, and there were white hills as high up as the moon, and a
cold wind. I have often dreamed of it afterwards, but the faces went away when I was very little.
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But a wonderful thing happened when I was about five. My nurse was carrying me on
her shoulder; there was a field of yellow corn, and we went through it, it was very hot. Then
we came to a path through a wood, and a tall man came after us, and went with us till we
came to a place where there was a deep pool, and it was very dark and shady. Nurse put me
down on the soft moss under a tree, and she said: “She can’t get to the pond now.”
So they left me there, and I sat quite still and watched, and out of the water and out of
the wood came two wonderful white people, and they began to play and dance and sing. They
were a kind of creamy white like the old ivory figure in the drawing-room; one was a beautiful
lady with kind dark eyes, and a grave face, and long black hair, and she smiled such a strange
sad smile at the other, who laughed and came to her. They played together, and danced round
and round the pool, and they sang a song till I fell asleep.
Nurse woke me up when she came back, and she was looking something like the lady
had looked, so I told her all about it, and asked her why she looked like that. At first she cried,
and then she looked very frightened, and turned quite pale. She put me down on the grass and
stared at me, and I could see she was shaking all over. Then she said I had been dreaming, but
I knew I hadn’t. Then she made me promise not to say a word about it to anybody, and if I did
I should be thrown into the black pit. I was not frightened at all, though nurse was, and I
never forgot about it, because when I shut my eyes and it was quite quiet, and I was all alone,
I could see them again, very faint and far away, but very splendid; and little bits of the song
they sang came into my head, but I couldn’t sing it.
I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, when I had a very singular adventure, so strange that
the day on which it happened is always called the White Day. My mother had been dead for
more than a year, and in the morning I had lessons, but they let me go out for walks in the
afternoon. And this afternoon I walked a new way, and a little brook led me into a new country, but I tore my frock getting through some of the difficult places, as the way was through
many bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets on the hills, and
by dark woods full of creeping thorns. And it was a long, long way. It seemed as if I was going
on for ever and ever, and I had to creep by a place like a tunnel where a brook must have
been, but all the water had dried up, and the floor was rocky, and the bushes had grown over74
head till they met, so that it was quite dark. And I went on and on through that dark place; it
was a long, long way.
And I came to a hill that I never saw before. I was in a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore me as I went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting all
over, and then I found that I was climbing, and I went up and up a long way, till at last the
thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of a big bare place, where there were
ugly grey stones lying all about on the grass, and here and there a little twisted, stunted tree
came out from under a stone, like a snake. And I went up, right to the top, a long way. I never
saw such big ugly stones before; they came out of the earth some of them, and some looked as
if they had been rolled to where they were, and they went on and on as far as I could see, a
long, long way. I looked out from them and saw the country, but it was strange. It was winter
time, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a
large room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different from
any I had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then beyond the woods there were other hills round
in a great ring, but I had never seen any of them; it all looked black, and everything had a
voor over it. It was all so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a wicked
voorish dome in Deep Dendo.
I went on into the dreadful rocks. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some
were like horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would jump at me out of the
stone, and catch hold of me, and drag me with them back into the rock, so that I should
always be there. And there were other rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words that I could not say, and others
like dead people lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and
my heart was full of wicked songs that they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist
myself about in the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks,
and they didn’t frighten me any more.
I sang the songs I thought of; songs full of words that must not be spoken or written
down. Then I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones, and I went up to one that was
grinning, and put my arms round him and hugged him. And so I went on and on through the
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rocks till I came to a round mound in the middle of them. It was higher than a mound, it was
nearly as high as our house, and it was like a great basin turned upside down, all smooth and
round and green, with one stone, like a post, sticking up at the top. I climbed up the sides, but
they were so steep I had to stop or I should have rolled all the way down again, and I should
have knocked against the stones at the bottom, and perhaps been killed.
But I wanted to get up to the very top of the big round mound, so I lay down flat on my
face, and took hold of the grass with my hands and drew myself up, bit by bit, till I was at the
top Then I sat down on the stone in the middle, and looked all round about. I felt I had come
such a long, long way, just as if I were a hundred miles from home, or in some other country,
or in one of the strange places I had read about in the “Tales of the Genie” and the “Arabian
Nights,” or as if I had gone across the sea, far away, for years and I had found another world
that nobody had ever seen or heard of before, or as if I had somehow flown through the sky
and fallen on one of the stars I had read about where everything is dead and cold and grey,
and there is no air, and the wind doesn’t blow.
I sat on the stone and looked all round and down and round about me. It was just as if
I was sitting on a tower in the middle of a great empty town, because I could see nothing all
around but the grey rocks on the ground. I couldn’t make out their shapes any more, but I
could see them on and on for a long way, and I looked at them, and they seemed as if they had
been arranged into patterns, and shapes, and figures. I knew they couldn’t be. because I had
seen a lot of them coming right out of the earth, joined to the deep rocks below, so I looked
again, but still I saw nothing but circles, and small circles inside big ones, and pyramids, and
domes, and spires, and they seemed all to go round and round the place where I was sitting,
and the more I looked, the more I saw great big rings of rocks, getting bigger and bigger, and I
stared so long that it felt as if they were all moving and turning, like a great wheel, and I was
turning, too, in the middle. I got quite dizzy and queer in the head, and everything began to be
hazy and not clear, and I saw little sparks of blue light, and the stones looked as if they were
springing and dancing and twisting as they went round and round and round. I was frightened again, and I cried out loud, and jumped up from the stone I was sitting on, and fell
down.
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When I got up I was so glad they all looked still, and I sat down on the top and slid
down the mound, and went on again. I danced as I went in the peculiar way the rocks had
danced when I got giddy, and I was so glad I could do it quite well, and I danced and danced
along, and sang extraordinary songs that came into my head. At last I came to the edge of that
great flat hill, and there were no more rocks, and the way went again through a dark thicket in
a hollow. It was just as bad as the other one I went through climbing up, but I didn’t mind
this one, because I was so glad I had seen those singular dances and could imitate them. I
went down, creeping through the bushes, and a tall nettle stung me on my leg, and made me
burn, but I didn’t mind it, and I tingled with the boughs and the thorns, but I only laughed
and sang.
Then I got out of the thicket into a close valley, a little secret place like a dark passage
that nobody ever knows of, because it was so narrow and deep and the woods were so thick
round it. There is a steep bank with trees hanging over it, and there the ferns keep green all
through the winter, when they are dead and brown upon the hill, and the ferns there have a
sweet, rich smell like what oozes out of fir trees. There was a little stream of water running
down this valley, so small that I could easily step across it. I drank the water with my hand,
and it tasted like bright, yellow wine, and it sparkled and bubbled as it ran down over beautiful red and yellow and green stones, so that it seemed alive and all colours at once. I drank it,
and I drank more with my hand, but I couldn’t drink enough, so I lay down and bent my head
and sucked the water up with my lips. It tasted much better, drinking it that way, and a ripple
would come up to my mouth and give me a kiss, and I laughed, and drank again, and pretended there was a nymph, like the one in the old picture at home, who lived in the water and was
kissing me. So I bent low down to the water, and put my lips softly to it, and whispered to the
nymph that I would come again. I felt sure it could not be common water, I was so glad when
I got up and went on; and I danced again and went up and up the valley, under hanging hills.
And when I came to the top, the ground rose up in front of me, tall and steep as a wall,
and there was nothing but the green wall and the sky. I thought of “for ever and for ever,
world without end, Amen”; and I thought I must have really found the end of the world,
because it was like the end of everything, as if there could be nothing at all beyond, except the
kingdom of Voor, where the light goes when it is put out, and the water goes when the sun
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takes it away. I began to think of all the long, long way I had journeyed, how I had found a
brook and followed it, and followed it on, and gone through bushes and thorny thickets, and
dark woods full of creeping thorns. Then I had crept up a tunnel under trees, and climbed a
thicket, and seen all the grey rocks, and sat in the middle of them when they turned round,
and then I had gone on through the grey rocks and come down the hill through the stinging
thicket and up the dark valley, all a long, long way.
I wondered how I should get home again, if I could ever find the way, and if my home
was there any more, or if it were turned and everybody in it into grey rocks, as in the “Arabian
Nights.” So I sat down on the grass and thought what I should do next. I was tired, and my
feet were hot with walking, and as I looked about I saw there was a wonderful well just under
the high, steep wall of grass. All the ground round it was covered with bright, green, dripping
moss; there was every kind of moss there, moss like beautiful little ferns, and like palms and
fir trees, and it was all green as jewelry, and drops of water hung on it like diamonds. And in
the middle was the great well, deep and shining and beautiful, so clear that it looked as if I
could touch the red sand at the bottom, but it was far below. I stood by it and looked in, as if I
were looking in a glass. At the bottom of the well, in the middle of it, the red grains of sand
were moving and stirring all the time, and I saw how the water bubbled up, but at the top it
was quite smooth, and full and brimming. It was a great well, large like a bath, and with the
shining, glittering green moss about it, it looked like a great white jewel, with green jewels all
round. My feet were so hot and tired that I took off my boots and stockings, and let my feet
down into the water, and the water was soft and cold, and when I got up I wasn’t tired any
more, and I felt I must go on, farther and farther, and see what was on the other side of the
wall.
I climbed up it very slowly, going sideways all the time, and when I got to the top and
looked over, I was in the queerest country I had seen, stranger even than the hill of the grey
rocks. It looked as if earth-children had been playing there with their spades, as it was all hills
and hollows, and castles and walls made of earth and covered with grass. There were two
mounds like big beehives, round and great and solemn, and then hollow basins, and then a
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steep mounting wall like the ones I saw once by the seaside where the big guns and the soldiers were.
I nearly fell into one of the round hollows, it went away from under my feet so suddenly, and I ran fast down the side and stood at the bottom and looked up. It was strange and
solemn to look up. There was nothing but the grey, heavy sky and the sides of the hollow;
everything else had gone away, and the hollow was the whole world, and I thought that at
night it must be full of ghosts and moving shadows and pale things when the moon shone
down to the bottom at the dead of the night, and the wind wailed up above. It was so strange
and solemn and lonely, like a hollow temple of dead heathen gods. It reminded me of a tale
my nurse had told me when I was quite little; it was the same nurse that took me into the
wood where I saw the beautiful white people. And I remembered how nurse had told me the
story one winter night, when the wind was beating the trees against the wall, and crying and
moaning in the nursery chimney.
She said there was, somewhere or other, a hollow pit, just like the one I was standing
in, everybody was afraid to go into it or near it, it was such a bad place. But once upon a time
there was a poor girl who said she would go into the hollow pit, and everybody tried to stop
her, but she would go.
And she went down into the pit and came back laughing, and said there was nothing
there at all, except green grass and red stones, and white stones and yellow flowers. And soon
after people saw she had most beautiful emerald earrings, and they asked how she got them,
as she and her mother were quite poor. But she laughed, and said her earrings were not made
of emeralds at all, but only of green grass.
Then, one day, she wore on her breast the reddest ruby that any one had ever seen, and
it was as big as a hen’s egg, and glowed and sparkled like a hot burning coal of fire. And they
asked how she got it, as she and her mother were quite poor. But she laughed, and said it was
not a ruby at all, but only a red stone.
Then one day she wore round her neck the loveliest necklace that any one had ever
seen, much finer than the queen’s finest, and it was made of great bright diamonds, hundreds
of them, and they shone like all the stars on a night in June. So they asked her how she got it,
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as she and her mother were quite poor. But she laughed, and said they were not diamonds at
all, but only white stones.
And one day she went to the Court, and she wore on her head a crown of pure angelgold, so nurse said, and it shone like the sun, and it was much more splendid than the crown
the king was wearing himself, and in her ears she wore the emeralds, and the big ruby was the
brooch on her breast, and the great diamond necklace was sparkling on her neck. And the
king and queen thought she was some great princess from a long way off, and got down from
their thrones and went to meet her, but somebody told the king and queen who she was, and
that she was quite poor.
So the king asked why she wore a gold crown, and how she got it, as she and her mother were so poor. And she laughed, and said it wasn’t a gold crown at all, but only some yellow
flowers she had put in her hair. And the king thought it was very strange, and said she should
stay at the Court, and they would see what would happen next. And she was so lovely that
everybody said that her eyes were greener than the emeralds, that her lips were redder than
the ruby, that her skin was whiter than the diamonds, and that her hair was brighter than the
golden crown.
So the king’s son said he would marry her, and the king said he might. And the bishop
married them, and there was a great supper, and after- wards the king’s son went to his wife’s
room. But just when he had his hand on the door, he saw a tall, black man, with a dreadful
face, standing in front of the door, and a voice said –
Venture not upon your life,
This is mine own wedded wife.
Then the king’s son fell down on the ground in a fit. And they came and tried to get
into the room, but they couldn’t, and they hacked at the door with hatchets, but the wood had
turned hard as iron, and at last everybody ran away, they were so frightened at the screaming
and laughing and shrieking and crying that came out of the room. But next day they went in,
and found there was nothing in the room but thick black smoke, because the black man had
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come and taken her away. And on the bed there were two knots of faded grass and a red
stone, and some white stones, and some faded yellow flowers.
I remembered this tale of nurse’s while I was standing at the bottom of the deep hollow; it was so strange and solitary there, and I felt afraid. I could not see any stones or flowers, but I was afraid of bringing them away without knowing, and I thought I would do a
charm that came into my head to keep the black man away. So I stood right in the very middle
of the hollow, and I made sure that I had none of those things on me, and then I walked
round the place, and touched my eyes, and my lips, and my hair in a peculiar manner, and
whispered some queer words that nurse taught me to keep bad things away.
Then I felt safe and climbed up out of the hollow, and went on through all those
mounds and hollows and walls, till I came to the end, which was high above all the rest, and I
could see that all the different shapes of the earth were arranged in patterns, something like
the grey rocks, only the pattern was different. It was getting late, and the air was indistinct,but
it looked from where I was standing something like two great figures of people lying on the
grass.
And I went on, and at last I found a certain wood, which is too secret to be described,
and nobody knows of the passage into it, which I found out in a very curious manner, by seeing some little animal run into the wood through it. So I went after the animal by a very narrow dark way, under thorns and bushes, and it was almost dark when I came to a kind of open
place in the middle.
And there I saw the most wonderful sight I have ever seen, but it was only for a minute,
as I ran away directly, and crept out of the wood by the passage I had come by, and ran and
ran as fast as ever I could, because I was afraid, what I had seen was so wonderful and so
strange and beautiful. But I wanted to get home and think of it, and I did not know what
might not happen if I stayed by the wood.
I was hot all over and trembling, and my heart was beating, and strange cries that I
could not help came from me as I ran from the wood. I was glad that a great white moon came
up from over a round hill and showed me the way, so I went back through the mounds and
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hollows and down the close valley, and up through the thicket over the place of the grey rocks,
and so at last I got home again.
My father was busy in his study, and the servants had not told about my not coming
home, though they were frightened, and wondered what they ought to do, so I told them I had
lost my way, but I did not let them find out the real way I had been.
I went to bed and lay awake all through the night, thinking of what I had seen. When I
came out of the narrow way, and it looked all shining, though the air was dark, it seemed so
certain, and all the way home I was quite sure that I had seen it, and I wanted to be alone in
my room, and be glad over it all to myself, and shut my eyes and pretend it was there, and do
all the things I would have done if I had not been so afraid. But when I shut my eyes the sight
would not come, and I began to think about my adventures all over again, and I remembered
how dusky and queer it was at the end, and I was afraid it must be all a mistake, because it
seemed impossible it could happen. It seemed like one of nurse’s tales, which I didn’t really
believe in, though I was frightened at the bottom of the hollow; and the stories she told me
when I was little came back into my head, and I wondered whether it was really there what I
thought I had seen, or whether any of her tales could have happened a long time ago.
It was so queer; I lay awake there in my room at the back of the house, and the moon
was shining on the other side towards the river, so the bright light did not fall upon the wall.
And the house was quite still. I had heard my father come upstairs, and just after the clock
struck twelve, and after the house was still and empty, as if there was nobody alive in it. And
though it was all dark and indistinct in my room, a pale glimmering kind of light shone in
through the white blind, and once I got up and looked out, and there was a great black shadow of the house covering the garden, looking like a prison where men are hanged; and then
beyond it was all white; and the wood shone white with black gulfs between the trees. It was
still and clear, and there were no clouds on the sky. I wanted to think of what I had seen but I
couldn’t, and I began to think of all the tales that nurse had told me so long ago that I thought
I had forgotten, but they all came back, and mixed up with the thickets and the grey rocks and
the hollows in the earth and the secret wood, till I hardly knew what was new and what was
old, or whether it was not all dreaming.
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And then I remembered that hot summer afternoon, so long ago, when nurse left me by
myself in the shade, and the white people came out of the water and out of the wood, and
played, and danced, and sang, and I began to fancy that nurse told me about something like it
before I saw them, only I couldn’t recollect exactly what she told me. Then I wondered
whether she had been the white lady, as I remembered she was just as white and beautiful,
and had the same dark eyes and black hair; and sometimes she smiled and looked like the
lady had looked, when she was telling me some of her stories, beginning with “Once on a
time,” or “In the time of the fairies.”
But I thought she couldn’t be the lady, as she seemed to have gone a different way into
the wood, and I didn’t think the man who came after us could be the other, or I couldn’t have
seen that wonderful secret in the secret wood.
I thought of the moon: but it was afterwards when I was in the middle of the wild land,
where the earth was made into the shape of great figures, and it was all walls, and mysterious
hollows, and smooth round mounds, that I saw the great white moon come up over a round
hill. I was wondering about all these things, till at last I got quite frightened, because I was
afraid something had happened to me, and I remembered nurse’s tale of the poor girl who
went into the hollow pit, and was carried away at last by the black man. I knew I had gone
into a hollow pit too, and perhaps it was the same, and I had done something dreadful.
So I did the charm over again, and touched my eyes and my lips and my hair in a peculiar manner, and said the old words from the fairy language, so that I might be sure I had not
been carried away. I tried again to see the secret wood, and to creep up the passage and see
what I had seen there, but somehow I couldn’t, and I kept on thinking of nurse’s stories.
There was one I remembered about a young man who once upon a time went hunting,
and all the day he and his hounds hunted everywhere, and they crossed the rivers and went
into all the woods, and went round the marshes, but they couldn’t find anything at all, and
they hunted all day till the sun sank down and began to set behind the mountain. And the
young man was angry because he couldn’t find anything, and he was going to turn back, when
just as the sun touched the mountain, he saw come out of a brake in front of him a beautiful
white stag. And he cheered to his hounds, but they whined and would not follow, and he
cheered to his horse, but it shivered and stood stock still, and the young man jumped off the
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horse and left the hounds and began to follow the white stag all alone. And soon it was quite
dark, and the sky was black, without a single star shining in it, and the stag went away into
the darkness.
And though the man had brought his gun with him he never shot at the stag, because
he wanted to catch it, and he was afraid he would lose it in the night. But he never lost it once,
though the sky was so black and the air was so dark, and the stag went on and on till the
young man didn’t know a bit where he was. And they went through enormous woods where
the air was full of whispers and a pale, dead light came out from the rotten trunks that were
lying on the ground, and just as the man thought he had lost the stag, he would see it all white
and shining in front of him, and he would run fast to catch it, but the stag always ran faster,
so he did not catch it.
And they went through the enormous woods, and they swam across rivers, and they
waded through black marshes where the ground bubbled, and the air was full of will-o’-thewisps, and the stag fled away down into rocky narrow valleys, where the air was like the smell
of a vault, and the man went after it. And they went over the great mountains and the man
heard the wind come down from the sky, and the stag went on and the man went after. At last
the sun rose and the young man found he was in a country that he had never seen before; it
was a beautiful valley with a bright stream running through it, and a great, big round hill in
the middle.
And the stag went down the valley, towards the hill, and it seemed to be getting tired
and went slower and slower, and though the man was tired, too, he began to run faster, and
he was sure he would catch the stag at last. But just as they got to the bottom of the hill, and
the man stretched out his hand to catch the stag, it vanished into the earth, and the man
began to cry; he was so sorry that he had lost it after all his long hunting. But as he was crying
he saw there was a door in the hill, just in front of him, and he went in, and it was quite dark,
but he went on, as he thought he would find the white stag. And all of a sudden it got light,
and there was the sky, and the sun shining, and birds singing in the trees, and there was a
beautiful fountain.
And by the fountain a lovely lady was sitting, who was the queen of the fairies, and she
told the man that she had changed herself into a stag to bring him there because she loved
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him so much. Then she brought out a great gold cup, covered with jewels, from her fairy
palace, and she offered him wine in the cup to drink. And he drank, and the more he drank
the more he longed to drink, because the wine was enchanted. So he kissed the lovely lady,
and she became his wife, and he stayed all that day and all that night in the hill where she
lived, and when he woke he found he was lying on the ground, close to where he had seen the
stag first, and his horse was there and his hounds were there waiting, and he looked up, and
the sun sank behind the mountain.
And he went home and lived a long time, but he would never kiss any other lady
because he had kissed the queen of the fairies, and he would never drink common wine any
more, because he had drunk enchanted wine.
And sometimes nurse told me tales that she had heard from her great-grandmother,
who was very old, and lived in a cottage on the mountain all alone, and most of these tales
were about a hill where people used to meet at night long ago, and they used to play all sorts
of strange games and do queer things that nurse told me of, but I couldn’t understand, and
now, she said, everybody but her great-grandmother had forgotten all about it, and nobody
knew where the hill was, not even her great-grandmother.
But she told me one very strange story about the hill, and I trembled when I remembered it. She said that people always went there in summer, when it was very hot, and they
had to dance a good deal. It would be all dark at first, and there were trees there, which made
it much darker, and people would come, one by one, from all directions, by a secret path
which nobody else knew, and two persons would keep the gate, and every one as they came up
had to give a very curious sign, which nurse showed me as well as she could, but she said she
couldn’t show me properly.
And all kinds of people would come; there would be gentle folks and village folks, and
some old people and boys and girls, and quite small children, who sat and watched. And it
would all be dark as they came in, except in one corner where some one was burning something that smelt strong and sweet, and made them laugh, and there one would see a glaring of
coals, and the smoke mounting up red. So they would all come in, and when the last had come
there was no door any more, so that no one else could get in, even if they knew there was anything beyond.
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And once a gentleman who was a stranger and had ridden a long way, lost his path at
night, and his horse took him into the very middle of the wild country, where everything was
up- side down, and there were dreadful marshes and great stones everywhere, and holes
underfoot, and the trees looked like gibbet-posts, because they had great black arms that
stretched out across the way. And this strange gentleman was very frightened, and his horse
began to shiver all over, and at last it stopped and wouldn’t go any farther, and the gentleman
got down and tried to lead the horse, but it wouldn’t move, and it was all covered with a
sweat, like death.
So the gentleman went on all alone, going farther and farther into the wild country, till
at last he came to a dark place, where he heard shouting and singing and crying, like nothing
he had ever heard before. It all sounded quite close to him, but he couldn’t get in, and so he
began to call, and while he was calling, something came behind him, and in a minute his
mouth and arms and legs were all bound up, and he fell into a swoon. And when he came to
himself, he was lying by the roadside, just where he had first lost his way, under a blasted oak
with a black trunk, and his horse was tied beside him. So he rode on to the town and told the
people there what had happened, and some of them were amazed; but others knew.
So when once everybody had come, there was no door at all for anybody else to pass in
by. And when they were all inside, round in a ring, touching each other, some one began to
sing in the darkness, and some one else would make a noise like thunder with a thing they
had on purpose, and on still nights people would hear the thundering noise far, far away
beyond the wild land, and some of them, who thought they knew what it was, used to make a
sign on their breasts when they woke up in their beds at dead of night and heard that terrible
deep noise, like thunder on the mountains.
And the noise and the singing would go on and on for a long time, and the people who
were in a ring swayed a little to and fro; and the song was in an old, old language that nobody
knows now, and the tune was queer. Nurse said her great-grandmother had known some one
who remembered a little of it, when she was quite a little girl, and nurse tried to sing some of
it to me, and it was so strange a tune that I turned all cold and my flesh crept as if I had put
my hand on something dead.
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Sometimes it was a man that sang and some- times it was a woman, and sometimes the
one who sang it did it so well that two or three of the people who were there fell to the ground
shrieking and tearing with their hands. The singing went on, and the people in the ring kept
swaying to and fro for a long time, and at last the moon would rise over a place they called the
Tole Deol, and came up and showed them swinging and swaying from side to side, with the
sweet thick smoke curling up from the burning coals, and floating in circles all around them.
Then they had their supper. A boy and a girl brought it to them; the boy carried a great cup of
wine, and the girl carried a cake of bread, and they passed the bread and the wine round and
round, but they tasted quite different from common bread and common wine, and changed
everybody that tasted them. Then they all rose up and danced, and secret things were brought
out of some hiding place, and they played extraordinary games, and danced round and round
and round in the moonlight, and sometimes people would suddenly disappear and never be
heard of afterwards, and nobody knew what had happened to them.
And they drank more of that curious wine, and they made images and worshipped
them, and nurse showed me how the images were made one day when we were out for a walk,
and we passed by a place where there was a lot of wet clay. So nurse asked me if I would like
to know what those things were like that they made on the hill, and I said yes. Then she asked
me if I would promise never to tell a living soul a word about it, and if I did I was to be
thrown into the black pit with the dead people, and I said I wouldn’t tell anybody, and she
said the same thing again and again, and I promised. So she took my wooden spade and dug a
big lump of clay and put it in my tin bucket, and told me to say if any one met us that I was
going to make pies when I went home. Then we went on a little way till we came to a little
brake growing right down into the road, and nurse stopped, and looked up the road and down
it, and then peeped through the hedge into the field on the other side, and then she said,
“Quick!” and we ran into the brake, and crept in and out among the bushes till we had gone a
good way from the road. Then we sat down under a bush, and I wanted so much to know what
nurse was going to make with the clay, but before she would begin she made me promise
again not to say a word about it, and she went again and peeped through the bushes on every
side, though the lane was so small and deep that hardly anybody ever went there.
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So we sat down, and nurse took the clay out of the bucket, and began to knead it with
her hands, and do queer things with it, and turn it about. And she hid it under a big dock-leaf
for a minute or two and then she brought it out again, and then she stood up and sat down,
and walked round the clay in a peculiar manner, and all the time she was softly singing a sort
of rhyme, and her face got very red. Then she sat down again, and took the clay in her hands
and began to shape it into a doll, but not like the dolls I have at home, and she made the
queerest doll I had ever seen, all out of the wet clay, and hid it under a bush to get dry and
hard, and all the time she was making it she was singing these rhymes to herself, and her face
got redder and redder. So we left the doll there, hidden away in the bushes where nobody
would ever find it.
And a few days later we went the same walk, and when we came to that narrow, dark
part of the lane where the brake runs down to the bank, nurse made me promise all over
again, and she looked about, just as she had done before, and we crept into the bushes till we
got to the green place where the little clay man was hidden. I remember it all so well, though I
was only eight, and it is eight years ago now as I am writing it down, but the sky was a deep
violet blue, and in the middle of the brake where we were sitting there was a great elder tree
covered with blossoms, and on the other side there was a clump of meadowsweet, and when I
think of that day the smell of the meadowsweet and elder blossom seems to fill the room, and
if I shut my eyes I can see the glaring blue sky, with little clouds very white floating across it,
and nurse who went away long ago sitting opposite me and looking like the beautiful white
lady in the wood.
So we sat down and nurse took out the clay doll from the secret place where she had
hidden it, and she said we must “pay our respects,” and she would show me what to do, and I
must watch her all the time. So she did all sorts of queer things with the little clay man, and I
noticed she was all streaming with perspiration, though we had walked so slowly, and then
she told me to “pay my respects,” and I did everything she did because I liked her, and it was
such an odd game. And she said that if one loved very much, the clay man was very good, if
one did certain things with it, and if one hated very much, it was just as good, only one had to
do different things, and we played with it a long time, and pretended all sorts of things. Nurse
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said her great-grandmother had told her all about these images, but what we did was no harm
at all, only a game.
But she told me a story about these images that frightened me very much, and that was
what I remembered that night when I was lying awake in my room in the pale, empty darkness, thinking of what I had seen and the secret wood. Nurse said there was once a young lady
of the high gentry, who lived in a great castle. And she was so beautiful that all the gentlemen
wanted to marry her, because she was the loveliest lady that anybody had ever seen, and she
was kind to everybody, and everybody thought she was very good. But though she was polite
to all the gentlemen who wished to marry her, she put them off, and said she couldn’t make
up her mind, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to marry anybody at all. And her father, who
was a very great lord, was angry, though he was so fond of her, and he asked her why she
wouldn’t choose a bachelor out of all the handsome young men who came to the castle. But
she only said she didn’t love any of them very much, and she must wait, and if they pestered
her, she said she would go and be a nun in a nunnery. So all the gentlemen said they would go
away and wait for a year and a day, and when a year and a day were gone, they would come
back again and ask her to say which one she would marry.
So the day was appointed and they all went away; and the lady had promised that in a
year and a day it would be her wedding day with one of them. But the truth was, that she was
the queen of the people who danced on the hill on summer nights, and on the proper nights
she would lock the door of her room, and she and her maid would steal out of the castle by a
secret passage that only they knew of, and go away up to the hill in the wild land. And she
knew more of the secret things than any one else, and more than any one knew before or
after, because she would not tell anybody the most secret secrets. She knew how to do all the
awful things, how to destroy young men, and how to put a curse on people, and other things
that I could not understand.
And her real name was the Lady Avelin, but the dancing people called her Cassap,
which meant somebody very wise, in the old language. And she was whiter than any of them
and taller, and her eyes shone in the dark like burning rubies; and she could sing songs that
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none of the others could sing, and when she sang they all fell down on their faces and worshipped her. And she could do what they called shib-show, which was a very wonderful
enchantment.
She would tell the great lord, her father, that she wanted to go into the woods to gather
flowers, so he let her go, and she and her maid went into the woods where nobody came, and
the maid would keep watch. When the lady would lie down under the trees and begin to sing a
particular song, and she stretched out her arms, and from every part of the wood great serpents would come, hissing and gliding in and out among the trees, and shooting out their
forked tongues as they crawled up to the lady. And they all came to her, and twisted round
her, round her body, and her arms, and her neck, till she was covered with writhing serpents,
and there was only her head to be seen. And she whispered to them, and she sang to them,
and they writhed round and round, faster and faster, till she told them to go. And they all
went away directly, back to their holes, and on the lady’s breast there would be a most curious, beautiful stone, shaped something like an egg, and coloured dark blue and yellow, and
red, and green, marked like a serpent’s scales. It was called a glame stone, and with it one
could do all sorts of wonderful things, and nurse said her great-grandmother had seen a
glame stone with her own eyes, and it was for all the world shiny and scaly like a snake.
And the lady could do a lot of other things as well, but she was quite fixed that she
would not be married. And there were a great many gentlemen who wanted to marry her, but
there were five of them who were chief, and their names were Sir Simon, Sir John, Sir Oliver,
Sir Richard, and Sir Rowland. All the others believed she spoke the truth, and that she would
choose one of them to be her man when a year and a day was done; it was only Sir Simon,
who was very crafty, who thought she was deceiving them all, and he vowed he would watch
and try if he could find out anything. And though he was very wise he was very young, and he
had a smooth, soft face like a girl’s, and he pre- tended, as the rest did, that he would not
come to the castle for a year and a day, and he said he was going away beyond the sea to foreign parts.
But he really only went a very little way, and came back dressed like a servant girl, and
so he got a place in the castle to wash the dishes. And he waited and watched, and he listened
and said nothing, and he hid in dark places, and woke up at night and looked out, and he
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heard things and he saw things that he thought were very strange. And he was so sly that he
told the girl that waited on the lady that he was really a young man, and that he had dressed
up as a girl because he loved her so very much and wanted to be in the same house with her,
and the girl was so pleased that she told him many things, and he was more than ever certain
that the Lady Avelin was deceiving him and the others. And he was so clever, and told the servant so many lies, that one night he managed to hide in the Lady Avelin’s room behind the
curtains. And he stayed quite still and never moved, and at last the lady came. And she bent
down under the bed, and raised up a stone, and there was a hollow place underneath, and out
of it she took a waxen image, just like the clay one that I and nurse had made in the brake.
And all the time her eyes were burning like rubies. And she took the little wax doll up in her
arms and held it to her breast, and she whispered and she murmured, and she took it up and
she laid it down again, and she held it high, and she held it low, and she laid it down again.
And she said, “Happy is he that begat the bishop, that ordered the clerk, that married
the man, that had the wife, that fashioned the hive, that harboured the bee, that gathered the
wax that my own true love was made of.”
And she brought out of an aumbry a great golden bowl, and she brought out of a closet
a great jar of wine, and she poured some of the wine into the bowl, and she laid her mannikin
very gently in the wine, and washed it in the wine all over. Then she went to a cupboard and
took a small round cake and laid it on the image’s mouth, and then she bore it softly and covered it up. And Sir Simon, who was watching all the time, though he was terribly frightened,
saw the lady bend down and stretch out her arms and whisper and sing, and then Sir Simon
saw beside her a handsome young man, who kissed her on the lips. And they drank wine out
of the golden bowl together, and they ate the cake together. But when the sun rose there was
only the little wax doll, and the lady hid it again under the bed in the hollow place.
So Sir Simon knew quite well what the lady was, and he waited and he watched, till the
time she had said was nearly over, and in a week the year and a day would be done. And one
night, when he was watching behind the curtains in her room, he saw her making more wax
dolls. And she made five, and hid them away. And the next night she took one out, and held it
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up, and filled the golden bowl with water, and took the doll by the neck and held it under the
water. Then she said –
Sir Dickon, Sir Dickon, your day is done,
You shall be drowned in the water wan.
And the next day news came to the castle that Sir Richard had been drowned at the
ford. And at night she took another doll and tied a violet cord round its neck and hung it up
on a nail. Then she said Sir Rowland, your life has ended its span,
High on a tree I see you hang.
And the next day news came to the castle that Sir Rowland had been hanged by robbers
in the wood. And at night she took another doll, and drove her bodkin right into its heart.
Then she said Sir Noll, Sir Noll, so cease your life,
Your heart piercèd with the knife.
And the next day news came to the castle that Sir Oliver had fought in a tavern, and a
stranger had stabbed him to the heart. And at night she took another doll, and held it to a fire
of charcoal till it was melted. Then she said Sir John, return, and turn to clay,
In fire of fever you waste away.
And the next day news came to the castle that Sir John had died in a burning fever. So
then Sir Simon went out of the castle and mounted his horse and rode away to the bishop and
told him everything. And the bishop sent his men, and they took the Lady Avelin, and everything she had done was found out. So on the day after the year and a day, when she was to
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have been married, they carried her through the town in her smock, and they tied her to a
great stake in the market-place, and burned her alive before the bishop with her wax image
hung round her neck. And people said the wax man screamed in the burning of the flames.
And I thought of this story again and again as I was lying awake in my bed, and I seemed to
see the Lady Avelin in the market-place, with the yellow flames eating up her beautiful white
body. And I thought of it so much that I seemed to get into the story myself, and I fancied I
was the lady, and that they were coming to take me to be burnt with fire, with all the people in
the town looking at me. And I wondered whether she cared, after all the strange things she
had done, and whether it hurt very much to be burned at the stake.
I tried again and again to forget nurse’s stories, and to remember the secret I had seen
that afternoon, and what was in the secret wood, but I could only see the dark and a glimmering in the dark, and then it went away, and I only saw myself running, and then a great moon
came up white over a dark round hill. Then all the old stories came back again, and the queer
rhymes that nurse used to sing to me; and there was one beginning “Halsy cumsy Helen
musty,” that she used to sing very softly when she wanted me to go to sleep. And I began to
sing it to myself inside of my head, and I went to sleep.
The next morning I was very tired and sleepy, and could hardly do my lessons, and I
was very glad when they were over and I had had my dinner, as I wanted to go out and be
alone. It was a warm day, and I went to a nice turfy hill by the river, and sat down on my
mother’s old shawl that I had brought with me on purpose. The sky was grey, like the day
before, but there was a kind of white gleam behind it, and from where I was sitting I could
look down on the town, and b it was all still and quiet and white, like a picture. I remembered
that it was on that hill that nurse taught me to play an old game called “Troy Town,” in which
one had to dance, and wind in and out on a pattern in the grass, and then when one had
danced and turned long enough the other person asks you questions, and you can’t help
answering whether you want to or not, and whatever you are told to do you feel you have to
do it. Nurse said there used to be a lot of games like that that some people knew of, and there
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was one by which people could be turned into anything you liked and an old man her greatgrandmother had seen had known a girl who had been turned into a large snake.
And there was another very ancient game of dancing and winding and turning, by
which you could take a person out of himself and hide him away as long as you liked, and his
body went walking about quite empty, without any sense in it. But I came to that hill because
I wanted to think of what had happened the day before, and of the secret of the wood. From
the place where I was sitting I could see beyond the town, into the opening I had found, where
a little brook had led me into an unknown country. And I pretended I was following the brook
over again, and I went all the way in my mind, and at last I found the wood, and crept into it
under the bushes, and then in the dusk I saw something that made me feel as if I were filled
with fire, as if I wanted to dance and sing and fly up into the air, because I was changed and
wonderful. But what I saw was not changed at all, and had not grown old, and I wondered
again and again how such things could happen, and whether nurse’s stories were really true,
because in the daytime in the open air everything seemed quite different from what it was at
night, when I was frightened, and thought I was to be burned alive.
I once told my father one of her little tales, which was about a ghost, and asked him if it
was true, and he told me it was not true at all, and that only common, ignorant people
believed in such rubbish. He was very angry with nurse for telling me the story, and scolded
her, and after that I promised her I would never whisper a word of what she told me, and if I
did I should be bitten by the great black snake that lived in the pool in the wood. And all alone
on the hill I wondered what was true. I had seen something very amazing and very lovely, and
I knew a story, and if I had really seen it, and not made it up out of the dark, and the black
bough, and the bright shining that was mounting up to the sky from over the great round hill,
but had really seen it in truth, then there were all kinds of wonderful and lovely and terrible
things to think of, so I longed and trembled, and I burned and got cold.
And I looked down on the town, so quiet and still, like a little white picture, and I
thought over and over if it could be true. I was a long time before I could make up my mind to
anything; there was such a strange fluttering at my heart that seemed to whisper to me all the
time that I had not made it up out of my head, and yet it seemed quite impossible, and I knew
my father and everybody would say it was dreadful rubbish. I never dreamed of telling him or
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anybody else a word about it, because I knew it would be of no use, and I should only get
laughed at or scolded, so for a long time I was very quiet, and went about thinking and wondering; and at night I used to dream of amazing things, and sometimes I woke up in the early
morning and held out my arms with a cry.
And I was frightened, too, because there were dangers, and some awful thing would
happen to me, unless I took great care, if the story were true. These old tales were always in
my head, night and morning, and I went over them and told them to myself over and over
again, and went for walks in the places where nurse had told them to me; and when I sat in
the nursery by the fire in the evenings I used to fancy nurse was sitting in the other chair, and
telling me some wonderful story in a low voice, for fear anybody should be listening. But she
used to like best to tell me about things when we were right out in the country, far from the
house, because she said she was telling me such secrets, and walls have ears. And if it was
something more than ever secret, we had to hide in brakes or woods; and I used to think it
was such fun creeping along a hedge, and going very softly, and then we would get behind the
bushes or run into the wood all of a sudden, when we were sure that none was watching us; so
we knew that we had our secrets quite all to ourselves, and nobody else at all knew anything
about them. Now and then, when we had hidden ourselves as I have described, she used to
show me all sorts of odd things.
One day, I remember, we were in a hazel brake, over-looking the brook, and we were so
snug and warm, as though it was April; the sun was quite hot, and the leaves were just coming
out. Nurse said she would show me something funny that would make me laugh, and then she
showed me, as she said, how one could turn a whole house upside down, without anybody
being able to find out, and the pots and pans would jump about, and the china would be broken, and the chairs would tumble over of themselves. I tried it one day in the kitchen, and I
found I could do it quite well, and a whole row of plates on the dresser fell off it, and cook’s
little work-table tilted up and turned right over “before her eyes,” as she said, but she was so
frightened and turned so white that I didn’t do it again, as I liked her. And afterwards, in the
hazel copse, when she had shown me how to make things tumble about, she showed me how
to make rapping noises, and I learnt how to do that, too. Then she taught me rhymes to say on
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certain occasions, and peculiar marks to make on other occasions, and other things that her
great-grandmother had taught her when she was a little girl herself.
And these were all the things I was thinking about in those days after the strange walk
when I thought I had seen a great secret, and I wished nurse were there for me to ask her
about it, but she had gone away more than two years before, and nobody seemed to know
what had become of her, or where she had gone. But I shall always remember those days if I
live to be quite old, because all the time I felt so strange, wondering and doubting, and feeling
quite sure at one time, and making up my mind, and then I would feel quite sure that such
things couldn’t happen really, and it began all over again. But I took great care not to do certain things that might be very dangerous.
So I waited and wondered for a long time, and though I was not sure at all, I never
dared to try to find out. But one day I became sure that all that nurse said was quite true, and
I was all alone when I found it out. I trembled all over with joy and terror, and as fast as I
could I ran into one of the old brakes where we used to go - it was the one by the lane, where
nurse made the little clay man - and I ran into it, and I crept into it; and when I came to the
place where the elder was, I covered up my face with my hands and lay down flat on the grass,
and I stayed there for two hours without moving, whispering to myself delicious, terrible
things, and saying some words over and over again.
It was all true and wonderful and splendid, and when I remembered the story I knew
and thought of what I had really seen, I got hot and I got cold, and the air seemed full of
scent, and flowers, and singing. And first I wanted to make a little clay man, like the one
nurse had made so long ago, and I had to invent plans and stratagems, and to look about, and
to think of things beforehand, because nobody must dream of anything that I was doing or
going to do, and I was too old to carry clay about in a tin bucket. At last I thought of a plan,
and I brought the wet clay to the brake, and did everything that nurse had done, only I made a
much finer image than the one she had made; and when it was finished I did everything that I
could imagine and much more than she did, because it was the likeness of something far better.
And a few days later, when I had done my lessons early, I went for the second time by
the way of the little brook that had led me into a strange country. And I followed the brook,
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and went through the bushes, and beneath the low branches of trees, and up thorny thickets
on the hill, and by dark woods full of creeping thorns, a long, long way. Then I crept through
the dark tunnel where the brook had been and the ground was stony, till at last I came to the
thicket that climbed up the hill, and though the leaves were coming out upon the trees, everything looked almost as black as it was on the first day that I went there.
And the thicket was just the same, and I went up slowly till I came out on the big bare
hill, and began to walk among the wonderful rocks. I saw the terrible voor again on everything, for though the sky was brighter, the ring of wild hills all around was still dark, and the
hanging woods looked dark and dreadful, and the strange rocks were as grey as ever; and
when I looked down on them from the great mound, sitting on the stone, I saw all their amazing circles and rounds within rounds, and I had to sit quite still and watch them as they began
to turn about me, and each stone danced in its place, and they seemed to go round and round
in a great whirl, as if one were in the middle of all the stars and heard them rushing through
the air. So I went down among the rocks to dance with them and to sing extraordinary songs;
and I went down through the other thicket, and drank from the bright stream in the close and
secret valley, putting my lips down to the bubbling water; and then I went on till I came to the
deep, brimming well among the glittering moss, and I sat down. I looked before me into the
secret darkness of the valley, and behind me was the great high wall of grass, and all around
me there were the hanging woods that made the valley such a secret place. I knew there was
nobody here at all besides myself, and that no one could see me.
So I took off my boots and stockings, and let my feet down into the water, saying the
words that I knew. And it was not cold at all, as I expected, but warm and very pleasant, and
when my feet were in it I felt as if they were in silk, or as if the nymph were kissing them. So
when I had done, I said the other words and made the signs, and then I dried my feet with a
towel I had brought on purpose, and put on my stockings and boots. Then I climbed up the
steep wall, and went into the place where there are the hollows, and the two beautiful
mounds, and the round ridges of land, and all the strange shapes. I did not go down into the
hollow this time, but I turned at the end, and made out the figures quite plainly, as it was
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lighter, and I had remembered the story I had quite forgotten before, and in the story the two
figures are called Adam and Eve, and only those who know the story understand what they
mean.
So I went on and on till I came to the secret wood which must not be described, and I
crept into it by the way I had found. And when I had gone about halfway I stopped, and
turned round, and got ready, and I bound the handkerchief tightly round my eyes, and made
quite sure that I could not see at all, not a twig, nor the end of a leaf, nor the light of the sky,
as it was an old red silk handkerchief with large yellow spots, that went round twice and covered my eyes, so that I could see nothing. Then I began to go on, step by step, very slowly. My
heart beat faster and faster, and something rose in my throat that choked me and made me
want to cry out, but I shut my lips, and went on. Boughs caught in my hair as I went, and
great thorns tore me; but I went on to the end of the path. Then I stopped, and held out my
arms and bowed, and I went round the first time, feeling with my hands, and there was nothing. I went round the second time, feeling with my hands, and there was nothing. Then I went
round the third time, feeling with my hands, and the story was all true, and I wished that the
years were gone by, and that I had not so long a time to wait before I was happy for ever and
ever.
Nurse must have been a prophet like those we read of in the Bible. Everything that she
said began to come true, and since then other things that she told me of have happened. That
was how I came to know that her stories were true and that I had not made up the secret
myself out of my own head. But there was another thing that happened that day. I went a second time to the secret place. It was at the deep brimming well, and when I was standing on
the moss I bent over and looked in, and then I knew who the white lady was that I had seen
come out of the water in the wood long ago when I was quite little. And I trembled all over,
because that told me other things. Then I remembered how sometime after I had seen the
white people in the wood, nurse asked me more about them, and I told her all over again, and
she listened, and said nothing for a long, long time, and at last she said, “You will see her
again.” So I understood what had happened and what was to happen.
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And I understood about the nymphs; how I might meet them in all kinds of places, and
they would always help me, and I must always look for them, and find them in all sorts of
strange shapes and appearances. And without the nymphs I could never have found the
secret, and without them none of the other things could happen. Nurse had told me all about
them long ago, but she called them by another name, and I did not know what she meant, or
what her tales of them were about, only that they were very queer. And there were two kinds,
the bright and the dark, and both were very lovely and very wonderful, and some people saw
only one kind, and some only the other, but some saw them both. But usually the dark
appeared first, and the bright ones came afterwards, and there were extraordinary tales about
them. It was a day or two after I had come home from the secret place that I first really knew
the nymphs. Nurse had shown me how to call them, and I had tried, but I did not know what
she meant, and so I thought it was all nonsense. But I made up my mind I would try again, so
I went to the wood where the pool was, where I saw the white people, and I tried again. The
dark nymph, Alanna, came, and she turned the pool of water into a pool of fire. . . .
f EPILOGUE f
“That’s a very queer story,” said Cotgrave, handing back the green book to the recluse, Ambrose. “I
see the drift of a good deal, but there are many things that I do not grasp at all. On the last page, for example, what does she mean by ‘nymphs’?”
“Well, I think there are references throughout the manuscript to certain ‘processes’ which have been
handed down by tradition from age to age. Some of these processes are just beginning to come within the
purview of science, which has arrived at them - or rather at the steps which lead to them - by quite different
paths. I have interpreted the reference to ‘nymphs’ as a reference to one of these processes.”
“And you believe that there are such things?”
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“Oh, I think so. Yes, I believe I could give you convincing evidence on that point. I am afraid you
have neglected the study of alchemy? It is a pity, for the symbolism, at all events, is very beautiful, and
moreover if you were acquainted with certain books on the subject, I could recall to your mind phrases
which might explain a good deal in the manuscript that you have been reading.”
“Yes; but I want to know whether you seriously think that there is any foundation of fact beneath
these fancies. Is it not all a department of poetry; a curious dream with which man has indulged himself?”
“I can only say that it is no doubt better for the great mass of people to dismiss it all as a dream. But
if you ask my veritable belief - that goes quite the other way. No; I should not say belief, but rather knowledge. I may tell you that I have known cases in which men have stumbled quite by accident on certain of
these ‘processes,’ and have been astonished by wholly unexpected results. In the cases I am thinking of
there could have been no possibility of ‘suggestion’ or sub-conscious action of any kind. One might as well
suppose a schoolboy ‘suggesting’ the existence of Aeschylus to himself, while he plods mechanically through
the declensions.
“But you have noticed the obscurity,” Ambrose went on, “and in this particular case it must have
been dictated by instinct, since the writer never thought that her manuscripts would fall into other hands.
But the practice is universal, and for most excellent reasons. Powerful and sovereign medicines, which are,
of necessity, virulent poisons also, are kept in a locked cabinet. The child may find the key by chance, and
drink herself dead; but in most cases the search is educational, and the phials contain precious elixirs for
him who has patiently fashioned the key for himself.”
“You do not care to go into details?”
“No, frankly, I do not. No, you must remain unconvinced. But you saw how the manuscript illustrates the talk we had last week?”
“Is this girl still alive?”
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“No. I was one of those who found her. I knew the father well; he was a lawyer, and had always left
her very much to herself. He thought of nothing but deeds and leases, and the news came to him as an
awful surprise. She was missing one morning; I suppose it was about a year after she had written what you
have read. The servants were called, and they told things, and put the only natural interpretation on them –
a perfectly erroneous one.
“They discovered that green book somewhere in her room, and I found her in the place that she
described with so much dread, lying on the ground before the image.”
“It was an image?”
“Yes, it was hidden by the thorns and the thick undergrowth that had surrounded it. It was a wild,
lonely country; but you know what it was like by her description, though of course you will understand that
the colours have been heightened. A child’s imagination always makes the heights higher and the depths
deeper than they really are; and she had, unfortunately for herself,something more than imagination. One
might say, perhaps, that the picture in her mind which she succeeded in a measure in putting into words,
was the scene as it would have appeared to an imaginative artist. But it is a strange, desolate land.”
“And she was dead?”
“Yes. She had poisoned herself - in time. No; there was not a word to be said against her in the ordinary sense. You may recollect a story I told you the other night about a lady who saw her child’s fingers
crushed by a window?”
“And what was this statue?”
“Well, it was of Roman workmanship, of a stone that with the centuries had not blackened, but had
become white and luminous. The thicket had grown up about it and concealed it, and in the Middle Ages
the followers of a very old tradition had known how to use it for their own purposes. In fact it had been
incorporated into the monstrous mythology of the Sabbath. You will have noted that those to whom a sight
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of that shining whiteness had been vouchsafed by chance, or rather, perhaps, by apparent chance, were
required to blindfold themselves on their second approach. That is very significant.”
“And is it there still?”
“I sent for tools, and we hammered it into dust and fragments.”
“The persistence of tradition never surprises me,” Ambrose went on after a pause. “I could name
many an English parish where such traditions as that girl had listened to in her childhood are still existent
in occult but unabated vigour. No, for me, it is the ‘story’ not the ‘sequel,’ which is strange and awful, for I
have always believed that wonder is of the soul.”
The End
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A Note On Arthur Machen and “The White People”
I have to confess.
I altered the paragraphing of the "diary section," "The Green Book." I felt this was needed to make
this, the bulk of the story, readable on the screen. But I did try to convey the original density but not adding
white space between paragraphs (as is done in the rest of this e-book).
The dense practically-all-one-paragraph style of “The Green Book” is one aspect that adds believability to the young girl's voice. Her story pours out in a stream-of-consciousness punctuated, exactly as
young writers do, by "and," "then," and "so." By using the female adolescent as the first person narrator,
Machen pulled off a highly ambiguous but extremely compelling, decidedly eerie story full of veiled sexuality and pagan magic.
To quote Ramsey Campbell: “What can I say about a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by H.P.Lovecraft, Peter Straub, T.E.D. Klein, M.John Harrison and Clive Barker? Perhaps that he
managed to communicate a sense of the inexpressibly and awesomely supernatural with more power than
he ever knew.” *
You can add Graham Joyce to that list as well. In an essay on Machen, he explains:
“In the list of influences I usually cite about my own writing, Arthur Machen is a name
that looms large. Machen not only inspired and influenced; he incited successive generations
of authors to write in a certain way. Born in Caerleon-on-Usk, Wales, in 1863, he lived to a
ripe age and was by all accounts a vivid character. With flowing white hair and a ruddy complexion, he wore a flapping cape (a real writer, one supposes) and his appearance provoked
comment wherever he went. His huge influence on the genre of ghost story writers was cited
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by none less than H.P. Lovecraft, a slip of a lad when Machen was already of mature years,
and yet whom Machen survived by a decade. The most obvious way in which Lovecraft was
influenced was in his treatment of terrors which were spiritual rather than physical in character... As a writer of the supernatural, Machen's stories are committed to the notion that there
exists an unseen world, a real world beyond the 'glamour' of this world. This [lifting of the veil]
is not just some ghostly literary trope; it is a spiritual state of mind, an almost theological principle, and the source of all Machen's terrors.”
You can read all of Joyce’s short essay on his Web site. (http://www.grahamjoyce.net/)
____________________
* H.P. Lovecraft's story “The Dunwich Horror,” T.E.D. Klein's novel The Ceremonies
and Peter Straub's Ghost Story have all be mentioned as being derived from Machen.
Lovecraft's story and Straub's novel are heavily influenced by “The Great God Pan,” and
Klein's novel is influenced by “The White People.”
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It was an old cemetery, and they had been long dead. Those who died nowadays were put in the new
burying-place on the hill, close to the Bois d’Amour and within sound of the bells that called the living to
mass. But the little church where the mass was celebrated stood faithfully beside the older dead; a new
church, indeed, had not been built in that forgotten corner of Finisterre for centuries, not since the calvary
on its pile of stones had been raised in the tiny square, surrounded then, as now, perhaps, by gray naked
cottages; not since the castle with its round tower, down on the river, had been erected for the Counts of
Croisac. But the stone walls enclosing that ancient cemetery had been kept in good repair, and there were
no weeds within, nor toppling headstones. It looked cold and gray and desolate, like all the cemeteries of
Brittany, but it was made hideous neither by tawdry gew-gaws nor the license of time.
And sometimes it was close to a picture of early beauty. When the village celebrated its yearly par don, a great procession came out of the church – priests in glittering robes, young men in their gala costume of black and silver, holding flashing standards aloft, and many maidens in flapping white head-dress
and collar, black frocks and aprons flaunting with ribbons and lace. They marched, chanting, down the road
beside the wall of the cemetery, where lay the generations that in their day had held the banners and chanted the service of the pardon. For the dead were peasants and priests — the Croisacs had their burying-place
in a hollow of the hills behind the castle — old men and women who had wept and died for the fishermen
that had gone to the grande pêche and returned no more, and now and again a child, slept there. Those
who walked past the dead at the pardon, or after the marriage ceremony, or took part in any one of the
minor religious festivals with which the Catholic village enlivens its existence — all, young and old, looked
grave and sad. For the women from childhood know that their lot is to wait and dread and weep, and the
men that the ocean is treacherous and cruel, but that bread can be wrung from no other master.
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Therefore the living have little sympathy for the dead who have laid down their crushing burden;
and the dead under their stones slumber contentedly enough. There is no envy among them for the young
who wander at evening and pledge their troth in the Bois d’Amour, only pity for the groups of women who
wash their linen in the creek that flows to the river. They look like pictures in the green quiet book of
nature, these women, in their glistening white head-gear and deep collars; but the dead know better than to
envy them, and the women — and the lovers — know better than to pity the dead.
The dead lay at rest in their boxes and thanked God they were quiet and had found everlasting
peace.
And one day even this, for which they had patiently endured life, was taken from them.
The village was picturesque and there was none quite like it, even in Finisterre. Artists discovered it
and made it famous. After the artists followed the tourists, and the old creaking diligence became an absurdity. Brittany was the fashion for three months of the year, and wherever there is fashion there is at least
one railway. The one built to satisfy the thousands who wished to visit the wild, sad beauties of the west of
France was laid along the road beside the little cemetery of this tale.
It takes a long while to awaken the dead. These heard neither the voluble working-men nor even the
first snort of the engine. And, of course, they neither heard nor knew of the pleadings of the old priest that
the line should be laid elsewhere. One night he came out into the old cemetery and sat on a grave and wept.
For he loved his dead and felt it to be a tragic pity that the greed of money, and the fever of travel, and the
petty ambitions of men whose place was in the great cities where such ambitions were born, should shatter
forever the holy calm of those who had suffered so much on earth. He had known many of them in life, for
he was very old; and although he believed, like all good Catholics, in heaven and purgatory and hell, yet he
always saw his friends as he had buried them, peacefully asleep in their coffins, the souls lying with folded
hands like the bodies that held them, patiently awaiting the final call. He would never have told you, this
good old priest, that he believed heaven to be a great echoing palace in which God and the archangels dwelt
alone waiting for that great day when the elected dead should rise and enter the Presence together, for he
was a simple old man who had read and thought little; but he had a zigzag of fancy in his humble mind, and
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he saw his friends and his ancestors’ friends as I have related to you, soul and body in the deep undreaming
sleep of death, but sleep, not a rotted body deserted by its affrighted mate; and to all who sleep there
comes, sooner or later, the time of awakening.
He knew that they had slept through the wild storms that rage on the coast of Finisterre, when ships
are flung on the rocks and trees crash down in the Bois d’Amour. He knew that the soft, slow chantings of
the pardon never struck a chord in those frozen memories, meagre and monotonous as their store had
been; nor the bagpipes down in the open village hall — a mere roof on poles — when the bride and her
friends danced for three days without a smile on their sad brown faces.
All this the dead had known in life and it could not disturb nor interest them now. But that hideous
intruder from modern civilization, a train of cars with a screeching engine, that would shake the earth
which held them and rend the peaceful air with such discordant sounds that neither dead nor living could
sleep! His life had been one long unbroken sacrifice, and he sought in vain to imagine one greater, which he
would cheerfully assume could this disaster be spared his dead.
But the railway was built, and the first night the train went screaming by, shaking the earth and rattling the windows of the church, he went out and out and sprinkled every grave with holy water.
And thereafter twice a day, at dawn and at night, as the train tore a tunnel in the quiet air, like the
plebian upstart it was, he sprinkled every grave, rising sometimes from a bed of pain, at other times defying
wind and rain and hail. And for a while he believed that his holy device had deepened the sleep of his dead,
locked them beyond the power of man to awake. But one night he heard them muttering.
It was late. There were but a few stars on a black sky. Not a breath of wind came over the lonely
plains beyond, or from the sea. There would be no wrecks to-night , and all the world seemed at peace. The
lights were out in the village. One burned in the tower of Croisac, where the young wife of the count lay ill.
The priest had been with her when the train thundered by, and she had whispered to him:
“Would that I were on it! Oh, this lonely lonely land! this cold echoing château, with no one to speak
to day after day! If it kills me, mon père, make him lay me in the cemetery by the road, that twice a day I
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may hear the train go by — the train that goes to Paris! If they put me down there over the hill, I will shriek
in my coffin every night.”
The priest had ministered as best he could to the ailing soul of the young noblewoman, with whose
like he seldom dealt, and hastened back to his dead. He mused, as he toiled along the dark road with
rheumatic legs, on the fact that the woman should have the same fancy as himself.
“If she is really sincere, poor young thing,” he thought aloud, “I will forbear to sprinkle holy-water on
her grave. For those who suffer while alive should have all they desire after death, and I am afraid the count
neglects her. But I pray God that my dead have not heard that monster to-night.” And he tucked his gown
under his arm and hurriedly told his rosary.
But when he went about among the graves with the holy-water he heard the dead muttering.
“Jean-Marie,” said a voice, fumbling among its unused tones for forgotten notes, “art thou ready?
Surely that is the last call.”
“Nay, nay,” rumbled another voice, “that is not the sound of a trumpet, François. That will be sudden
and loud and sharp, like the great blasts of the north when they come plunging over the sea from out the
awful gorges of Iceland.
“Dost thou remember them, Fran?ois? Thank the good God they spared us to die in our beds with
our grandchildren about us and only the little wind sighing in the Bois d’Amour. Ah, the poor comrades
that died in their manhood, that went to the grande pêche once too often! Dost thou remember when the
great wave curled round Ignace like his poor wife’s arms, and we saw him no more? We clasped each
other’s hands, for we believed that we should follow, but we lived and went again and again to the grande
pêche, and died in our beds. Grâce à Dieu!”
“Why dost thou think of that now — here in the grave where it matters not, even to the living?”
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“I know not; but it was of that night when Ignace went down that I thought as the living breath went
out of me. Of what didst thou think as thou layest dying?”
“Of the money I owed to Dominique and could not pay. I sought to ask my son to pay it, but death
had come suddenly and I could not speak. God knows how they treat my name to-day in the village of St.
Hilaire.”
“Thou art forgotten,” murmured another voice. I died forty years after thee and men remember not
so long in Finisterre. But thy son was my friend and I remember that he paid the money.”
“And my son, what of him? Is he, too, here?”
“Nay; he lies deep in the northern sea. It was his second voyage, and he had returned with a purse
for the young wife, the first time. But he returned no more, and she washed in the river for the dames of
Croisac, and by-and-by she died. I would have married her but she said it was enough to lose one husband.
I married another, and she grew ten years in every three that I went to the grande pêche. Alas for Brittany,
she has no youth!”
“And thou? Wert thou an old man when thou camest here?”
“Sixty. My wife came first, like many wives. She lies here. Jeanne!”
“Is’t thy voice, my husband? Not the Lord Jesus Christ’s? What miracle is this? I thought that terrible sound was the trumpet of doom.”
“It could not be, old Jeanne, for we are still in our graves. When the trump sounds we shall have
wings and robes of light, and fly straight up to heaven. Hast thou slept well?”
“Ay! But why are we awakened? Is it time for purgatory? Or have we been there?”
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“The good God knows. I remember nothing. Art thou frightened? Would that I could hold thy hand,
as when thou didst slip from life into that long sleep thou didst fear, yet welcome.”
“I am frightened, my husband. But it is sweet to hear thy voice, hoarse and hollow as it is from the
mould of the grave. Thank the good God thou didst bury me with the rosary in my hands,” and she began
telling the beads rapidly.
“If God is good,” cried François, harshly, and his voice came plainly to the priest’s ears, as if the lid
of the coffin had rotted, “why are we awakened before our time? What foul fiend was it that thundered and
screamed through the frozen avenues of my brain? Has God, perchance, been vanquished and does the Evil
One reign in His stead?”
“Tut, tut! Thou blasphemest! God reigns, now and always. It is but a punishment He has laid upon
us for the sins of earth.”
“Truly, we were punished enough before we descended to the peace of this narrow house. Ah, but it
is dark and cold! Shall we lie like this for an eternity, perhaps? On earth we longed for death, but feared the
grave. I would that I were alive again, poor and old and alone and in pain. It were better than this. Curse
the foul fiend that woke us!”
“Curse not, my son,” said a soft voice, and the priest stood up and uncovered and crossed himself,
for it was the voice of his aged predecessor. “I cannot tell thee what this is that has rudely shaken us in our
graves and freed our spirits of their blessed thraldom, and I like not the consciousness of this narrow
house, this load of earth on my tired heart. But it is right, it must be right, or it would not be at all — ah,
me!”
For a baby cried softly, hopelessly, and from a grave beyond came a mother’s anguished attempt to
still it.
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“Ah, the good God!” she cried. “I, too, thought it was the great call, and that in a moment I should
rise and find my child and go to my Ignace, my Ignace whose bones lie white on the floor of the sea. Will he
find them, my father, when the dead shall rise again? To lie here and doubt! – that were worse than life.”
“Yes, yes,” said the priest; “all will be well, my daughter.”
“But all is not well, my father, for my baby cries and is alone in a little box in the ground. If I could
claw my way to her with my hands — but my old mother lies between us.”
“Tell your beads!” commanded the priest, sternly — “tell your beads, all of you. All ye that have not
your beads, say the ‘Hail Mary!’ one hundred times.”
Immediately a rapid, monotonous muttering arose from every lonely chamber of that desecrated
ground. All obeyed but the baby, who still moaned with the hopeless grief of deserted children. The living
priest knew that they would talk no more that night, and went into the church to pray till dawn. He was sick
with horror and terror, but not for himself. When the sky was pink and the air full of the sweet scents of
morning, and a piercing scream tore a rent in the early silences, he hastened out and sprinkled his graves
with a double allowance of holy-water. The train rattled by with two short derisive shrieks, and before the
earth had ceased to tremble the priest laid his ear to the ground. Alas, they were still awake!
“The fiend is on the wing again,” said Jean-Marie; “but as he passed I felt as if the finger of God
touched my brow. It can do us no harm.”
“I, too, felt that heavenly caress!” exclaimed the old priest. “And I!” “And I!” “And I!” came from
every grave but the baby’s.
The priest of earth, deeply thankful that his simple device had comforted them, went rapidly down
the road to the castle. He forgot that he had not broken his fast nor slept. The count was one of the directors of the railroad, and to him he would make a final appeal.
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It was early, but no one slept at Croisac. The young countess was dead. A great bishop had arrived in
the night and administered extreme unction. The priest hopefully asked if he might venture into the presence of the bishop. After a long wait in the kitchen, he was told that he could speak with Monsieur l'
Évêque. He followed the servant up the wide spiral stair of the tower, and from its twenty-eighth step
entered a room hung with purple cloth stamped with golden fleurs-de-lis. The bishop lay six feet above the
floor on one of the splendid carved cabinet beds that are built against the walls in Brittany. Heavy curtains
shaded his cold white face. The priest, who was small and bowed, felt immeasurably below that august
presence, and sought for words.
“What is it, my son?” asked the bishop, in his cold weary voice. “Is the matter so pressing? I am very
tired.”
Brokenly, nervously, the priest told his story, and as he strove to convey the tragedy of the tormented
dead he not only felt the poverty of his expression — for was little used to narrative — but the torturing
thought assailed him that what he said sounded wild and unnatural, real as it was to him. But he was not
prepared for its effect on the bishop. He was standing in the middle of the room, whose gloom was softened
and gilded by the waxen lights of a huge candelabra; his eyes, which had wandered unseeingly from one
massive piece of carved furniture to another, suddenly lit on the bed, and he stopped abruptly, his tongue
rolling out. The bishop was sitting up, livid with wrath.
“And this was thy matter of life and death, thou prating madman!" he thundered. "For this string of
foolish lies I am kept from my rest, as if I were another old lunatic like thyself! Thou art not fit to be a
priest and have the care of souls. To-morrow —”
But the priest had fled, wringing his hands.
As he stumbled down the winding stair he ran straight into the arms of the count. Monsieur de
Croisac had just closed a door behind him. He opened it, and, leading the priest into the room, pointed to
his dead countess, who lay high up against the wall, her hands clasped, unmindful for evermore of the six
feet of carved cupids and lilies that upheld her. On high pedestals at head and foot of her magnificent couch
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the pale flames rose from tarnished golden candlesticks. The blue hangings of the room, with their white
fleurs-de-lis, were faded, like the rugs on the old dim floor; for the splendor of the Croisacs had departed
with the Bourbons. The count lived in the old ch‰teau because he must; but he reflected bitterly to-night
that if he had made the mistake of bringing a young girl to it, there were several things he might have done
to save her from despair and death.
“Pray for her,” he said to the priest. “And you will bury her in the old cemetery. It was her last
request.”
He went out, and the priest sank on his knees and mumbled his prayers for the dead. But his eyes
wandered to the high narrow windows through which the countess had stared for hours and days, stared at
the fishermen sailing north for the grande pêche, followed along the shore of the river by wives and mothers, until their boats were caught in the great waves of the ocean beyond; often at naught more animate
than the dark flood, the wooded banks, the ruins, the rain driving like needles through the water. The priest
had eaten nothing since his meagre breakfast at twelve the day before, and his imagination was active. He
wondered if the soul up there rejoiced in the death of the beautiful restless body, the passionate brooding
mind. He could not see her face from where he knelt, only the waxen hands clasping a crucifix. He wondered if the face were peaceful in death, or peevish and angry as when he had seen it last. If the great
change had smoothed and sealed it, then perhaps the soul would sink deep under the dark waters, grateful
for oblivion, and that cursed train could not awaken it for years to come. Curiosity succeeded wonder. He
cut his prayers short, got to his weary swollen feet and pushed a chair to the bed. He mounted it and his
face was close to the dead woman’s. Alas! it was not peaceful. It was stamped with the tragedy of a bitter
renunciation. After all, she had been young, and at the last had died unwillingly. There was still a fierce
tenseness about the nostrils, and her upper lip was curled as if her last word had been an imprecation. But
she was very beautiful, despite the emaciation of her features. Her black hair nearly covered the bed, and
her lashes looked too heavy for the sunken cheeks.
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“Pauvre petite!” thought the priest. “No, she will not rest, nor would she wish to. I will not sprinkle
holy-water on her grave. It is wondrous that monster can give comfort to any one, but if he can, so be it.”
He went into the little oratory adjoining the bedroom and prayed more fervently. But when the
watchers came an hour later they found him in a stupor, huddled at the foot of the altar.
When he awoke he was in his own bed in his little house beside the church. But it was four days
before they would let him rise to go about his duties, and by that time the countess was in her grave.
The old housekeeper left him to take care of himself. He waited eagerly for the night. It was raining
thinly, a gray quiet rain that blurred the landscape and soaked the ground in the Bois d’Amour. It was wet
about the graves, too; but the priest had given little heed to the elements in his long life of crucified self,
and as he heard the remote echo of the evening train he hastened out with his holy-water and had sprinkled
every grave but one when the train sped by.
Then he knelt and listened eagerly. It was five days since he had knelt there last. Perhaps they had
sunk again to rest. In a moment he wrung his hands and raised them to heaven. All the earth beneath him
was filled with lamentation. They wailed for mercy, for peace, for rest; they cursed the foul fiend who had
shattered the locks of death; and among the voices of men and children the priest distinguished the quavering notes of his aged predecessor; not cursing, but praying with bitter entreaty. The baby was screaming
with the accents of mortal terror and its mother was too frantic to care.
“Alas,” cried the voice of Jean-Marie, “that they never told us what purgatory was like! What do the
priests know? When we were threatened with punishment of our sins not a hint did we have of this. To
sleep for a few hours, haunted with the moment of awakening! Then a cruel insult from the earth that is
tired of us, and the orchestra of hell. Again! and again! and again! Oh God! How long? How long?”
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The priest stumbled to his feet and ran over graves and paths to the mound above the countess.
There he would hear a voice praising the monster of night and dawn, a note of content in this terrible chorus of despair which he believed would drive him mad. He vowed that on the morrow he would move his
dead, if he had to unbury them with his own hands and carry them up the hill to graves of his own making.
For a moment he heard no sound. He knelt and laid his ear to the grave, then pressed it more closely
and held his breath. A long rumbling moan reached it, then another and another. But there were no words.
“Is she moaning in sympathy with my poor friends?” he thought; “or have they terrified her? Why
does she not speak to them? Perhaps they would forget their plight were she to tell them of the world they
have left so long. But it was not their world. Perhaps that it is which distresses her, for she will be lonelier
here than on earth. Ah!”
A sharp horrified cry pierced to his ears, then a gasping shriek, and another; all dying away in a
dreadful smothered rumble.
The priest rose and wrung his hands, looking to the wet skies for inspiration.
“Alas!” he sobbed, “she is not content. She has made a terrible mistake. She would rest in the deep
sweet peace of death, and that monster of iron and fire and the frantic dead about her are tormenting a soul
so tormented in life. There may be rest for her in the vault behind the castle, but not here. I know, and I
shall do my duty — now, at once.”
He gathered his robes about him and ran as fast as his old legs and rheumatic feet would take him
towards the château, whose lights gleamed through the rain. On the bank of the river he met a fisherman
and begged to be taken by boat. The fisherman wondered, but picked the priest up in his strong arms, lowered him into the boat, and rowed swiftly towards the château. When they landed he made fast.
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“I will wait for you in the kitchen, my father,” he said; and the priest blessed him and hurried up to
the castle.
Once more he entered through the door of the great kitchen, with its blue tiles, its glittering brass
and bronze warming-pans which had comforted nobles and monarchs in the days of Croisac splendor. He
sank into a chair beside the stove while a maid hastened to the count. She returned while the priest was still
shivering, and announced that her master would see his holy visitor in the library.
It was a dreary room where the count sat waiting, for the priest, and it smelled of musty calf, for the
books on the shelves were old. A few novels and newspapers lay on the heavy table, a fire burned on the
andirons, but the paper on the wall was very dark and the fleurs-de-lis were tarnished and dull. The count,
when at home, divided his time between this library and the water, when he could not chase the boar or the
stag in the forests. But he often went to Paris, where he could afford the life of a bachelor in a wing of his
great hotel; he had known too much of the extravagance of women to give his wife the key of the faded
salons. He had loved the beautiful girl when he married her, but her repinings and bitter discontent had
alienated him, and during the past year he had held himself aloof from her in sullen resentment. Too late
he understood, and dreamed passionately of atonement. She had been a high-spirited brilliant eager creature, and her unsatisfied mind had dwelt constantly on the world she had vividly enjoyed for one year. And
he had given her so little in return!
He rose as the priest entered, and bowed low. The visit bored him, but the good old priest commanded his respect; moreover, he had performed many offices and rites in his family. He moved a chair towards
his guest, but the old man shook his head and nervously twisted his hands together.
“Alas, monsieur le comte,” he said, “it may be that you, too, will tell me that I am an old lunatic, as
did Monsieur l' Évêque. Yet I must speak, even if you tell your servants to fling me out of the château.”
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The count had started slightly. He recalled certain acid comments of the bishop, followed by a statement that a young curé should be sent, gently to supersede the old priest, who was in his dotage. But he
replied suavely:
“You know, my father, that no one in this castle will ever show you disrespect. Say what you wish;
have no fear. But will you not sit down? I am very tired.”
The priest took the chair and fixed his eyes appealingly on the count.
“It is this, monsieur.” He spoke rapidly, lest his courage should go. “That terrible train, with its brute
of iron and live coals and foul smoke and screeching throat, has awakened my dead. I guarded them with
holy-water and they heard it not, until one night when I missed — I was with madam as the train shrieked
by shaking the nail out of the coffins. I hurried back, but the mischief was done, the dead were awake, the
dear sleep of eternity was shattered. They thought it was the last trump and wondered why they still were in
their graves. But they talked together and it was not so bad at the first. But now they are frantic. They are in
hell, and I have come to beseech you to see that they are moved far up on the hill. Ah, think, think, monsieur, what it is to have the last long sleep of the grave so rudely disturbed — the sleep for which we live and
endure so patiently!”
He stopped abruptly and caught his breath. The count had listened without change of countenance,
convinced that he was facing a madman. But the farce wearied him, and involuntarily his hand had moved
towards a bell on the table.
“Ah, monsieur, not yet! not yet!” panted the priest. “It is of the countess I came to speak. I had forgotten. She told me she wished to lie there and listen to the train go by to Paris, so I sprinkled no holywater on her grave. But she, too, is wretched and horror-stricken, monsieur. She moans and screams. Her
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coffin is new and strong, and I cannot hear her words, but I have heard those frightful sounds from her
grave to-night, monsieur; I swear it on the cross. Ah, monsieur, thou dost believe me at last!”
For the count, as white as the woman had been in her coffin, and shaking from head to foot, had
staggered from his chair and was staring at the priest as if he saw the ghost of his countess. “You heard–?”
he gasped.
“She is not at peace, monsieur. She moans and shrieks in a terrible, smothered way, as if a hand
were on her mouth—”
But he had uttered the last of his words. The count had suddenly recovered himself and dashed from
the room. The priest passed his hand across his forehead and sank slowly to the floor.
“He will see that I spoke the truth,” he thought, as he fell asleep, “and to-morrow he will intercede
for my poor friends.”
The priest lies high on the hill where no train will ever disturb him, and his old comrades of the violated cemetery are close about him. For the Count and Countess of Croisac, who adore his memory, hastened to give him in death what he most had desired in the last of his life. And with them all things are well,
for a man, too, may be born again, and without descending into the grave.
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A Note on Gertrude Atherton and “The Dead and the Countess”
The best-known (and perhaps best overall) of Gertrude Atherton's spooky stories is "The Bell in the
Fog," but I chose to share "The Dead and the Countess" with you instead. Because:
1) It’s Halloween, we needed a graveyard tale.
2) Atherton managed to include both humor and horror in her premature burial story.
3) Of course the most famous fictional tale of being buried alive is Poe’s “The Premature Burial.”
But Atherton and Poe each dealt with the theme differently. Poe told his version in the first person voice of
the interred victim; Atherton's tale concentrates on a simple priest who shows a great deal of care and concern for the long-dead before anyone living is accidently put in the ground. Poe's morbid story focuses on
the victim’s terror. Atherton’s dead are not terrifying at all and more to be pitied than feared. Her use of the
supernatural seems to be is something of a criticism of the encroachments of industrial technology along
with a swipe at hypocritical and cynical prelates.
Nowadays Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948) is usually summed up with something like: Born in San
Francisco, wrote a series of historical novels about California including The Californians (1898), Rezánov
(1906), and The Ancestors (1907); most popular books are her fictionalized biography of Alexander
Hamilton, The Conqueror (1902), and the controversial novel Black Oxen (1923), the story of a woman
revitalized by hormone treatments which was based on Atherton's own experience. Atherton also produced
a number of post-gothic/supernaturalist stories.
That's not much for a woman who wrote more than 40 novels in her career, as well as short stories
and nonfiction (including two autobiographies) – obviously there's a lot more to tell about her long and colorful life. They even say she's still around, in spirit at least, haunting the Atherton Mansion in the Pacific
Heights district of San Francisco.
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Perhaps, then we should have a "real" ghost story to end our little e-anthology –
The story begins in 1834 when Faxon D. Atherton, a native of Massachusetts, traveled to Chile to
become a trader. His business often brought him to California and in 1860 Atherton moved there permanently. Now one of the wealthiest men on the west coast, he bought a great deal of real estate. One purchase, in San Mateo County, became his estate. (The land now forms much of present-day city of
Atherton.) Atherton married Dominga de Goñi, the daughter of a prominent Chileno family, who bore him
seven children. A notorious womanizer, Atherton traveled frequently and left his wife to deal with the estate
and the children. He died in 1880 and left her considerable wealth.
Dominga de Goñi Atherton moved into the city of San Francisco and built her mansion on the corner
of Octavia and California streets in 1881. Dominga lived there with at least one of her children, her son
George – who had married an 18-year-old Gertrude Horn a few years earlier. Dominga was a strong-willed
woman and Gertrude was becoming one. George was weak, a drinker, and something of an embarrassment to the Athertons. Living with his domineering mother and wife didn't do much to reinforce a healthy
masculinity in George and, in 1887 he accepted an invitation to sail to Chile. It is thought he sought to
prove himself in South America and and earn his family's respect.
But George died of kidney failure during the voyage. His remains were stored in a barrel of rum,
which was dropped off in Tahiti then shipped back to the Atherton home. Unfortunately the cask was not
marked as containing anything more than rum. It was opened by the Atherton butler and the sight of his
former – now pickled – employer gave him a considerable shock.
George, after a thorough drying out, was duly buried. It wasn't long until his spirit sought a measure
of revenge against the women. Dominga de Goñi and Gertrude were awakened at night by phantom
knocks at their bedroom doors, by a disturbing presence, and inexplicable cold spots in the mansion.
After her husband's death, however, Gertrude did not stick around long enough to be bothered too
much by George’s ghost. She went to New York and reinvented herself as an author. Dominga de Goñi,
however, was troubled enough by her son’s haunting to sell her mansion and move out.
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Knockings and cold spots were reported by those who subsequently lived in the house and no one
resided there for long. In 1923 the mansion was purchased by Carrie Rousseau who lived exclusively in
the house's ball room with more than 50 cats until her death in 1974 at the age of 93. After her death, the
mansion was remodeled into several apartments where tenants still report various manifestations – cold
spots, voices in the night, wind blowing through closed rooms, and odd knocking sounds.
A San Francisco psychic has, through a séance, supposedly identified the source of the problems
as three female spirits who don't care much for men and a "frail" male spirit. She believes the home is still
haunted by the ghosts of Dominga de Goñi, George, and Gertrude Atherton, and Carrie Rousseau.
Well, it's a nice story, but it seems to me that the Atherton mansion – a place she fled as soon as
she could – is an unlikely place for Gertrude, who lived in New York and Europe as well as California, to
haunt. As for hating men, she may not have cared much for George, but there's no evidence she loathed
the gender as a whole. (In fact, she made much of her friend Ambrose Bierce's supposed infatuation with
her.) Nor would one expect the highly individualistic Gertrude to be such a mundane ghost. The paradoxical author was a feminist, a philanthropist, a snob (she considered herself an aristocrat and looked down
on ordinary people), worshiped power, spread a rumor that Edith Wharton didn't actually write The House
of Mirth herself, and believed herself to be a reincarnation of Aspasia the Greek courtesan and consort of
Pericles.
Surely the ghost of Gertrude Atherton could find someplace far more suitable than her hated motherin-law's house to haunt if she were so incline?
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