(removed, still under copyright)
(removed, still under copyright)
(introduction removed, still under copyright)
The monk was not merely accused of rape and murder by the Inquisition, but the crime of sorcery was also laid to his charge, as well as to Matilda. On searching her cell, various suspicious books and instruments were found, which justified the accusation brought against her. To incriminate the monk, the constellated mirror was produced, which Matilda had accidentally left in his chamber. It was shown to the Grand Inquisitor who took a small golden cross and laid it upon the mirror. Instantly a loud noise was heard, resembling a clap of thunder, and the steel shivered into a thousand pieces. This circumstance confirmed the suspicion of the monk's having dealt in magic.
Determined to make him confess not only the crimes he had committed, but those also of which he was innocent, the inquisitors began their examination. The monk asserted his purity in a voice bold and resolute. Matilda followed his example, but spoke with fear and trembling. Having in vain exhorted him to confess, the inquisitors ordered the monk to be put to the torture. The decree was immediately executed. Ambrosio suffered the most excruciating pangs that were ever invented by human cruelty. Yet so dreadful is death, when guilt accompanies it, that he had sufficient fortitude to persist in his disavowal. His agonies were redoubled in consequence; nor was he released till, fainting from excess pain, insensibility rescued him from the hands of his tormentors.
Matilda was next ordered to the torture; but, terrified by the sight of the friar's sufferings, her courage totally deserted her. She sank upon her knees, acknowledged her corresponding with infernal spirits, and as to the crime of sorcery, she declared herself the sole criminal, and Ambrosio perfectly innocent. It was announced that she must expiate her crime in fire on the approaching Auto da Fé. All her tears and entreaties could procure no mitigation of her doom, and she was dragged by force from the hall of trial.
Returned to his dungeon, the sufferings of Ambrosio's body were far more supportable than those of his mind. His dislocated limbs, the nails torn from his hands and feet, and his fingers mashed and broken by the pressure of screws, were far surpassed in anguish by the agitation of his soul and vehemence of his terrors. The remembrance of what his denial had already cost him, terrified him at the idea of being again applied to the question, and almost engaged him to confess his crimes. Then again the consequences of his confession flashed before him, and rendered him once more irresolute. His death would be inevitable, and that a death the most dreadful. He shuddered at the approaching Auto da Fé, at the idea of perishing in flames, and only escaping from endurable torments to pass into others more subtle and everlasting! In this labyrinth of terrors, fain would have taken his refuge in the gloom of atheism; fain would he have denied the soul's immortality. Even this resource was refused to him. He could not help feeling the existence of a God. Those truths, once his comfort, now presented themselves before him in the clearest light; but they served only to drive him to distraction. They destroyed his ill-grounded hopes of escaping punishment; and, dispelled by the irresistible brightness of truth and conviction, philosophy's deceitful vapours faded away like a dream.
In anguish almost too great for mortal frame to bear, he busied himself in planning ineffectual schemes for escaping both present and future punishment. Of the first there was no possibility; of the second despair made him neglect the only means. He disbelieved that a sinner like himself could find mercy. Ignorance could furnish him with no excuse. Before he had committed his crimes, he had computed every scruple of their weight, and yet he had committed them.
“Pardon?” he would cry in an excess of frenzy: “Oh! there can be none for me!”
Persuaded of this, he abandoned himself to the transports of desperate rage; he sorrowed for the punishment of his crimes, not their commission; and exhaled his bosom's anguish in idle sighs, in vain lamentations, in blasphemy and despair. As the few beams of day which pierced through the bars of his prison window gradually disappeared, he felt more solemn, more despondent. He dreaded the approach of sleep. No sooner did his eyes close, than the dreadful visions seemed to be realised on which his mind had dwelt during the day. He found himself in sulphurous realms and burning caverns, surrounded by fiends appointed his tormentors. Such were the pictures that floated before his eyes in sleep: they vanished not till his repose was disturbed by excess of agony. Then would he start from the ground, his brows running down with cold sweat, his eyes wild and frenzied. He paced his dungeon with disordered steps; he gazed with terror upon the surrounding darkness, and often did he cry, “Oh! fearful is night to the guilty!”
The day of his second examination was at hand. He had been compelled to swallow cordials to restore his bodily strength, and enable him to support the torture longer. On the night preceding this dreadful day, his terrors were so violent as nearly to annihilate his mental powers. He sat like one stupefied near the table on which his lamp was burning dimly. He remained for some hours, unable to speak or move, or indeed to think.
“Look up, Ambrosio!” said a voice in accents well known to him.
The monk started, and raised his melancholy eyes. Matilda stood before him. She now wore a female dress, at once elegant and splendid; a profusion of diamonds blazed upon her robes, and her hair was confined by a coronet of roses. In her right hand she held a small book: a lively expression of pleasure beamed upon her countenance.
“You here, Matilda?” he at length exclaimed: “How have you gained entrance? Where are your chains? What means this magnificence, and the joy which sparkles in your eyes? Have our judges relented? Is there a chance of my escaping? Answer me for pity, and tell me what I have to hope or fear.”
“Ambrosio!” she replied with an air of commanding dignity: “I have baffled the Inquisition's fury. I am free: yet, I purchased my liberty at a dear, at a dreadful price! Dare you pay the same, Ambrosio? You are silent—you look upon me with eyes of suspicion and alarm. Yes, Ambrosio, I have sacrificed all for life and liberty. I have renounced God's service, and am enlisted beneath the banners of His foes. The deed is past recall; yet were it in my power to go back, I would not. Oh! my friend, to expire in such torments! to die amidst curses and execrations! to bear the insults of an exasperated mob! who can reflect without horror on such a doom! Let me then exult in my exchange. I have obtained the power of procuring every bliss which can make that life delicious! The infernal spirits obey me as their sovereign; by their aid shall my days be passed in every refinement of luxury and voluptuousness. I will enjoy unrestrained the gratification of my senses; every passion shall be indulged even to satiety; then will I bid my servants invent new pleasures, to revive and stimulate my glutted appetites! Nothing should hold me one moment longer in this abhorred abode, but the hope of persuading you to follow my example. Ambrosio, I still love you: our mutual guilt and danger have rendered you dearer to me than ever, and I would fain save you from impending destruction. Summon then your resolution to your aid, and renounce for immediate and certain benefits the hopes of salvation difficult to obtain, and perhaps altogether erroneous. Abandon a God who has abandoned you, and raise yourself to the level of superior beings!”
She paused for the monk's reply: he shuddered while he gave it.
“Matilda!” he said, after a long silence, in a low and unsteady voice: “What price gave you for liberty?”
She answered him firm and dauntless.
“Ambrosio, it was my soul!”
“Wretched woman, what have you done? Pass but a few years, and how dreadful will be your sufferings!”
“Weak man, pass but this night, and how dreadful will be your own! Do you remember what you have already endured? Tomorrow you must bear torments doubly exquisite. In two days you must be led a victim to the stake; what then will become of you? Still dare you hope for pardon? Think upon your crimes! Think upon the innocent blood which cries to the throne of God for vengeance, and then hope for mercy! Absurd! Open your eyes, Ambrosio, and be prudent. Hell is your lot; you are doomed to eternal perdition; nought lies beyond your grave, but a gulph of devouring flames. And will you then speed towards that hell? No, no, Ambrosio, let us for a while fly from divine vengeance. Be advised by me, purchase by one moment's courage the bliss of years; enjoy the present, and forget that a future lags behind.”
“Matilda, your counsels are dangerous; I dare not, I will not follow them. Monstrous are my crimes; but God is merciful, and I will not despair of pardon.”
“Is such your resolution? I have no more to say. I speed to joy and liberty, and abandon you to death and eternal torments !”
“Yet stay one moment, Matilda! You command the infernal demons; you can force open these prison doors; you can release me from these chains which weigh me down. Save me, I conjure you, and bear me from these fearful abodes!”
“You ask the only boon beyond my power to bestow. I am forbidden to assist a partisan of God.”
“I will not sell my soul to perdition.”
“Persist in your obstinacy till you find yourself at the stake: then will you repent your error. I quit you. Yet ere the hour of death arrives, should wisdom enlighten you, listen to the means of repairing your present fault. I leave with you this book. Read the first four lines of the seventh page backwards. The spirit, whom you have already once beheld, will immediately appear to you. If you are wise we shall meet again; if not, farewell for ever!”
She let the book fall upon the ground. A cloud of blue fire wrapped itself round her. She waved her hand to Ambrosio, and disappeared. He threw himself into his seat, and, leaning his head upon the table, sank into reflections perplexing and unconnected.
He was still in this attitude, when the opening of the prison doors roused him from this stupor. He was summoned to appear before the Grand Inquisitor. He was led into the same hall, and was again interrogated whether he would confess. He replied as before, that, having no crimes, he coufld acknowledge none. But when he saw the engines of torture, and remembered the pangs which they had already inflicted, his resolution failed him entirely. Forgetting the consequences, and only anxious to escape the terrors of the present moment, he made an ample confession. He disclosed every circumstance of his guilt, and owned not merely the crimes, with which he was charged, but those of which he had never been suspected. Being interrogated as to Matilda's flight, which had created much confusion, he confessed that she had sold herself to Satan, and that she was indebted to sorcery for her escape. The threat of being tortured made him declare himself to be a sorcerer and heretic, and whatever other title the inquisitors chose to fix upon him. In consequence of this avowal, his sentence was immediately pronounced. He was ordered to prepare himself to perish at the Auto da Fé, which was to be solemnised at twelve o'clock that night. Ambrosio, rather dead than alive, was left alone in his dungeon. He looked forward to the morrow with despair, and his terrors increased with the approach of midnight. Sometimes he was buried in gloomy silence; at others, he raved with delirious passion, wrung his hands, and cursed the hour when he first beheld the light. In one of these moments his eye rested upon Matilda's mysterious gift. He looked earnestly at the book; he took it up, but immediately threw it from him with horror. He reflected that here at least was a resource from the fate which he dreaded. He stooped, and took it up a second time. The recollection of his sentence at length fixed his indecision. He opened the volume; but his agitation was so great, that he at first sought in vain for the page mentioned by Matilda. Ashamed of himself, he called all his courage to his aid. He turned to the seventh leaf: he began to read it aloud; but his eyes frequently wandered from the book, while he anxiously cast them round in search of the spirit, whom he wished, yet dreaded to behold. Still he persisted in his design, and with a voice unassured he contrived to finish the four first lines of the page.
Scarce had he pronounced the last word, when a loud burst of thunder was heard, the prison shook to its very foundations, a blaze of lightning flashed through the cell, and in the next moment Lucifer stood before him a second time. But he came not as when at Matilda's summons he borrowed the seraph's form to deceive Ambrosio. He appeared in all that ugliness which since his fall from heaven had been his portion. His blasted limbs still bore marks of the Almighty's thunder. A swarthy darkness spread itself over his gigantic form: his hands and feet were armed with long talons. Fury glared in his eyes, which might have struck the bravest heart with terror. Over his huge shoulders waved two enormous sable wings: and his hair was supplied by living snakes, which twined themselves round his brows with frightful hissings. In one hand he held a roll of parchment, and in the other an iron pen.
Ambrosio remained gazing at the fiend, deprived of the power of utterance.
“For what am I summoned hither?” said the demon, in a voice which sulphurous fogs had damped to hoarseness.
Ambrosio was long unable to answer the demon's demand.
“I am condemned to die,” he said with a faint voice, his blood running cold while he gazed upon his dreadful visitor. “Save me! bear me from hence!”
“Shall the reward of my services be paid me? Dare you embrace my cause? Will you be mine, body and soul? Are you prepared to renounce Him who made you, and Him who died for you? Answer but ‘Yes!’ and Lucifer is your slave.”
“Will no less price content you? Can nothing satisfy you but my eternal ruin? Yet convey me from this dungeon. Be my servant for one hour, and I will be yours for a thousand years. Will not this offer suffice?”
“It will not. I must have your soul: must have it mine, and mine for ever.”
“Insatiate demon! I will not doom myself to endless torments. I will not give up my hopes of being one day pardoned.”
“You will not? Miserable wretch! Are you not guilty? Your fate is already pronounced. The Eternal has abandoned you. Mine you are marked in the book of destiny, and mine you must and shall be.”
“Fiend! 'tis false. Infinite is the Almighty's mercy, and the penitent shall meet His forgiveness. My crimes are monstrous, but I will not despair of pardon. Perhaps when I have received due chastisement—”
“Chastisement? Was purgatory meant for guilt like yours? Ambrosio! be wise. Mine you must be. Sign this parchment: I will bear you from hence, and you may pass your remaining years in bliss and liberty. Enjoy your existence. Indulge in every pleasure to which appetite may lead you. But from the moment that it quits your body, remember that your soul belongs to me, and that I will not be defrauded of my right.”
The monk was silent. The fiend saw that his resolution was shaken. He described the agonies of death in the most terrific colours, and he worked so powerfully upon Ambrosio's despair and fears, that he prevailed upon him to receive the parchment. He then struck the iron pen which he held into a vein of the monk's left hand. It pierced deep, and was instantly filled with blood; yet Ambrosio felt no pain from the wound. The pen was put into his hand: it trembled. The wretch placed the parchment on the table before him, and prepared to sign it. Suddenly he threw the pen upon the table.
“What am I doing?” he cried. Then turning to the fiend with a desperate air, “Leave me! begone! I will not sign the parchment.”
“Fool!” exclaimed the disappointed demon, darting looks so furious as penetrated the friar's soul with horror. “Thus am I trifled with? Go then! Rave in agony, expire in tortures, and then learn the extent of the Eternal's mercy! But beware how you make me again accept your mock! Summon me a second time to dismiss me thus idly, and these talons shall rend you into a thousand pieces. Speak yet again: will you sign the parchment?”
“I will not. Leave me. Away!”
Instantly the thunder was heard to roll horribly: once more the earth trembled with violence: the dungeon resounded with loud shrieks, and the demon fled with blasphemy and curses.
At first, the monk rejoiced at having obtained a triumph over mankind's enemy: but as the hour of punishment drew nearer, the more did he dread appearing before the throne of God. He shuddered to think how soon he must meet the eyes of his Creator, whom he had so grievously offended. The bell announced midnight. As he listened to the first stroke, the blood ceased to circulate in the abbot's veins. He seized the magic volume in a fit of despair. He opened it, turned hastily to the seventh page, and, as if fearing to allow himself a moment's thought, ran over the fatal lines with rapidity. Accompanied by his former terrors, Lucifer again stood before the trembler.
“You have summoned me,” said the fiend. “Are you determined to be wise? Will you accept my conditions? Renounce your claim to salvation, make over to me your soul, and I bear you from this dungeon instantly. Will you sign the parchment?”
“I must—Fate urges me—I accept your conditions.”
“Sign the parchment,” replied the demon in an exulting tone.
The contract and the bloody pen still lay upon the table. Ambrosio prepared to sign his name. A moment's reflection made him hesitate.
“Hark!” cried the tempter, “they come. Be quick. Sign the parchment, and I bear you from hence this moment.”
In effect, the torturers were heard approaching. The sound encouraged the monk in his resolution.
“What is the import of this writing?” said he.
“It makes your soul over to me for ever, and without reserve.”
“What am I to receive in exchange?”
“My protection, and release from this dungeon. Sign it, and this instant I bear you away.”
Ambrosio took up the pen. He set it to the parchment. Again his courage failed him. He felt a pang of terror at his heart, and once more threw the pen upon the table.
“Weak and puerile!” cried the exasperated fiend. “Sign the writing this instant, or I'll sacrifice you to my rage.”
At this moment the bolt of the outward door was drawn back. The prisoner heard the rattling of chains: the heavy bar fell: the men were on the point of entering. Terrified by the demon's threats and, seeing no other means to escape destruction, the wretched monk signed the fatal contract, and gave it hastily into the evil spirit's hands.
“Take it!” said the God-abandoned, “Now then save me! Snatch me from hence!”
“Hold. Do you freely and absolutely renounce your Creator and His son?”
“I do! I do!”
“Do you make over your soul to me for ever?”
“For ever!”
“Without reserve or subterfuge? Without future appeal to the divine mercy?”
The last chain fell from the door of the prison. The key was heard turning in the lock. Already the iron door grated heavily upon its rusty hinges—
“I am yours for ever, and irrevocably!” cried the monk, wild with terror: “I abandon all claim to salvation. I own no power but yours. Hark! Hark! they come! Oh! save me! bear me away.”
“I have triumphed! You are mine past reprieve, and I fulfil my promise.”
Instantly the demon grasped one of Ambrosio's arms, spread his broad pinions, and sprang with him into the air. The roof opened as they soared upwards, and closed again, when they had quitted the dungeon.
In the meanwhile, the jailer was thrown into the utmost surprise by the disappearance of his prisoner. Though neither he nor the torturers were in time to witness the monk's escape a sulphurous smell prevailing through the prison sufficiently informed them by whose aid he had been liberated. They hastened to make their report to the Grand Inquisitor. The story, how a sorcerer had been carried away by the Devil, was soon noised about Madrid; and for some days the whole city was employed in discussing the subject. Gradually it ceased to be the topic of conversation, and Ambrosio was soon forgotten as totally as if he had never existed. While this was passing, the monk, supported by his infernal guide, traversed the air with the rapidity of an arrow; and a few moments placed him upon a precipice's brink, the steepest in Sierra Morena.
Though rescued from the Inquisition, Ambrosio as yet was insensible of the blessings of liberty. The disorder of his imagination was increased by the wildness of the surrounding scenery; by the gloomy caverns and steep rocks, rising above each other, and dividing the passing clouds; the shrill cry of mountain eagles, who had built their nests among these lonely deserts; the stunning roar of torrents, as they rushed violently down tremendous precipices; and the dark waters of a silent sluggish stream, which bathed the rock's base on which Ambrosio stood. The monk cast round him a look of terror. His infernal conductor was still by his side, and eyed him with a look of mingled malice, exultation and contempt.
“Whither have you brought me?” said the monk at length in a hollow trembling voice. “Why am I placed in this melancholy scene? Bear me from it quickly! Carry me to Matilda!”
The fiend replied not, but continued to gaze upon him in silence. Ambrosio could not sustain his glance; he turned away his eyes, while thus spoke the demon:
“I have him then in my power! This model of piety! this being without reproach! He is mine! irrevocably, eternally mine! Companions of my sufferings! denizens of hell! how grateful will be my present!”
He paused; then addressed himself to the monk.
“Bear you to Matilda?” he continued, repeating Ambrosio's words. “Wretch! you shall soon be with her! You well deserve a place near her, for hell boasts no miscreant more guilty than yourself. Hark, Ambrosio, while I unveil your crimes! The women Antonia and Elvira perished by your hand. That Antonia whom you violated was your sister! that Elvira whom you murdered gave you birth! Tremble, abandoned hypocrite! inhuman parricide! incestuous ravisher! And you it was who thought yourself proof against temptation, absolved from human frailties, and free from error and vice! Know, vain man! that I long have marked you for my prey. I saw that you were virtuous from vanity, not principle. I observed your blind idolatry of the Madonna's picture. I bade a subordinate but crafty spirit assume a similar form, and you eagerly yielded to the blandishments of Matilda. Your pride was gratified by her flattery; your lust needed only an opportunity to break forth; you scrupled not to commit a crime which you blamed on another with unfeeling severity. It was I who threw Matilda in your way; it was I who gave you entrance to Antonia's chamber; and it was I who warned Elvira in dreams of your designs upon her daughter, and thus, by preventing your profiting by her sleep, compelled you to add rape, as well as incest, to the catalogue of your crimes. Hear, hear, Ambrosio! Had you resisted me one minute longer you had saved your body and soul. The guards whom you heard at your prison door came to signify your pardon. But I had already triumphed: my plots already succeeded. You are mine, and Heaven itself cannot rescue you from my power. Hope not that your penitence will make void our contract. You have given up your claim to mercy. Believe you that your secret thoughts escaped me? No, no, I read them all! I saw your artifice, knew its falsity, and rejoiced in deceiving the deceiver! You are mine beyond reprieve. I burn to possess my right, and alive you quit not these mountains.”
During the demon's speech Ambrosio had been stupefied by terror and surprise. This last declaration aroused him.
“Not quit these mountains alive?” he exclaimed. “Perfidious, what mean you? Have you forgotten our contract?”
The fiend answered by a malicious laugh:
“Our contract? What more did I promise than to save you from your prison? Have I not done so? Are you not safe from the Inquisition? Fool that you were to confide yourself to a devil! Why did you not stipulate for life, and power, and pleasure? Then all would have been granted; now your reflections come too late. Miscreant, prepare for death; you have not many hours to live!”
On hearing this sentence dreadful were the feelings of the devoted wretch! He sank upon his knees, and raised his hands towards heaven. The fiend read his intention, and prevented it—
“What?” he cried, darting at him a look of fury. “Dare you still implore the Eternal's mercy? Villain, resign your hopes of pardon. Thus I secure my prey!”
As he said this, darting his talons into the monk's shaven crown, he sprang with him from the rock. The caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The demon continued to soar aloft till reaching a dreadful height he released the sufferer. Headlong fell the monk through the airy waste; the sharp point of a rock received him and he rolled from precipice to precipice, till, bruised and mangled, he rested on the river's banks. Instantly a violent storm arose: the winds in fury rent up rocks and forests: the sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire: the rain fell in torrents: it swelled the stream: the waves overflowed their banks: they reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated, carried with them into the river the corpse of the monk.
(introduction removed, still under copyright)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping.
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“ 'Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“ 'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;
This is it and nothing more.”Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door—
Darkness there and nothing more.Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”
Merely this and nothing more.Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping something louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what there at is and this mystery explore—
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore—
'Tis the wind and nothing more.”Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”But the Raven, sitting lonely on that placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther than he uttered; not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered, “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before,”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore.’ ”But the Raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er,
But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er
She shall press, ah, nevermore!Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe1 from thy memories of Lenore!
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this Home by horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that he thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!
Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
(introduction removed, still under copyright)
The events of this strange tale, though they actually occurred in England but a short while since, would scarcely be out of place in a book of German dreams and fancies.
The narrator, a girl of the servant class, but of rather superior education and manners, had called on the writer's sister on the subject of a place to which she had been recommended, and in the course of conversation, related the following as a recent experience.
The advertisement in which she set forth her willingness to take charge of an invalid, infirm, or lunatic person, or to assume any office demanding unusual steadiness of nerve, was replied to by a lady whose letter was dated from a certain locality on the outskirts of a large commercial city, and who requested her attendance there at an appointed time.
The house proved to be a dingy, deserted looking mansion, and was not rendered more cheerful by the fact that the adjoining tenements on either side were unoccupied. It wore altogether a haunted and sinister aspect, and the girl, as she rang the bell, was sensible of a kind of misgiving for which she could not account. A timid person might have hesitated. This girl possessed unusual firmness and courage, and, in spite of the presentiment we have mentioned, she determined, at all events, to see what she would be called on to encounter.
A lady-like person, the mistress herself, opened the door, and conducting the applicant into a vacant apartment, informed her in a few words that the service that would be required of her was of a very peculiar nature imperatively demanding those precise qualities she conceived her to possess. It was right, she added, to mention that the family lived in great seclusion, partly from choice, partly from necessity, an impression having gone abroad that there existed something strange and evil in connection with the residence, which was, in reality, known in the vicinity by the title of the “haunted house”.
With these preliminary warnings, the lady suggested that the applicant might wish to reconsider her purpose. The latter, however, having little fear of anything human, and none at all of apparitions, at once agreed to the terms proposed stipulating only that the cause of the strange reports affecting the mansion should be a little more clearly explained, and her own particular duties defined.
The mistress readily assented to both conditions, and, leading the way to a ground floor apartment at the back, unlocked the door and turned the handle as if about to enter, but checking herself suddenly, warned her companion, without sinking her voice below its ordinary tone, that she was about to be brought face to face with a spectacle that might well try the strongest nerves; nevertheless, there was nothing to fear so long as she retained her self-command. With this not very reassuring preface, they entered the room.
It was rather dark, for the lower half of the windows were boarded up; but in one corner, on the floor, was plainly distinguishable what looked like a heap of clothes flung together in disorder. It appeared to be in motion, however, and the mistress of the house once more turning to her follower had just time to utter the mysterious words, “Don't be frightened. If she likes you she'll hoot; if she doesn't she'll scream,” when from the apex of the seeming heap of clothes there rose a head that made the stranger's blood run chill. It was human, indeed, in general structure, but exhibited, in place of a nose a huge beak curved and pointed like that of an owl. Two large staring yellow eyes increased the bizarre resemblance, while numerous tufts of some feathery substance, sprouting from a hard skin and black as a parrot's tongue, completed this horrible intermingling of bird and woman.
As they approached, the unhappy being rose and sunk with the measured motion of a bird upon a perch, and presently, opening its mouth gave utterance to a hideous and prolonged “tu-whoo”.
“All right,” said the lady quietly, “she likes you!”
They were now standing as it were over the unfortunate freak of nature.
“Have you the courage to lift her?” enquired the lady. “Try.”
The girl, though recoiling instinctively from the contact, nerved herself to the utmost, and, putting her arms beneath those of the still hooting creature, strove to raise it up. In doing so, the hands became disengaged from the clothes. They were black, and armed with long curved talons, like those of a bird of prey.
Even this new discovery might not have made the girl's courage quail, had she not, in raising the creature, observed that she was not, as had seemed to be the case, crouched on the ground, but balanced on an actual perch, or rail, round which her feet closed and clung by means of talons similar to those which adorned her hands.
So inexpressible was the feeling of horror that now overcame the visitor, that, after one desperate effort of self control, she was forced to let go of the thing she held. A wild, unearthly scream that rang through the house marked the creature's change of mood. The baleful eyes shot yellow fire, and scream after scream pursued her as she fairly fled from the apartment, followed at a steadier pace, by the lady.
The latter took her into another room, did all in her power to sooth her agitation, but expressed no surprise when the girl declared that ten times the liberal amount already offered, would not tempt her to undertake such a charge.
(introduction removed, still under copyright)
I must confess that I was a little taken aback, on my last evening before leaving for England, when Monsignor Maxwell turned on me suddenly at supper, and exclaimed aloud that I had not yet contributed a story.
I protested that I had none; that I was a prosaic person; that there was some packing to be done; that my business was to write down the stories of other people; that I had my living to make and could not be liberal with my slender store; that it was a layman's function to sit at holy and learned priests' feet, not to presume to inform them on any subject under the sun.
But it was impossible to resist; it was pointed out to me that I had listened on false pretences if I had not intended to do my share, that telling a story did not hinder my printing it. And as a final argument it was declared that unless I occupied the chair that night, all present withdrew the leave that had already been given to me, to print their stories on my return to England.
There was nothing therefore to be done; and as I had already considered the possibility of the request, I did not occupy an unduly long time in pretending to remember what I had to say.
When I was seated upstairs, and the fire had been poked according to the ritual, and the matches had gone round, and buckled shoes protruded side by side with elastic-ankled boots, I began.
“This is a very unsatisfactory story,” I said, “because it has no explanation of any kind. You will see that even theorising is useless, when I have come to the end. It is simply a series of facts that I have to relate; facts that have no significance except one that is supernatural; but it is utterly out of the question even to guess at that significance
“It is unsatisfactory, too, for a second reason; and that is, that it is on such very hackneyed lines. It is simply one more instance of that very dreary class of phenomena, named haunted houses; except that there is no ghost in it. Its only claim to interest is, as I have said, the complete futility of any attempt to explain it.”
This was rather a pompous exordium, I felt; but I thought it best not to raise expectations too high; and I was therefore deliberately dull.
“Sixteen years ago from last summer, I was in Brittany. I had left school where I had laboured two hours a week at French for four years; and gone away in order to learn it in six weeks. This I accomplished very tolerably, in company with five other boys and an English tutor. Our general adventures are not relevant; but towards the end of our stay we went over one Sunday from Portrieux in order to see a French chateau about three miles away.
“It was a really glorious June day, hot and fresh and exhilarating; and we lunched delightfully in the woods with a funny fat little French Count and his wife who came with us from the hotel. It is impossible to imagine less uncanny circumstances or companions.
“After lunch we all went cheerfully to the house, whose chimneys we had seen among the trees.
“I knew nothing about the dates of houses; but the sort of impression I got of this house was that it was about three hundred years old; yet it may equally have been four, or two. I did not know then; and do not know now anything about it except its name, which I will not tell you; and its owner's name which I will not tell you either—and—and something else that I will tell you. We will call the owner, if you please, Comte Jean Marie the First. The house is built in two courts. The right-hand court through which we entered was then used as a farmyard; and I should think it probable that it is still so used. This court was exceedingly untidy. There was a large manure heap in the centre; and the servants' quarters to our right looked miserably cared for. There was a cart or two with shafts turned up, near the sheds that were built against the wall opposite the gate; and there was a sleepy old dog with bleared eyes that looked at us crossly from his kennel door.
“Our French friend went across to the servants' cottages with his moustache sticking out on either side of his face, and presently came back with two girls and the keys. There was no objection, he exclaimed dramatically, to our seeing the house!
“The girls went before us, and unlocked the iron gate that led to the second court; and we went through after them.
“Now, we had heard at the hotel that the family lived in Paris; but we were not prepared for the dreadful desolation of that inner court. The living part of the house was on our left; and what had once been a lawn to our right; but the house was discoloured and weather-stained; the green paint of the closed shutters and door was cracked and blistered; and the lawn resembled a wilderness; the grass was long and rank; there were rose trees trailing along the edge and across the path; and a sun dial on the lawn reminded me strangely of a drunken man petrified in the middle of a stagger. All this of course was what was to be expected in an adventure of this kind. It would do for a Christmas number.
“But it was not our business to criticise; and after a moment or two, we followed the girls who had unlocked the front door and were waiting for us to enter.
“One of them had gone before to open the shutters.
“It was not a large house, in spite of its name; and we had soon looked through the lower rooms of it. They, too, were what you would expect; the floors were beeswaxed; there were tables and chairs of a tolerable antiquity; a little damask on the walls, and so on. But what astonished us was the fact that none of the furniture was covered up, or even moved aside; and the dust lay, I should say, half-an-inch thick on every horizontal surface. I heard the Frenchman crying on his God in an undertone—as is the custom of Gauls—and finally he burst out with a question as to why the rooms were in this state.
“The girl looked at him stolidly. She was a stout, red-faced girl.
“ ‘It is by the Count's orders,’ she said.
“ ‘And does the Count not come here?’ he asked.
“ ‘No, sir.’
“Then we all went upstairs. One of the girls had preceded us again and was waiting with her hand on the door to usher us in.
“ ‘See here the room, the most splendid,’ she said; and threw the door open.
“It was certainly the most splendid room. It was a great bedchamber, hung with tapestry; there was some excellent chairs with carved legs; a fine gold-framed mirror tilted forward over the carved mantelpiece; and, above all, and standing out from the wall opposite the window, was a great four-posted bed, with an elaborately carved head to it, and heavy curtains hanging from the canopy.
“But what surprised us more than anything that we had yet seen, was the sight of the bed. Except for the dust that lay on it, it might have been slept in the night before. There were actually damask sheets upon it, thrown back, and two pillows—all grey with dust. These were not arranged but tumbled about, as a bed is in the morning before it is made.
“As I was looking at this, I heard a boy cry out from the washing-stand:
“ ‘Why, it has had water in it,’ he said
“This did not sound exceptional for a basin, but we all crowded round to look; and it was perfectly true; there was a grey film around the interior of it; and when he had disturbed it (as a boy would) with his finger, we could see the flowered china beneath. The line came two-thirds of the way up the sides of the basin. It must have been partly filled with water a long while ago, which gradually evaporated, leaving its mark in the dust that must have collected there week after week.
“The Frenchman lost his patience at that.
“ ‘My sacred something!’ he said, ‘why is the room like this?’
“The same girl who had answered him before, answered him again in the same words. She was standing by the mantelpiece watching us.
“ ‘It is the Count's orders,’ she said stolidly.
“ ‘It is by the Count's orders that the bed is not made?’ snapped the man.
“ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl simply.
“Well, that did not content the Frenchman. He exhibited a couple of francs and began to question.
“This is the story that he got out of her. She told it quite simply.
“The last time that Count Jean Marie had come to the place, it had been for his honeymoon. He had come down from Paris with his bride. They had dined together downstairs, very happily and gaily; and had slept in the room in which we were at this moment. A message had been sent out for the carriage early next morning; and the couple had driven away with their trunks, leaving the servants behind. They had not returned, but a message had come from Paris that the house was to be closed. It appeared that the servants who had been left behind had had orders that nothing was to be tidied; even the bed was not to be made; the rooms were to be locked up and left as they were.
“The Frenchman had hardly been able to restrain himself as he heard this unconvincing story; though his wife shook him by the shoulders at each violent gesture that he made, and at the end he had put a torrent of questions.
“ ‘Were they frightened then?’
“ ‘I do not know, sir.’
“ ‘I mean the bride and bridegroom, fool!’
“ ‘I do not know, sir.’
“ ‘Sacred name—and—and—why do you not know?’
“ ‘I have never seen any of them, sir.’
“ ‘Not seen them I Why you said just now—’
“ ‘Yes, sir; but I was not born then. It was thirty years ago.’
“I do not think I have ever seen people so bewildered as we were. This was entirely unexpected. The Frenchman's jaw dropped; he licked his lips once or twice, and turned away. We all stood perfectly still a moment, and then we went out.”
I indulged myself with a pause just here I was enjoying myself more than I thought I should. I had not told the story for some while; and had forgotten what a good one it was. Besides, it had the advantage of being perfectly true. Then I went on again, with a pleased consciousness of faces turned to me.
“I must tell you this,” I said, “I was relieved to get out of the room. It is sixteen years ago now; and I may have embroidered on my own sensations; but my impression is that I had been just a little uncomfortable even before the girl's story. I don't think that I felt that there was any presence there, or anything of that kind. It was rather the opposite; it was the feeling of an extraordinary emptiness.”
“Like a Catholic cathedral in Protestant hands,” put in a voice.
“It was very like that,” I said, “and had, too, the same kind of pathos and terror that one feels in the presence of a child's dead body. It is unnaturally empty, and yet significant; and one does not quite know what it signifies.”
I paused again.
“Well, Reverend Fathers; that is the first Act. We went back to Portrieux: we made inquiries and got no answer. All shrugged their shoulders and said they did not know.
“There were no tales of the bride's hair turning white in the night, or of any curse or ghost or noises or lights. It was just as I have told you. Then we went back to England; and the curtain came down.
“Now, generally, such curtains have no resurrection. I suppose we have all had fifty experiences of first Acts; and we do not know to this day whether the whole play is a comedy or a tragedy; or even whether the play has been written at all.”
“Do not be modern and allusive, Mr Benson,” said Monsignor Maxwell
“I beg your pardon, Monsignor; I will not. I forgot myself. Well, here is the second Act. There are only two; and this is a much shorter one.
“Nine years later I was in Paris; staying in the Rue Picot with some Americans. A French friend of theirs was to be married to a man; and I went to the wedding at the Madeleine. It was—well, it was like all other weddings at the Madeleine. No description can be adequate to the appearance of the officiating clergyman and the altar and the bridesmaids and the French gentlemen with polished boots and butterfly ties, and the conversation, and the gaiety, and the general impression of a confectioner's shop and a milliner's and a salon and a holy church. I observed the bride and bridegroom and forgot their names for the twentieth time, and exchanged some remarks in the sacristy with a leader of society who looked like a dissipated priest; with my eyes starting out of my head in my anxiety not to commit a solecisme or a barbarisme. And then we went home again.
“On the way home we discussed the honeymoon. The pair were going down to a country house in Brittany. I inquired the name of it; and of course it was the chateau I had visited nine years before. It had been lent them by Count Jean Marie the Second. The gentleman resided in England, I heard, in order to escape the conscription; he was a connection of the bride's; and was about thirty years of age.
“Well, of course I was interested; and made inquiries and related my adventure. The Americans were mildly interested too, but not excited. Thirty-nine years is ancient history to that energetic nation. But two days afterwards they were excited. One of the girls came into dejeuner; and said that she had met the bride and bridegroom dining together in the Bois. They had seemed perfectly well, and had saluted her politely. It seemed that they had come back to Paris after one night at the chateau, exactly as another bride and bridegroom had done thirty-nine years before.
“Before I finish, let me sum up the situation.
“In neither case was there apparently any shocking incident; and yet something had been experienced that broke up plans and sent away immediately from a charming house and country two pairs of persons who had deliberately formed the intention of living there for a while. In both cases the persons in question had come back to Paris.
“I need hardly say that I managed to call with my friends upon the bride and bridegroom; and, at the risk of being impertinent, asked the bride point-blank why they had changed their plans and come back to town.
“She looked at me without a trace of horror in her eyes, and smiled a little.
“ ‘It was triste,’ she said, ‘a little triste. We thought we would come away; we desired crowds.’ ”
I paused again
“ ‘We desired crowds,’ ” I repeated. “You remember, Reverend Fathers, that I had experienced a sense of loneliness even with my friends during five minutes spent in that upstairs room. I can only suppose that if I had remained longer I should have experienced such a further degree of that sensation that I should have felt exactly as those two pairs of brides and bridegrooms felt; and have come away immediately. I might even, if I had been in authority, have given orders that nothing was to be touched except my own luggage.”
“I do not understand that,” said one Father, looking puzzled.
“Nor do I altogether,” I answered, “but I think I perceive it to be a fact for all that. One might feel that one was an intruder; that one had meddled with something that desired to be left alone, and that one had better not meddle further in any kind of way.”
“I suppose you went down there again,” observed Monsignor Maxwell.
“I did, a fortnight afterwards. There was only one girl left; the other was married and gone away. She did not remember me; it was nine years ago; and she was a little redder in the face and a little more stolid.
“The lawn had been clipped and mown, but was beginning to grow rank again. Then I went upstairs with her. The room was comparatively clean; there was water in the basin; and clean sheets on the bed; but there was just a little film of dust lying on everything. I pretended I knew nothing and asked questions; and I was told exactly the same story as I had heard nine years before; only this time the date was only a fortnight ago.
“When she had finished, she added:
“ ‘It happened so once before, sir: before I was born.’
“ ‘Do you understand it?’ I said.
“ ‘No, sir; the house is a little triste, perhaps. Do you think so, sir?’
“I said that perhaps it was. Then I gave her two francs and came away.
“That is all, Reverend Fathers.”
There was silence for a minute. Then one listener made what I consider a tactless remark.
“Bah! that does not terrify me,” he said.
“ ‘Terrify’ is certainly not the word,” remarked a second.
“I am not quite so sure about that,” ended Monsignor Maxwell.
(introduction removed, still under copyright)
The death of Mrs. Williamson Morley occurred in the early part of October, in San Francisco, only a couple of weeks before I was due to sail from New York for St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, my usual winter habitat. It was too far to get to the funeral, although, being an old friend and school mate of Morley's, I should have attended under any ordinary circumstances. I do not happen to know what the Morleys were doing in San Francisco. They lived in New York, and had a summer place on Long Island and I never knew Morley to move about very much. I wrote him at once, of course, a long and intimate letter. In it I suggested his coming down to stay with me in St. Thomas. I was there when I received his reply.
He accepted, and said that he would be arriving about the middle of November and would cable me accordingly.
When he arrived he made quite a flutter among my negro house-servants; an impression, it seemed to me, that went much deeper, for some strange reason, than his five huge trunks of clothes would cause among such local dandies as my house-man, Stephen Penn. I am anything but “psychic”, despite some experience with various out-of-the-way matters among the Caribbean Islands and in various parts of the globe. Indeed, one of my chief aversions is the use of this word by anyone as applying to one's own character. But “psychic” or not, I could not help but feel that flutter, as I have called it. Mr. Williamson Morley made a very striking impression indeed. I mention it because it recalled to me something I had entirely dropped out of my mind in the year or more since I had seen Sylvia, Morley's late wife. My servants, very obviously, showed an immediate, an inexplicable dread of him. I cannot, honestly, use a less emphatic word. When you notice your cook making the sign of the cross upon herself when she lays rolling, anxious eyes upon your house-guest, observe an unmistakable greyish tinge replacing the shining brown of your house-man's “Sambo” cheeks as he furtively watches that guest at his morning setting-up exercises which Morley performed with vigour and gusto—when you notice things like this, you can hardly help wondering what it is all about, especially when you remember that the late wife of that house-guest was as unmistakably afraid of her genial husband!
I had never known Sylvia very well, but I had known her well enough to realise that during Williamson Morley's courtship there was no such element of fear in her reception of his advances preliminary to a marriage. I tried, when I did notice this thing, beginning not long after the wedding, not so much to explain it—I regarded it as inexplicable that anyone should have such feelings towards Morley whom I had known since we were small boys together in the same form at Berkeley School in New York City—as to classify it. I found that I could give it several names—dread, repulsion, even loathing.
It was too much for me. Williamson Morley inspiring any of these feelings, especially in the wife of his bosom! The thing, you see, was quite utterly ridiculous. There never was, there could not possibly be, a more kindly, normal, open-hearted and reasonable fellow than Morley himself. He was, and always had been, good-natured to the degree of a fault. He was the kind who would let anyone smack him in the face, and laugh at it, without even the thought of hitting back. He had always had a keen sense of humour. He was generous, and rich. He had inherited good-sized fortunes both from his father and mother, and had made a good deal more in his Wall Street office. Williamson Morley was what some people call “a catch” for any woman.
Knowing him as well as I did it seemed rather tough that his wife, whom he plainly loved, should take things the way she did. Morley never said anything about it, even to me. But I could see what certain novelists name “the look of pain in his eyes” more than once.
Morley's good-nature, more like that of a friendly big dog than anything else I could compare it to, was proverbial. His treatment of his wife, in the six or seven years of their married life, a good deal of which I saw with my own eyes, was precisely what anyone who knew him very well would expect of him. Sylvia had been a comparatively poor girl. Married to Morley, she had everything a very rich man's petted darling could possibly desire. Morley indulged her, lavished upon her innumerable possessions, kindnesses, privileges...
And yet, through it all there ran that unmistakable note of a strange unease, of a certain suggestion of dread in his presence on Sylvia's part.
I put it down to perverseness pure and simple after seeing it for the first year or so. I wasn't doing any guessing, you see, about Morley's “inside” treatment of his wife. There was no bluff about the fellow, nothing whatever in the way of deceit or double-mindedness. I have seen him look at her with an expression which almost brought the tears into my eyes—a compound expression mingled out of respect and devotion, and puzzlement and a kind of dogged undertone as though he were saying, mentally, “All right, my dear, I've done all I know how to make things go right and have you happy and contented, and I'm keeping it up indefinitely, hoping you'll see that I love you honestly, and would do anything in the world for you; and that I may find out what's wrong so that I can make it right.”
That invincible, good-nature I have spoken of, that easygoing way of slipping along through life letting people smack you and not smacking them back which was always characteristic of Williamson Morley, was, I should hasten to make clear, not in the slightest degree due to any lack of ability on Morley's part to take care of himself, physically or otherwise. Quite the contrary! Morley had been, by far, our best athlete in school days. He held the inter-scholastic record for the twelve-pound shot and the twelve-pound hammer, records which, I believe, still stand. He was slow and a trifle awkward on his feet, it is true, but as a boxer and wrestler he was simply invincible. Our school trainer, Ernie Hjertberg, told me that he was the best junior athlete he had ever handled, and Ernie had a long and reputable record.
Morley went on with this in college. In fact, he became a celebrity, what with his succession of record-breaking puts of the sixteen-pound shot, and his tremendous heaves of the hammer of the same weight. Those two events were firsts for Haverford whenever their star heavyweight competed during his four years at that institution. He quit boxing after he had nearly killed the Yale man who was heavyweight champ in Morley's Freshman year, in the first round. He was intercollegiate champion wrestler of all weights for three and one-half years. Watching him handle the best of them was like watching a mother put her baby to bed! Morley simply brushed aside all attempts to hammerlock or half-nelson him, took hold of his opponent, and put him on his back and held him there long enough to record the fall; and then got up with one of those deprecating smiles on his face as much as to say: “I hated to do that to you, old man—hope I didn't hurt you too much.”
All through his athletic career at school, for the four years we were together there, he showed only one queer trait. That, under the circumstances, was a very striking one. Morley would never get under the showers. No. A dry-rub for him, every time. He was a hairy fellow, as many very powerfully-built men are, and I have seen him many a time, after some competition event or a strenuous workout at our athletic field or winter days in the gymnasium shining with honest sweat so that he might have been lacquered! Nevertheless, no shower for Morley! Never anything but four or five dry towels, then the usual muscle-kneading and alcohol rub afterwards—invariably with his track or gym shoes on. That, in its way, was another, and the last, of Morley's peculiarities. From first to last, he never, to my knowledge, took off even for muscle-kneadings at the capable hands of Black Joe, our rubber, the shoes he had been wearing, nor, of course, the heavy woollen stockings he always wore under them.
When quizzed about his dry-rubs, Morley always answered with his unfailing good-nature, that it was a principle with him. He believed in the dry-rub. He avoided difficulty and criticism in this strange idea of his, as it seemed to the rest of us, because Ernie Hjertberg, whose word was law and whose opinions were gold and jewels to us boys, backed him up in it. Many of the older athletes, said Ernie, preferred the dry-rub, and a generation ago nobody would have thought of taking a shower after competition or a workout. So it became a settled affair that Williamson Morley should dry-rub himself while the rest of us revelled under our cascades of alternate hot and cold water and were cool and comfortable while Morley at least looked half-cooked, red, and uncomfortable after his plain towellings!
It was, too, entirely clear to the rest of us that Morley's dry-rubs were taken on principle. That he was a bather—at home—was entirely evident. He was, besides being by long odds the best-dressed fellow in a very dressy, rather “fashionable” New York City school, the very pink and perfection of cleanliness. Indeed, if it had not been for Morley's admirable disposition, self-restraint, and magnificent muscular development and his outstanding athletic pre-eminence among us—our football teams with Morley in were simply invincible, and his inordinately long arms made him unbeatable at tennis—the school would very likely have considered him a “dude”. A shot-putter, if it had been anybody else than Morley, who, however modestly, displays a fresh manicure twice a week at the group-critical age of fifteen or sixteen is—well, it was Morley, and whatever Morley chose to do among our crowd, or, indeed any group of his age in New York City in those days, was something that called for respectful imitation—not adverse criticism. Morley set the fashion for New York's foremost school for the four or five years that he and I, Gerald Canevin, were buddies together.
It was when we were sixteen that the Morley divorce case shrieked from the front pages of the yellow newspapers for the five weeks of its lurid course in the courts.
During that period I, who had been a constant visitor at the house on Madison Avenue where Williamson, an only son, lived with his parents, by some tacit sense of the fitness of things, refrained from dropping in Saturdays or after school hours. Subsequently, Mrs. Morley, who had lost the case, removed to an apartment on Riverside Drive. Williamson accompanied his mother, and Mr. Morley continued to occupy the former home.
It was a long time afterwards, a year or more, before Williamson talked of his family affairs with me. When he did begin it, it came with a rush, as though he had wanted to speak about it to a close friend for a long time and had been keeping away from the topic for decency's sake. I gathered from what he said that his mother was in no way to blame. This was not merely “chivalry” on Williamson's part. He spoke reticently, but with a strong conviction. His father, it seemed, had always, as long as he could remember, been rather “mean” to the kindest, most generous and whole-souled lady God had ever made. The attitude of Morley senior, as I gathered it, without, of course, hearing that gentleman's side of the affair, had always been distant and somewhat sarcastic, not only to Mrs. Morley but to Williamson as well. It was, Wiliamson said, as though his father had disliked him from birth, thought of him as a kind of inferior being! This had been shown, uniformly, by a general attitude of contemptuous indifference to both mother and son as far back as Williamson's recollection of his father took him.
It was, according to him, the more offensive and unjust on his father's part, because, not long before his own birth, his mother had undergone a more than ordinarily harrowing experience, which Williamson and I agreed, should have made any man that called himself a man considerate to half the woman Mrs. Morley was, for the rest of his natural life!
The couple had, it appeared, been married about five years at the time, were as yet childless, and were living on the island of Barbados in the Lower Caribbean. Their house was an estate-house, “in the country”, but quite close-in to the capital town, Bridgetown. Quite nearby, in the very next estate-house, in fact, was an eccentric old fellow, who was a retired animal collector. Mr. Burgess, the neighbour, had been in the employ, for many years before his retirement due to a bad clawing he had received in the wilds of Nepal, of the Hagenbecks and Wombwells.
Mr. Burgess' outstanding eccentricity was his devotion to “Billy”, a full-grown orang-utan which, like the fellow in Kipling's horrible story, Bimi, he treated like a man, had it at the table with him, had taught the creature to smoke—all that sort of thing. The Negroes for miles around were in a state of sustained terror, Williamson said.
In fact, the Bimi story was nearly re-enacted there in Barbados, only with a somewhat different slant. We boys at school read Kipling, and Sherlock Holmes, and Alfred Henry Lewis' Wolfville series those days, and Bimi was invoked as familiar to us both when Williamson told me what had happened.
It seems that the orang-utan and Mrs. Morley were great friends. Old Burgess didn't like that very well, and Douglas Morley, Williamson's father, made a terrific to-do about it. He finally absolutely forbade his wife to go within a hundred yards of Burgess' place unless for the purpose of driving past!
Mrs. Morley was a sensible woman. She listened to her husband's warnings about the treachery of the great apes, and the danger she subjected herself to in such matters as handing the orang-utan a cigarette, and willingly enough agreed to keep entirely away from their neighbour's place so long as the beast was maintained there at large and not, as Mr. Morley formally demanded of Burgess, shut up in an adequate cage. Mr. Morley even appealed to the law for the restraint of a dangerous wild beast, but could not, it appeared, secure the permanent caging of Burgess' strange pet.
Then, one night, coming home late from a Gentlemen's Party somewhere on the island, Mr. Morley had walked into his house and discovered his wife unconscious, lying on the floor of the dining-room, most of her clothing torn off her, and great weals and bruises all over her where the orang-utan had attacked her, sitting alone in a small living-room next to the dining-room.
Mrs. Morley, hovering between life and death for days-on-end with a bad case of physiological shock, could give no account of what had occurred, beyond the startling apparition of “Billy” in the open doorway, and his leap towards her. She had mercifully lost consciousness, and it was a couple of weeks before she was able to do so much as speak.
Meanwhile Morley, losing no time, had dug out a couple of his Negroes from the estate-village, furnished them with hurricane-lanterns for light on a black and starless night, and, taking down his Martini-Henry elephant gun, and charging the magazine with explosive bullets, had gone out after the orangutan, and blown the creature, quite justifiably of course, into a mound of bloody pulp. He had, again almost justifiably, it seemed to Williamson and me, been restrained only by his two men disarming him lest he be hung by the neck until dead, from disposing of his neighbour, Burgess, with the last of the explosive cartridges. As it was, although Morley was not a man of any great physical force, being slightly built and always in somewhat precarious health, he had administered a chastising with his two hands to the fatuous ex-wild animal collector, which was long remembered in His Majesty King Edward's loyal colony of Barbados, BWI.
It was, as Williamson's maternal grandmother had confided to him, almost as though this horrible experience had unhinged Mr. Morley's mind. Williamson himself had been born within a year, and Douglas Morley, who had in the meantime sold out the sugar estates in which most of his own and his young wife's money had been invested, had removed to New York where he instituted a Bond Brokerage business. This Williamson had inherited two years after his graduation from college, at the time of his father's death at the rather premature age of forty-seven.
Douglas Morley, according to his grandmother's report and his own experience, had included his son in the strange attitude of dislike and contemptuous indifference which the devastating experience with the orang-utan had seemed to bring into existence.
We were not out of school when Mrs. Douglas Morley died, and Williamson went back to the Madison Avenue house to five with his father.
Mr. Morley had a kind of apartment built in for him, quite separate from his own part of the house. He could not, it seemed, bear to have Williamson under his eye, even though his plain duty and ordinary usage and custom made it incumbent on him to share his home with his son. The two of them saw each other as little as possible. Williamson had inherited his mother's property, and this his father administered for him as I must record to his credit, in an admirably competent and painstaking manner, so that Williamson was already a rich man well before his father's death about doubled his material possessions.
I have gone into this detail largely because I want to accentuate how extremely regrettable, it seemed to me, was Sylvia's unaccountable attitude, which I have described to one of the best and kindliest fellows on earth, after a childhood and youth such as he had been subjected to because of some obscure psychological slant of a very odd fish of a father for which, of course, he was in no way responsible himself.
Well, now Sylvia was gone, too, and Williamson Morley was once more alone in the world so far as the possession of near relatives went, and free to go about as he pleased.
His one comment, now that he was presumably settled down with me for the winter, about his late wife, I mean, was a very simple one, unconnected with anything that had been said or even alluded to, in answer to my carefully-phrased first personal word of regret for his loss.
“I did everything I knew how, Gerald.”
There was a world of meaning, a resume of quiet suffering, patiently and, I am sure, bravely, borne in those few and simple words so characteristic of Williamson Morley.
He did, once, refer to his mother during his visit with me, which lasted for several months. It was apropos of his asking my help in classifying and arranging a briefcase full of papers, legal and otherwise, which he had brought along, the documentation connected with a final settlement of his financial affairs. He had disposed of his Bond Brokerage business immediately after his wife's death.
There were various family records—wills, and suchlike—among these papers, and I noted among these as I sorted and helped arrange them for Morley, sitting opposite him at the big table on my West gallery, the recurring names of various kinsfolk of his—Parkers, Morleys, Graves, Putneys—but a total absence of the family name Williamson. I had asked him, without any particular purpose, hardly even curiosity over so small a matter, whether there were not some Williamson relatives, that being his own baptismal name.
“That's a curious thing, Gerald,” said Morley, reflectively, in his peculiarly deep and mellow voice. “My poor mother always—well simply abominated the name. I suppose that's how-come I got it fastened on me—because she disliked it! You see, when I was born—it was in New York, in Roosevelt Hospital—my mother very nearly died. She was not a very big or strong person, and I was—er—rather a good-sized baby—weighed seventeen pounds or something outrageous at birth! Queer thing too—I nearly passed out during the first few days myself, they say! Undernourished. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it. Yet, that was the verdict of three of New York's foremost obstetricians who were in on the case in consultation.
“Well, it seems, when I was about ten days old, and out of danger, my father came around in his car—it was a Winton, I believe in those days, or perhaps a Panhard—and carted me off to be baptised. My mother was still in a dangerous condition—they didn't let her up for a couple of weeks or so after that—and chose the name for me himself, so ‘Williamson’ I've been, ever since!”
We had a really very pleasing time together. Morley was popular with the St. Thomas crowd from the very beginning. He was too sensible to mope, and while he didn't exactly rush after entertainment, we went out a good deal, and there is a good deal to go out to in St. Thomas, or was in those days, two years ago, before President Hoover's Economy Programme took our Naval personnel out of St. Thomas.
Morley's geniality, his fund of stories, his generous attitude to life, the outstanding kindliness and fellowship of the man, brought him a host of new friends, most of whom were my old friends. I was delighted that my prescription for poor old Morley—getting him to come down and stay with me that winter—was working so splendidly.
It was in company with no less than four of these new friends of Morley's, Naval Officers, all four of them, that he and I turned the corner around the Grand Hotel one morning about eleven o'clock and walked smack into trouble! The British sailorman of the Navy kind is, when normal, one of the most respectful and pleasant fellows alive. He is, as I have observed more than once, quite otherwise when drunk. The dozens or so British tars we encountered that moment, ashore from the Sloop-of-War Amphitrite, which lay in St. Thomas' Harbour, were as nasty and aggressive a group of human beings as I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. There is no telling where they had acquired their present condition of semi-drunkenness, but there was no question whatever of their joint mood!
“Ho-plasterin' band o' brass-hat!” greeted the enormous cockney who seemed to be their natural leader, eyeing truculently the four white-drill tropical uniforms with their shoulder insignia, and rudely jostling Lieutenant Sankers, to whose house we were en route afoot that morning, “fink ye owns the 'ole blasted universe, ye does. I'll show ye!” and with that, the enormous bully, abetted by the salient jeers of his following which had, somehow, managed to elude their ship's Shore Police down to that moment, barged headfirst into Morley, seizing him first by both arms and leaving the soil-marks of a pair of very dirty hands on his immaculate white drill jacket. Then, as Morley quietly twisted himself loose without raising a hand against this attack, the big cockney swung an open hand, and landed a resounding slap across Morley's face.
This whole affair, of course, occupied no more than a few seconds. But I had time, and to spare, to note the red flush of a sudden, and I thought an unprecedented, anger in Morley's face; to observe the quick tightening of his tremendous muscles, the abrupt tensing of his long right arm, the beautifully-kept hand on the end of it hardening before my eyes into a great, menacing fist; the sudden glint in his deep-set dark-brown eyes, and then—then—I could hardly believe the evidence of my own two eyes—Williamson Morley, on his rather broad pair of feet, was trotting away, leaving his antagonist who had struck him in the face; leaving the rest of us together there in a tight little knot and an extremely unpleasant position on that corner. And then—well, the crisp “quarterdeck” tones of Commander Anderson cut through that second's amazed silence which had fallen. Anderson had seized the psychological moment to turn to these discipline-forgetting tars. He blistered them in a cutting vernacular in no way inferior to their own. He keel-hauled them, warming to his task.
Anderson had them standing at attention, several gaping-mouthed at his extraordinary skill in vituperation, by the time their double Shore Police squad came around the corner with truncheons in hand, and to the tender mercies of that businesslike and strictly sober group we left them.
We walked along in a complete silence. Morley's conduct as plainly dominating everything else in all our minds, as though we were five sandwichmen with his inexcusable cowardice blazoned on our fore-and-aft signboards.
We found him at the foot of the flight of curving steps with its really beautiful metal-wrought railing which leads up to the high entrance of Lieutenant Sankers' house. We went up the steps and into the house together, and when we had taken off our hats and gone into the “hall”, or living room, there fell upon us a silence so awkward as to transcend anything else of the kind in my experience. I, for one, could not speak to save my life; could not, it seemed, so much as look at Morley. There was, too, running through my head a half-whispered bit of thick, native, negro, St. Thomian speech, a dialect remark, made to herself, by an aged negress who had been standing, horrified, quite nearby, and who had witnessed our besetting and the fiasco of Morley's ignominious retreat after being struck full in the face. The old woman had muttered: “Him actin' foo save him own soul, de mahn—Gahd keep de mahn stedfas'!”
And as we stood there, and the piling-up silence was becoming simply unbearable, Morley, who quite certainly had not heard this comment of the pious old woman's, proceeded, calmly, in that mellow, deep baritone voice of his, to make a statement precisely bearing out the old woman's contention.
“You fellows are wondering at me, naturally. I'm not sure that even Canevin understands! You see, I've allowed myself to get really angry three times in my life, and the last time I took a resolution that nothing, nothing whatever, nothing conceivable, would ever do it to me again! I remembered barely in time this morning, gentlemen. The last time, you see, it cost me three weeks of suspense, nearly ruined me, waiting for a roughneck I had struck to die or recover—compound fracture—and I only tapped him, I thought! Look here!” as, looking about him, he saw a certain corporate lack of understanding on the five faces of his audience.
And, reaching up one of those inordinately long arms of his to where hung an old wrought-iron-barrelled musket, obviously an “ornament” in Sankers' house, hired furnished, he took the thing down, and with no apparent effort at all, in his two hands, broke the stock away from the lock and barrel, and then, still merely with his hands, not using a knee for any pressure between them such as would be the obvious and natural method for any such feat attempted, with one sweep bent the heavy barrel into a right-angle.
He stood there, holding the strange-looking thing that resulted for us to look at, and then as we stood, speechless, fascinated, with another motion of his hands, and putting forth some effort this time—a herculean heave which made the veins of his forehead stand out abruptly and the sweat start up on his face on which the mark of the big cockney's hand now showed a bright crimson, Williamson Morley bent the gun-barrel back again into an approximate trueness and laid it down on Sankers' hall table.
“It's better the way it is, don't you think?” he remarked, quietly, dusting his hands together, “rather than probably to have killed that mucker out of Limehouse—maybe two or three of them, if they'd pitched in to help him.” Then, in a somewhat altered tone, a faintly perceptible trace of vehemence present in it, he added: “I think you should agree with me, gentlemen!”
I think we were all too stultified at the incredible feat of brute strength we had witnessed to get our minds very quickly off that. Sankers, our host for the time-being, came-to the quickest.
“Good God!” he cried out, “of course—rather—oh, very much so, Old Man! Good God!—mere bones and cockney meat under those hands!”
And then the rest of them chimed in. It was a complete, almost a painful revulsion on the part of all of them. I, who had known Morley most of my life, had caught his point almost, as it happened, before he had begun to demonstrate it; about the time he had reached up after the old musket on the wall. I merely caught his eye and winked, aligning myself with him as against any possible adverse conclusion of the others.
This of course, in the form of a choice story, was all over St. Thomas, Black, White, and “Coloured” St. Thomas, within twenty-four hours, and people along the streets began to turn their heads to look after him, as the Negroes had done since his arrival, whenever Morley passed among them.
I could hardly fail to catch the way in which my own household reacted to this new information about the physical strength of the stranger within its gates so soon as the grapevine route had apprised its dark-skinned members of the fact. Stephen Penn, the house-man, almost never looked at Morley now, except by the method known among West Indian Negroes as “cutting his eyes”, which means a sidewise glance. Esmerelda, my extremely pious cook, appeared to add to the volume of her crooned hymn tunes and frequently muttered prayers with which she accompanied her work. And once when my washer's pick'ny glimpsed him walking across the stone-flagged yard to the side entrance to the West gallery, that coal-black child's single garment lay stiff against the breeze generated by his flight towards the kitchen door and safety!
It was Esmeralda the cook who really brought about the set of conditions which solved the joint mysteries of Morley's father's attitude to him, his late wife's obvious feeling of dread, and the uniform reaction of every St. Thomas Negro whom I had seen in contact with Morley. The denouement happened not very long after Morley's demonstration in Lieutenant Sankers' house that morning of our encounter with the sailors.
Esmeralda had been trying-out coconut oil, a process, as performed in the West Indies, involving the boiling of a huge kettle of water. This, arranged outdoors, and watchfully presided over by my cook, had days at intervals. Into the boiling water Esmerelda would throw several panfuls of copra, the white meat dug out of the matured nuts. After the oil had been foiled out and when it was floating, this crude product would be skimmed off, and more copra put into the pot. The final process was managed indoors, with a much smaller kettle, in which the skimmed oil was “boiled down” in a local refining process.
It was during this final stage in her preparation of the oil for me household that old Esmerelda, in some fashion of which I never really heard the full account, permitted the oil to get on fire, and, in her endeavours to put out the blaze, got her dress afire. Her loud shrieks which expressed fright rather than pain, for the blazing oil did not actually reach the old soul's skin, brought Morley, who was alone at the moment on the gallery reading, around the house and to the kitchen door on the dead run. He visualised at once what had happened, and, seizing an old rag-work floor mat which Esmerelda kept near the doorway, advanced upon her to put out the fire.
At this she shrieked afresh, but Morley, not having the slightest idea that his abrupt answer to her yells for help had served to frighten the old woman almost into a fit, merely wrapped the floor-mat about her and smothered the flames. He got both hands badly burned in the process and Dr. Pelletier dressed them with an immersion in more coconut oil and did them up in a pair of bandages about rubber tissue to keep them moist with the oil dressing inside so that Morley's hands looked like a prize-fighter's with the gloves on. These pudding-like arrangements Dr. Pelletier adjured his patient to leave on for at least forty-eight hours.
We drove home and I declined a dinner engagement for the next evening for Morley on the ground that he could not feed himself! He managed a bowl of soup between his hands at home that evening, and as he had a couple of fingers free outside the bandage on his left hand, assured me that he could manage undressing quite easily. I forgot all about his probable problem that evening, and did not go to his room to give him a hand as I had fully intended doing.
It was not until the next day at lunch that it dawned on me that Morley was fully dressed, although wearing pumps into which he could slip his feet, instead of shoes, and wondering how he had managed it. There were certain details, occurring to me, as quite out of the question for a man with hands muffled up, all but the two outside fingers on the left hand, as Morley was. Morley's tie was knotted with his usual careful precision; his hair, as always, was brushed with a meticulous exactitude. His belt-buckle was fastened.
I tried to imagine myself attending to all these details of dress with both thumbs and six of my eight fingers out of commission. I could not. It was too much for me.
I said nothing to Morley, but after lunch I asked Stephen Penn if he had assisted Mr. Morley to dress.
Stephen said he had not. He had offered to do so, but Mr. Morley had thanked him and replied it wasn't going to be necessary.
I was mystified.
The thing would not leave my mind all that afternoon while Morley sat out there on the West gallery with the bulk of the house between himself and the sun and read various magazines. I went out at last merely to watch him turn the pages. He managed that very easily, holding the magazine across his right forearm and grasping the upper, right-hand corner of a finished page between the two free fingers and the bandage itself whenever it became necessary to turn it over.
That comparatively simple affair, I saw, was no criterion.
The thing got to “worrying” me. I waited, biding my time.
About ten minutes before dinner, carrying the silver swizzle-tray, with a clinking jug and a pair of tall, thin glasses, I proceeded to the door of Morley's room, tapped, rather awkwardly turned the door's handle, my other hand balancing the tray momentarily, and walked in on him. I had expected, you see, to catch him in the midst of dressing for dinner.
I caught him.
He was fully dressed, except for putting on his dinner jacket. He wore a silk soft shirt and his black tie was knotted beautifully, all his clothes adjusted with his accustomed careful attention to the detail of their precise fit.
I have said he was fully dressed, save for the jacket. Dressed, yes, but not shod. His black silk socks and the shining patent-leather pumps which would go on over them lay on the floor beside him, where he sat, in front of his bureau mirror, at the moment of my entrance brushing his ruddy-brown, rather coarse, but highly decorative hair with a pair of ebony backed military brushes. Morley's hair had always been perhaps the best item of his general appearance. It was a magnificent crop, and of a sufficiently odd colour to make it striking to look at without being grotesque or even especially conspicuous. Morley had managed a fine parting this evening in the usual place, a trifle to the right of the centre of his forehead. He was smoothing it down now, with the big, black-backed brushes with the long bristles, sitting, so to speak, on the small of his back in the chair.
With those pumps and socks not yet put on I saw Morley's feet for the first time in my life.
And seeing them I understood those dry rubs in the gymnasium when we were schoolboys together—that curious peculiarity of Morley's which caused him to take his rubs with his track shoes on! “Curious peculiarity,” I have said. The phrase is fairly accurate, descriptive, I should be inclined to think, of those feet—feet with well-developed thumbs, like huge, broad hands—feet which he had left to clothe this evening until the last end of his dressing for dinner, because—well, because he had been using them to fasten his shirt at the neck, and tie that exquisite knot in his evening bow. He was using them now, in fact, as I looked dumbfounded at him, to hold the big military brushes with which he was arranging that striking hair of his.
He caught me, of course, my entrance with the tray—which I managed not to drop—and at first he looked annoyed, and then, true to his lifelong form, Williamson Morley grinned at me in the looking-glass.
“Oh good!” said he. “That's great, Gerald. But, Old Man, I think I'll ask you to hold my glass for me, if you please. Brushing one's hair, you see—er—this way, is one thing. Taking a cocktail is, really, quite another.”
And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me, and very nearly made me drop that tray after all, why Morley's father had named him “Williamson”.
I set the tray down, very carefully, avoiding Morley's embarrassed eyes, feeling abysmally ashamed of myself for what I, his host, had done—nothing, of course farther from my mind than that I should run into any such oddment as this. I poured out the glasses. I wiped off a few drops I had spilled on the top of the table where I had set the tray. All this occupied some little time, and all through it I did not once glance in Morley's direction.
And when I did, at last, carry his glass over to him, and, looking at him, I am sure, with something like shame in my eyes wished him “Good Health” after our West Indian fashion of taking a drink; Morley needed my hand with his glass in it at his mouth, for the black silk socks and the shining, patent-leather pumps were on his feet now, and the slight flush of his embarrassment had faded entirely from his honest, good-natured face.
And, I thought down inside me, that, whatever his motive in his unique chagrin, Douglas Morley had honoured him by naming him “Williamson!” For Williamson Morley, as I had never doubted, and doubted just at that moment rather less than ever before, was a better man than his father—whichever way you care to take it.
(removed, still under copyright)
(introduction removed, still under copyright)
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those withered memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.
I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun outdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower. There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.
I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything alive but the noiseless rats and bats and spiders. I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of something mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled, and decaying like the castle. To me there was nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that strewed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations. I fantastically associated these things with everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I know. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years—not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud. My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth because I remembered so little.
Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went further from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear; so that I ran frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of nighted silence.
So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for fight grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.
In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upwards. Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose wings made no noise. But more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of haunted and venerable mould assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I had attained.
All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upwards again, pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trap-door of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. I crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into place, but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the eerie echoes of its fall, but hoped when necessary to pry it up again.
Believing I was now at prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. More and more I reflected, and wondered what hoary secrets might abide in this high apartment so many eons cut off from the castle below. Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a portal of stone, rough with strange chiselling. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inwards. As I did so there came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through an ornate grating of iron, and down a short stone passageway of steps that ascended from the newly found doorway, was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.
Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to rush up the few steps beyond the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was stall very dark when I reached the grating—which I tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.
Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight.
Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel path that stretched away in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I knew not who I was nor what I was, nor what my surroundings might be; though as I continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road. Once I swam across a swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long vanished.
Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a venerable ivied castle in a thickly wooded park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the moat was filled in, and that some of the well-known towers were demolished; whilst new wings existed to confuse the beholder. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows—gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. Advancing to one of these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company, indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien.
I now stepped through the low windows into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation. The nightmare was quick to come, for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape, overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors.
The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved towards one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there—a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered—a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause—I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.
I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolution, the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world—or no longer of this world—yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering abhorrent travesty of the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintergrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.
I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance, so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonisingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the fetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.
I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognised, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.
But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in the chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that fight is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
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A drink possessing sedative properties—Editor
Editor's note: The reader may wish to pursue this story further and for his information the extract is taken from Mr. Wheatley's novel, “The Ka of Gifford Hillary” (Hutchinson).