this is a mystery . so until one reads, how can he or she will feel the thrill


palace intrigues


The Bachelor






--:1:--


I was sitting outside on the patio this morning with my morning cuppa of tea watching the sun come up, and feeling a cool breeze from the water below me. I was trying to imagine being in a realm where one could not experience the five senses. What would it be like to know everything that is ---- to know all the secrets of the universe .

Thus my whole day was spent on this only without any solution in sight or in brain.

I was suddenly confronted with a rare visit of an extraordinary person :--

It is as if one met a tram-car coming down a country lane. He has his rails and he runs on them. His Lodgings, the CLUB, that is his cycle. Once, and only once, he has been here. What upheaval can possibly have derailed him ?

That person should break out in this erratic fashion ! A planet might as well leave its orbit. By the way, do you know what he is ? I did not know what he is ?

I did not know him quite so well in those days. One has to be discreet when one talks of high matters of state.

He draws sixty thousand pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambition of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man.

His position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest brain. His professional "specialism" is in "omniscience". He has made himself an essential. In his brain, everything is pigeon-holed. He lives in it. He thinks on nothing else save when, as an intellectual exercise, he unbends if I call upon him and ask him to advice me on one of my little problems.

But the JUPITER is descending today.. what on earth can it mean ?


The story had held me, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome. An appearance of a dreadful kind made a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it ; waking her not to dissipate his dread, but to encounter also herself the same sight that shocked him.

Mr. Sam Neil passed his hand over his eyes, made a wincing grimace. "For dreadful --- dreadfulness ! The same horror is happening with me for the past few weeks. Probably whoever heard this story comes under the influence of it."

"How can it be such?"

"It's beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it ."

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"For general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain. You won't understand, Mr. Drayton Olmert."

He turned round to the fire, gave a kick to a log, watched it an instant. Then as he faced me again : "I can't explain.." There was a unanimous groan at this, and much reproach.

He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter ; he had had his reasons for a long silence.

"I took that here" ---- he tapped his heart.

"But how ?" I asked in astonishment.

"Is in old faded ink and in the most beautiful hand." He added, "The thing had been such a scare. It was a scene for a shudder ; but oh -- !"

I knew next day that a letter containing a key had gone off to his London apartments ; but in spite of ---- or just on account of ---- the eventual diffusion of this knowledge I quite let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening in fact as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes were fixed.

Many persons have heard much, though most have doubtless seen little, of the famous institution of the salon, and many are born to the depression of knowing that this finest flower of social life refuses to bloom where the English tongue is spoken. The explanation is usually that the British women have not the skill to cultivate it --- the art to direct through a smiling land, between suggesting shores, a sinuous stream of talk. My affectionate, my pious memory of Mr. SAM NEIL contradicts this induction only, more insidiously to confirm it. The sallow and slightly smoked drawing-room in which he spent so large a portion of his life certainly deserved the distinguished name ; but on the other hand it could not be said at all to owe its stamp to any intervention throwing into relief the fact that there was no Mrs. Neil the dear man had indeed, at the most, been capable of one of those sacrifices to which women are deemed peculiarly apt : he had recognized --- under the influence, in some degree, it is true, of some infirmity – that if one wishes people to find one at home one must manage not to be out. He had in short accepted the truth which many dabblers in the social art are slow to learn, that you must really, as they say, take a line, and that the only way as yet discovered of being at home is to stay at home. Finally his own fireside had become a summary of his habits. This would have been leaving what was notoriously pleasantest in London, the compact charmed cluster round the fine old chimney-piece which, with the exception of the remarkable collection of miniatures, was the best thing the place contained. Mr. Neil was not rich ; but he had enough money he got from his ancestors.




This person, Mr. Sam Neil, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream, impressed me. He was handsome and bold, off-hand and kind. He was extravagant, --- expensive habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his town residence a big house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase ; but it was to his country home, an old family place in Essex. He had been left, by the death of his parents in India, lonely . A lone man without the right sort of experience or a grain of patience --- very heavy on his hands to look after and take responsibility of even himself.

I opened the faded red cover of a thin, gilt-edged album. The whole thing took indeed more time than one. He has invited me to visit his country house and has given me the job of saving him from some dreadful happenings that was making his life a hell for the past few weeks.







--:2:--


I remember the whole beginning as a succession of little throbs and the wrong. I had all my doubts bristled again..... In this state of mind I spent the long hours of bumping swinging vehicle that carried me to the stopping-place at which I was to be met by another vehicle from his country house. The driver who was previously driving the car now changed his position and told me to drive the vehicle ---- rather strange.

"Then what job do you do there if you can't drive me to his place?"

Looking hard at me, he answered, "I have been ordered not to drive any of my owner's friends ."

"May I know the reason ?"

But there was no more reply from the man.

It was a strange order...
Driving at that hour, on a lovely day, through a country the summer sweetness of which served as a friendly welcome, my fortitude revived and, I had dreaded something so dreary that what greeted me was a good surprise. I remember as a thoroughly pleasant impression the broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains..........


That person Mr. Sam Neil, my client and who is going to be my host --- a stout, clean, wholesome man --- as to be positively on his guard against showing it too much. I wondered even then a little why he should wish not to show it, and that, with reflexion, with suspicion, might of course have made me uneasy.

Empty chambers, dull corridors, crooked staircases.... That made me pause..... it was a big, ugly, antique but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-displaced and half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship.

Such a person always evoke strange feelings and if there is any previous acquaintance --- then it generates strange memories.

I remembered my past meetings with him in London.

I remember vividly every element of the place, when I visited his London house, down to the intensely Londonish look of the grey opposite houses, in the gap of the white curtains of the high windows, and the exact spot where, on a particular afternoon, I put down my tea-cup for him, lingering an instant, to gather it up as if he were plucking a flower. His drawing-room was indeed his garden, his pruned and tended human parterre, and if we all flourished there and grew well in our places it was largely owing to his supervision.

Prima facie it appeared as if he was caught in a time warp. His house is nearly 350 years old. A kind of mini zoo in Herefordshire, north of London, that houses an interesting variety of animals including five goats and a donkey. In this lovely, old structure, Mr. Sam Neil sits at an equally old typewriter and keys in tomorrow's 'headlines'.

When I am reminded of some opposed discomfort of the present hour how perfectly we were all handled there, I ask myself once more what had been the secret of such perfection. Mr. Neil has solved the insoluble ; he had, without feminine help – save in the sense that ladies were dying to come to him and that he saved the lives of several --- established a salon . There was an art in it all, and how was the art so hidden ? Who indeed if it came to that was the occult artist ? I had already got hold of the tail of my reply.

I felt this covertly at the time, without formulating it and were conscious, as an ordered and prosperous community, of his evenhanded justice, all untainted with flunkeyism. His touch was infinitely fine. The delicacy of it was clear to me on the first occasion my eyes rested, as they were so often to rest again, on the domestic revealed, in the turbid light of the street, by the opening of the house-door. L'Ecole Anglaise I laughingly called him when, later on, it happened more than once that we had some conversation about this.

I remembered this man's saying to me : "O my dear friend, if you can live with me a fortnight you can live with me for ever. But it's the first fortnight that tries you." Strange and deep must such a probation have been to me, and I doubtless emerged from it tempered and purified. I guessed in a moment that what Mr. Neil alluded to was a participation more intense than any speech could have represented ---- that of being perpetually present on a hundred legitimate pretexts, errands, necessities, and breathing the very atmosphere of criticism, the famous criticism of life.

The first day his door was closed was therefore a dark date in contemporary history. It was raining hard and my umbrella was wet, but he received it from me exactly as if this were a preliminary for going upstairs. I observed however that instead of putting it away he held it poised and trickling over the rug, and I then became aware that he was looking at me with deep acknowledging eyes ----- his air of universal responsibility. I immediately understood. I exclaimed dolefully : "What a difference it will make ?"

"I shall be one of them !" said Mr. Neil ; and that was the beginning of the end.



I met him again at that great party...
Our acquaintance grew there . He had been told the ladies were at church, but this was corrected by what he saw from the top of the steps --- they descended from a great height in two arms, with a circular sweep of the most charming effect --- at the threshold of the door which, from the long bright gallery, overlooked the immense lawn. Three gentlemen, on the grass sat under the trees, while the fourth figure showed a crimson dress. The young man did not desire to go to his room as being conscious of no disrepair from so short and easy a journey and always liking to take at once a general perceptive possession of a new scene. He stood there a little with his eyes on the group and on the admirable picture, the wide grounds of an old country-house near London.

"But that lady, who's she ?" he asked a person.

"I think she's the daughter of Sir Peter MacDonald, Sir."

"Oh, she, Miss MacDonald ..such a beautiful lady !" exclaimed Sam.

"She is now the wife of the great novelist Calvin Fairbrother.

Sam was slightly nervous ; that went with his character as a student of fine prose, went with the artist's general disposition to vibrate ; and there was a particular thrill in the idea that the lady's husband might be a member of the party . For the young aspirant he had remained a high literary figure, in spite of the lower range of production to which he had fallen after his first success, the comparative absence of quality in his later works. He was but slenderly supplied with a social boldness – it was really a weakness in him --- so that, conscious of a want of acquaintance with the three gentlemen in the distance, he gave way to motions recommended by their not committing him to a positive approach. There was a fine English awkwardness in this .

Sam Neil approached the lady.

"Suppose we go into the gallery," said he. She pleased him greatly.

Seated opposite to him at luncheon, she had given him for half an hour the impression of her beautiful face. Something else had come with it --- a sense of generosity, of an enthusiasm which, unlike many enthusiasms, was not all manner. Sitting next to her this celebrity husband of hers was also opposite this young man, at the end of an hour spent in her company this young bachelor thought her still prettier than at the first radiation, and if her profane allusions to her husband's work had not still rung in his ears he should have liked her. Pretty women were a clear need to this genius, for the hour it was Mrs. Fairbrother who supplied that want.

This young man walked with her into the gallery, and they strolled to the end of it, looking at the pictures, the cabinets, the charming vista, which harmonized with the prospect of the summer afternoon, resembling it by a long brightness, with great divans and old chairs. The lady sat down with her new acquaintance on a flowered sofa and presently said : "I'm really glad to have a chance to talk to you."

"To thank me ---?" he was wondering.

"I liked your book a lot."

The feeling she excited was something larger, something that had little to do with any quickened pulsation of his own vanity. It was responsive admiration of the life she embodied, the young purity of which appeared to imply that real success was to resemble that, to live, to bloom, to present the perfection of a fine type. He was conscious he should have liked better to please her in some other way. The lines of her face were those of a woman grown, but the child lingered on in her complexion and in the sweetness of her mouth.

The he was an artist to the essence, the modern reactionary nymph, with the brambles of the woodland caught in her folds and a look as if the satyrs had toyed with her hair, made him shrink not as a man of starch and patent leather, but as a man potentially himself a poet .

"Tell, after all, why try to be an artist ? It's so poor !" the young man pursued.

"But why ?" said Mrs. Fairbrother.

"I mean as compared with being a person of action --- as living your works."

"But life is so clumsy without its vividness and art is nothing but an intense life." She replied.

"But I don't think so."

"Do you know the continent of Asia is always swarmed with great figures? That continent always enchants me . Haven't you heard of those captive kings and tributary princes chained to the cars of the British administrators in the twentieth century ?"

"One never heard of a picture – never a book except bad ones," said the man.

"Wasn't all life a picture ? I adore England !" she cried.

"Did your husband say that ?"

There was a small, as he felt, harmless spark of irony in his latest question ; which, however, she answered simply. "Yes, he says England hasn't been touched," she went on. "To listen to him makes me want so to do something."

"But some of his latest books seem to me of a queerness !"

"Ya, --- he knows that. He didn't esteem them."

There was a certain shock for this young pursuer of beauty in the knowledge that the fine genius they were discussing of had been reduced to so explicit a confession, in his misery, to the first comer ; for though Mrs. Fairbrother was charming what was she after all but an immature girl encountered at a country-house ?

"Here he comes. Now you must know him," she told . there stood that great novelist near a gathering , not falling into the talk but taking up an old miniature from a table and regarding it. As the young man approached this celebrity, the eyes of the great man turned, left and right, to the pictures. The gallery was so long that this transit took some little time.

This young man was sorry for the great celebrity, as he was at any time for any person publicly invited to be responsive . He got up, trying to show his compassion, but at the same instant he found himself encompassed by this artist's happy personal art --- a manner of which it was the essence to conjure away false positions.

But he knew that the lady's strength was not equal to her aspirations.




The smoking-room was on the scale of the rest of the place ; high, light and commodious. This young man was a faithless smoker ; he would puff a cigarette for reasons with which tobacco had nothing to do. This was particularly the case on that occasion ; his motive was the vision of a little direct talk with that great novelist. The "tremendous" communion of which the great man had held out hopes to him earlier in the day had not yet come off, and this saddened him considerably, for the party was to go its several ways immediately after breakfast on the morrow. He waited a little, wondering if he had only gone to put on something extraordinary ; this would account for his delay as well as contribute further to this young bachelor's impression of his tendency to do the approved superficial thing.

In this attitude he presently felt a hand on his shoulder and a friendly voice in his ear. "I hoped I should find you." That great man was there and with a fine face .

Mr. Neil, the young man offered him a cigarette.

"Well, you know, I don't smoke. It's very good for my health. My wife doesn't let me this luxury. Let's take that sofa."

"Do you mean you like smoking ?"

"No, no. she won't let me smoke, never again in my life – after that dreaded breathing trouble."

They took possession of a sofa at a distance from the group of smokers, while I was standing some distance away and that husband went on : "Have you got one yourself ?"

"A cigarette?"

"Oh no. A wife ?"

"No, not yet. But I won't give up my smoking for one ."

"If you can get a good deal in return , you'll have to give up a good deal ." He stopped for a moment and resumed, "I know you remarkably. You've written a very distinguished book."

"And how do you know it?" he asked.

"It's in the air, it's in the papers." The writer spoke with the immediate familiarity of a confere – a tone that seemed to his neighbour the very rustle of the laurel. "You're on all men's lips and, what's better, on all women's."

"Have you read it full ?"

"No. my wife had."

"I like her very much," said Mr. Neil .

"It's the best thing you can do with her. She's a rare young lady. " He broke into a laugh to
reply.

"Do you wish to pass exactly for what she represents you ?" he said.

"I'm passing away – nothing else than that. She has a better use for young imagination than in 'representing' in any way such a weary wasted used-up animal ! Leave that. Ah ! you're surprisingly brilliant ."

"I'm going to be better," he made bold to reply.

"It's so much easier to be worse --- heaven knows I've found it so. I'm not in a great glow, you know. I see you'll be able to keep it up. It will be a great disgrace if you don't. that's the devil of the whole thing."

"You make me very miserable," he ecstatically breathed.

"It's a warning , I know, gentleman. The spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." The celebrity, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was cruel – cruel to himself. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the twentieth century ceiling : "Look at me, take my lesson to heart. Don't become in your old age what I have in mine ----- the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods !"

"What do you mean by your old age ?"

"It has made me old."

He answered nothing – they sat in silence.

Then "What do you mean by false gods?" Mr. Neil enquired.

"The idols of the market ; money and 'the world' ; placing one's children ; all the vile things they make one do !"

"But surely one's right to want to place one's children."

"One has no business to have any children," the novelist declared.

"But aren't they an inspiration ?'

"An incentive to damnation, artistically speaking."

"You touch on very deep things."

"My wife likes great celebrities, whether incipient or predominant. It's cruel. I'll tie my vanity to the stake for you and burn it to the ashes. You must come and dine."

"I must see you more. Mrs. Fairbrother is so nice."

"She will be, before anything else, my wife ; and she won't on the whole think it any less vulgar to talk about inferiors than I do myself."

At the end of the moment the thing had turned into a smoke, and out of smoke – the last puff of a big cigar ----- proceeded the voice of the great celebrity. "I follow a hygiene. I must leave now."

Mr. Neil did also learn something more about the lady : She never got credit for repressing her annoyance at the poverty of the nominal signs and styles, a deep desolation. The little speech to her husband's kins, relatives and parents was the most reckless sign she gave of it ; and there were few things that contributed more to the good conscience she habitually enjoyed than her self-control on this particular point.

Most of the company, after breakfast, drove back to town, entering their own vehicles. The young man , Sam waved his hat to her in response to her nods and flourishes he reflected that, taken together, they were honourable image of success. Such things were not the full measure, but he nevertheless felt a little proud for literature .


This was too much ---- the husband of Mrs. Fairbrother was the mocking fiend. He turned from Mr. Sam Neil with a mere nod for good-night and the sense in a sore heart that he might come back to him and his easy grace, his fine way of arranging things, some time in the far future, but could not fraternize with him now. It was necessary to his soreness to believe for the hour in the intensity of his grievance – all the more cruel for its not being a legal one.




Before two weeks had elapsed he met Mrs. Fairbrother in Harley Street, at a 'private view' of the works of a young artist who had been so good as to invite him to the stuffy scene.

We had been invited to that 'private view' of an artwork. I did not miss this great opportunity of seeing some great works of art. Here I met Mr. Sam Neil again. There were certain females whose heads were surmounted with hats of strange convolution and plumage, which rose on long necks above the others. One of the heads, he perceived, was much the most beautiful of the collection, and his next discovery was that it belonged to Mrs. Fairbrother. Its beauty was enhanced by the glad smile she sent him across surrounding obstructions, a smile that drew him to her as fast as he could make his way. He had seen for himself in the last party that the last thing her nature contained was an affection of indifference.

"Oh, you're alone ? I think your husband has not accompanied you."

"You're right. If you had been so kind as to propose it – why not you as well as he ?"

"Why he's a pere de famillie ? Will you go to see places with me ? Sam asked.

"Anything you like !" she smiled. "I know what you mean, that a girl like me should not waste her life on a wasted artist like Mr. Fairbrother," she added with a sweet distinctness that made those near her turn around.

"Let me at least repay that speech by taking you out of this squash," her new admirer said.

"This type of private view will be held next year again. I hope we're going to be friends always. I can't wait till next year to see you."

"We should wait."

"No, no --- aren't we to meet at dinner on the twentieth ?" she panted with an eagerness as happy as his own.

"Like a shot, if you'll be so good as to ask me !"

"I'm going to take you to the Park ," he said with elation as people passed along the corridor that led to the street.

"It's a nice day --- there'll be great crowd. We're going to look at the people, to look at types," the lady went on.

"I go once a year --- on business," said he.

"Do you know presently my husband's manner of conducting himself towards me appeared not quite in harmony?"

An indefinite envy rose in this young man's heart as he took way with her. Her tone had truth and emotional beauty.

I was with Mr. Neil.
He shook hands with the lady. And got off. His face was red and he had the sense of its growing more and more crimson.

If at all, he was an absurd, abject victim. It was as if he had not lost her till now. He had renounced her, yes ; but that was another affair --- that was a closed but not a locked door. Now he seemed to see the door quite slammed in his face. Did he expect her to wait ---- was she to give him his time like that : two years at a stretch ? He did not know what he had expected – he only knew what he had not. It was not this --- it was not this. Mystification bitterness and wrath rose and boiled in him when he thought of the deference, the devotion, the credulity with which he had listened to Mr. Fairbrother. The evening wore on and the light was long ; but even when it had darkened he remained without a light. He had flung himself on the sofa, where he lay through the hours with his eyes either closed or gazing at the gloom, in the attitude of a man teaching himself to bear something. He had made it too easy – the idea passed over him like a hot wave. He would go to the dinner – he would see her at least ; perhaps he should see what it meant.

It was her old liberal lavish way, with a certain added amplitude that time had brought ; and if this manner began to operate the spot, at such a juncture in her history, perhaps in the other days too it had meant just as little or as much --- a mere mechanical charity, with the difference now that she was satisfied --- and why shouldn't she be ? Why shouldn't she have been surprised at his coming the first day --- for all the good she had ever got from
him ? As the lady continued to hold her attention he turned from her with a strange irritation in his complicated artistic soul and a sort of disinterested disappointment . She was so happy that it was almost stupid – a disproof of the extraordinary intelligence he had formerly found in her.

The person in him had now definitely ceased to count – ceased to count as a person. As he smiled a welcome across the place he was almost banal, to make a movement, as if for all the world he had his bad conscience ; then they had already met in the middle of the room and had shaken hands --- expressively, cordially on his part.

He was, as a person of imagination and dream and tact, quite ready to give every satisfaction --- being both by his genius and his method so able to enter into everything another might feel.

She has been so free, and yet she consents. Better than any one else perhaps --- "for I remember how I liked her before I went away, and how she liked me --- I can intelligently congratulate me...." These thoughts engulfed him all the time I was with him.

Wasn't the artist's allusion to her having liked him a part of the irony ? By his theory the lady's husband disapproved of an artist's marrying.

He stared as if divining a bitterness.

Standing there in the ripeness of his successful manhood, he did not suggest that any of his veins were exhausted.

On the pre-planned date of twentieth at sharp nine o'clock, he called in Manchester Square, where his secret wish was gratified by his finding Mrs. Fairbrother alone. She was carrying many water-color drawings from the hand of herself, commemorating with a brave breadth the sunsets, the mountains, the temples and palaces of India. Luckily now, of a fine Sunday, half the world went out of town, and that made it better for those who did not go, when these others were in sympathy. It was the defect of London.

After that, I found myself busy in some other works and there was neither any news of Sam's elopement with another person's wife, nor even Sam gave me any news of his latest engagements. At least I expected there would definitely be an upheaval in the London social circle because of this event, but nothing of this kind reached my ears. Still I knew his bachelorship was coming to an end very soon.

Suddenly, after a few days, one evening I met Sam Neil in a London street, near Mrs. Fairbrother's house, just before setting out for the journey to his country house, after I had got his letter. It was doubtless in the attitude of hugging this wrong that he descended the stairs without taking leave of Mrs. Fairbrother, who had not been in view at the moment he quitted the room. He was glad to get out into the honest dusky unsophisticating night, to move fast, to take his way home on foot.

He was looking haggard as if walked a long time, going ashtray, paying no attention. He seemed to be thinking of too many other things. I was following him from behind keeping some safe distance. His steps recovered their direction, however, and at the end of a quarter of an hour, he found himself before his door in the small inexpensive empty street. He lingered, questioning himself still before going in, with nothing around and above him but moonless blackness, a bad light or two and a few far-away dim stars. To these last faint features he raised his eyes ; he had been saying to himself that he should probably have been "sold" indeed, diabolically sold, if now, on his new foundation, at the end of a year.............

He probably did not see me . Not even he obstructed my seeing him.
All that evening at home – Sam Neil went straight to his rooms and remained there dinnerless ---- his cheek burned at intervals as if it had been smitten. He did not understand what had happened to him, what trick had been played on him, what treachery practiced. "None, none," he said to himself. "It's none of my business."

He was indignant. He closed the door behind his backs with restrained violence, turned the key, shot the bolt. He was not satisfied with his new-found friend. In the light of his friend's philosophy which appeared hopelessly futile, he could not at all at once take the initiative of action. He had to be cautious. Moved by the just indignation of a man well over forty-five, menaced in what is dearest to his soul --- his repose and his security.

He descended into the abyss of moral reflections. With the insight of a kindred temperament he pronounced his verdict.

A lazy lot, Mrs. Fairbrother, a woman whom he had enticed away from that friend, and afterwards had tried more than once to shake off into the gutter. Jolly lucky for Mrs. Fairbrother that she had persisted in coming up time after time, or else there would have been no one now to help him out of the bus by the railings, where that spectre took its constitutional crawl every fine morning. When that indomitable snarling lady died the swaggering spectre would have to vanish, too – there would be an end to that fiery Miss...... . and his morality as offended also by the optimism of his friend . He drew fine distinctions in his mind on the strength of insignificant differences. He drew them with a certain complacency, because the instinct of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all kinds of recognized labour.

He was brought face to face with the necessity of going to bed some time or other that evening. Then why not go now – at once ? the necessity was not so normally pleasurable as it ought to have been for a man of his age and temperament. He dreaded the demon of sleeplessness. He raised his arm and prepared for the bed.

But that bewildered murmur was followed again and again by the incongruous ejaculations : "Was it a plan ?" sometimes he cried to himself, breathless, "Have I been duped ?"







--:3:--



Mr. Sam Neil's country house gave me some sleepless nights after my arriving there. There was not even a single servant or maid to help him. He used to do all his household works all alone.

He expressed in his way of his behaviour an extraordinary detachment from disagreeable duties, looking at me, with a hard light that seemed to offer it as a mere result of the affection he had conceived for my person.

"How can you manage everything in such a big house?" I asked him.

"My parents used to stay here before their death. And I don't like anybody disturbing my tranquility."

"Oh, I see. But what about the driver?"

"I don't trust anybody."

"Mr. Neil, what about your marriage with that beautiful lady ?"

"Don't ask unnecessary questions."

His sudden turning his back on me was fortunately not, for my just preoccupations, a snub that could check the growth of our mutual esteem. I was really saddened by his answer and his behaviour.

I felt that he was now a rather different person , and was looking for work. He was a rather finely-made young man, with dark-brown hair and light blue eyes. His face had already lost its chubbiness, and was becoming somewhat rough-featured, almost rugged ---- and it was extraordinarily mobile. Usually he looked as if he saw things, was full of life, and warn ; then his smile came suddenly and was very lovable, and then, when there was any clog in his soul's quick running, his face went stupid and ugly.

He suffered very much from the first contact with anything. Now he felt he had to go out into life , he went through agonies of shrinking self-consciousness. He was quite a clever person completely different from the person whom I know in the not so long past..



A time so full that as I was reminded by the events --- of all the art I needed to make it a little distinct. I had known space and air, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature---it was a trap --- not designed but deep – to my delicacy..... made me off my guard. It may be of course above all that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness --- that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.

He took me for a walk in the countryside. We walked down the quaint village street with a row of pollarded elms on either side of it. Just beyond were two ancient stone pillars, weather-stained and lichen-blotched bearing upon their summits a shapeless something. A short walk along the winding drive, with such sward and oaks turn, and the long, low, Jacobean house of dingy, live-coloured brick lay before us, with an old-fashioned garden of cut yews on either side of it. The centuries had flowed past the old house, centuries of births and deaths and of homecomings, of country dances and of the meetings of fox-hunters . Strange that now in its old age this dark business should have cast its shadow upon the venerable walls. And yet those strange peaked roofs and quaint overhung gables were a fitting covering to grim and terrible intrigue. As I looked at the deep-set windows and the long sweep of the dull-coloured front I felt that no more fitting scene could be set for such a fitting a tragedy.

One such a fine day, I stopped short of emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot --- and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for ---- was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there ! --- but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower. It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first : the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which there is no living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear ; and the figure that faced me was ---- a few more seconds assured me – as little any one else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. I had not seen it anywhere. The place, moreover, in the strangest way in the world, had on the instant and by the very fact of its appearance become a solitude. The rest of the scene was stricken with death. I felt an intense hush in which the sounds of that evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky and the friendly hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice. We were confronted across our distance quite long enough for me to ask myself with intensity who then he was and to feel, as an effect of my inability to say, a wonder that in a few seconds more became intense.

It lasted while I just bridled a little with the sense of how my office seemed to require that there should be no such ignorance and no such person. It lasted while this visitant, at all events ---- and there was a touch of the strange freedom in the sign of familiarity of his wearing no hat ----- seemed to fix me, from his position that his own presence provoked. Suddenly, he changed his place – passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite corner of the platform. It was intense to me that during this transit he never took his eyes from me, and I could see his hand as he went . He turned away ; that was all I saw.

The next day was grey enough, but the afternoon light still lingered, and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize, on a chair near the wide window, the articles I wanted, but to become aware of a person on the other side of the window and looking straight in. my vision was instantaneous ; it was all there. That same unknown person ---- he remained but a few seconds – long enough to convince me he also saw and recognized ; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. His stare into my face ---- oh! it was really unbearable, was as deep and hard as then, but it did quit me for a moment during which I could still watch it, ..............On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come. He had come for some one else --- as I could see him fixing successively several other things.............

The flash of this knowledge --- for it was the knowledge in the midst of dread --- produced in me the most extraordinary effect, starting, as I stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage. I bounded straight out of the door again, reached that of the house, got in an instant upon the drive and, passing along the terrace as fast as I could rush, turned a corner and came full in sight. But it was in sight of nothing now --- my visitor had vanished. The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden behind it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness.






--:4:--




He was too irritable for conversation and too restless for sleep. I left him smoking hard, with his heavy, dark brows knotted together, and his long, nervous fingers tapping upon the arms of his chair, as he turned over in his mind every possible solution of the mystery . Several times in the curse of the night I heard him prowling about the house. Finally, just after I had been called in the morning, he rushed into my room. He was in his dressing-gown, but his pale, hollow-eyed face told me that his night had been a sleepless one.

His large face showed me, at this, for the first time, the far-away faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute : I somehow made out in it the delayed dawn of an idea I myself had not given Mr. Sam Neil and that was as yet quite obscure to me. It comes back to me that I thought instantly of this as something I could get from him ; and I felt it to be connected with the desire he presently showed to know more.

It was one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed. It would be an over –statement to say that he was shocked or even excited by the amazing announcement. Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long over-stimulation. If his emotions were dulled, his intellectual perceptions were exceedingly active. His face showed rather the quiet and interested composure of the chemist who sees the crystals falling into position from his over-saturated solution........

"What's he like?"

"He's like nobody."

"Nobody?" he echoed. "Ha ha ha!"

It was a demonic laughter. It was very strange with me.

"He has no hat. He has brown hair, close-curling, and a very hard face, long in shape, with straight features and little queer whiskers that are as brown as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker. His eyes are very, very sharp, strange ; very fixed."

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could, my dreadful liability to impressions of order so vividly exemplified, and my client-cum-host's knowledge henceforth --- a knowledge half consternation and half compassion --- of that liability. The result of our everything out was simply to reduce our situation to the last rigour of its elements. He himself had seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house was in my plight. He showed an awestricken tenderness, a deference to my more than questionable privilege, of which the very breath has remained with me as that of the sweetest of human charities.

What was settled between us accordingly that night was that we thought we might bear things together ; and I was not even sure that in spite of his exemption it was he who had the best of the burden. I knew at this hour, as well as I knew later, what I was capable of meeting to shelter my host ; but it took me some time to be wholly sure of what my honest host was prepared to keep terms with so stiff an agreement. I was queer company enough – quite as queer as the company I received ; but as I trace over what we went through I see how much common ground we must have found in the one idea that, by good fortune, could steady us. It was the idea, the second movement, that led me straight out, as I may say, of the inner chamber of my dread. I do not know how the particular way strength came to me before we separated for the night. We had gone over and over every feature of what I had seen.

I said to myself, "If it's a spirit, heaven forbid....he wants to appear to him."

It was an awful conception, and yet I could keep it at bay. I thought that I should serve as an expiatory victim and guard the tranquility of the rest of the household.

"It's rather odd," I thought. "It was the spirit's own fancy. To spoil him. It was much too free...that strange person !"

This gave me, straight from my vision of that face – such a face ! ---- a sudden sickness of disgust . "Too free with my friend-cum-host Sam ?"

"Too free with every one !" My heart told me with a shock.

There was everything, for our apprehension, in the lucky fact that no discomfortable legend, no perturbation of scullions, had ever, within any one's memory, attached to this kind old place. It had neither bad name nor ill fame.

A rigid control, from the next day, was to follow Mr. Sam ; yet how often and how passionately, for a week, we came back together to the subject ! That sinister figure of the living man ---- the dead one would keep awhile ! ---------and of the days he had continuously passed there in the house, which, added up, a formidable stretch. The limit of this evil time had arrived only when,....on the dawn of one morning, my host was found lying on the road : an accident explained --- superficially at least ---- by a wound on his head ; a fatal slip ; in the dark and after leaving the local bar... the steepish slope, the turn mistaken at night and in liquor, accounted for much --- practically, in the end and after the inquest and boundless chatter, for everything ; but there had been matters in his life ------ strange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspected, that would have accounted for a good deal more.

Still I was in those days literally able to find a joy in the extraordinary flight of heroism the occasion demanded of me. I now saw that I had been asked for a service difficult ; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen --- oh, in the right quarter ! That I could succeed where many another person might have failed. It was an immense help to me – I confess I rather applaud myself as I look back ! – that I saw my response so strongly and so simply . I was there to protect and defend this odd creature like Sam in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become too explicit, a deep, constant ache of one's own engaged affection. We were cut off, really, together. He had nothing but me, and I – well, I had him.. I was a screen – I was to stand before him. The more I saw the less he would. I began to watch him in a stifled suspense, a disguised tension, that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. It did not last as a suspense --- it was superseded by horrible proofs.

This moment dated from a twilight hour that I happened to spend in the grounds with him alone. This young man's only defect was a certain ingenuity of restlessness. My attention to him all really went to seeing him amuse himself immensely without me : this was a spectacle they seemed actively to prepare and that employed me as an active admirer. I walked in a world of his invention.

Suddenly, amid these elements, I became aware that on the other side of the little pond we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world --- the strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work – for I was something or other that could sit --- on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond ; in this position I began to take in the certitude and yet without direct vision the presence, a good way off, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in anything ; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the pond as a consequence of raising my eyes. I can feel once more the spasm of my effort not to move or disturb my host till I should so have steadied myself as to be able to make up my mind what to do. There was an alien object in view – a figure whose right of presence I instantly questioned. Nothing was more natural, at that moment, than the appearance of one of the men about the place, or even a messenger, from the county. Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things they absolutely were not.

Of the positive identity of the apparition I would assure myself as soon as the small clock of my courage should have ticked out the right second ; meanwhile, with an effort that was already sharp enough, I transferred my eyes straight to my host, who, at the moment, was about fifteen yards away. My heart had stood still for an instant with the terror of the question whether he too would see ; and I held my breath while I waited for what a shout or an utter from him, what some sudden sign either of interest or of alarm, would tell me. I waited, but nothing came ; then in the first place --- and there is something more dire in this, I felt, than in anything I have to relate --- I was determined by a sense that within a minute all spontaneous sounds from him had dropped ; in the second by the circumstance that also within the minute he had, in his amusement, turned his back to the water. My apprehension of what he was going to do sustained me so that after some seconds I felt I was ready for more. Then I again shifted my eyes – I faced what I had to face.







--:5:--




I could not breath properly after that incident. "He knows --- it's monstrous !"

I could scarcely articulate it to myself. How could I tell it to anybody or ask for an explanation from my host, the victim. Unutterable still for me was the stupefaction of it.

A figure of quite an unmistakable horror and evil ; a person in black, pale and dreadful – with such an air also, and such a face ! on the other side of the pond. I was there with my host --- quiet for the hour ; and in the midst of it he came.

The figure just appeared and stood there – but not so near. He appeared from nowhere ! This drew from me, in the state of my nerves, a flash of impatience. There were depths, depths ! the more I go over it the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see – what I don't fear !

At the image of this possibility I for a moment, nearly collapsed, yet presently to pull myself together again as from the positive force of the sense of what, should I yield an inch, there would really be to give way to. I could not forget those awful eyes, the determination ----indescribable , with which that third person was seeing at my host. With a kind of fury of intention ! in mourning – rather poor, almost shabby clothes he was wearing --- it was really strange and odd ....but with extraordinary beauty even in that attire....i now recognized to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my confidence, for my host quite visibly weighed this. But infamous ! that dangerous fellow was an impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved... a hound. !

I considered as it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades. This fellow can do what he wishes ! With my host.

As I looked into my own eyes in the mirror, that fellow again appeared. I seemed at any rate for an instant to trace my evocation of him as distinctly as I had seen him by the pond ; and I brought out with decision : it must have been also what my host wished !"

And what I imagined was dreadful.

"Not so dreadful as what I do," I thought ; on which I must have shown him – as I was indeed but too conscious ---- a front of miserable defeat. It is far worse than I dreamed ! He is lost !




I was in a common mind about the duty of resistance to extravagant fancies. I was to keep my head if I should keep nothing else --- difficult indeed as that might be in the face of all that, in my prodigious experience, seemed least to be questioned. Late that night, while the house slept, I was thinking in my room ; it was beyond doubt that I had seen exactly what I had seen. I found that to keep him thoroughly in the grip of this I had only to ask myself how, if I had "made it up", I came to be able to give, of each of the persons appearing to me, a picture disclosing, to the last detail, their special marks – a portrait on the exhibition of which he had instantly recognized and named them. I closed with myself cordially on the article of the likelihood that with recurrence – for recurrence I took for granted – I should get used to my danger ; distinctly professing that my personal exposure had suddenly become the least of my discomforts. It was my new suspicion that was intolerable ; and yet even to this complication the late hours of the day had brought a little case.

On leaving my host, after my first outbreak, I had of course returned to my own self, associating the right remedy for my dismay with the sense of his charm which I had already recognized as a resource I could positively cultivate and which had never failed me yet. It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the evening, by the pond, had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised must have been for both parties a matter of habit. It was a pity I should have had to quaver out again, the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the person , that is, my host saw our visitant even as I actually saw him himself, and that he wanted, by just so much as he did thus see, to make me suppose he did not, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did ! it was a pity I needed to recapitulate the portentous little activities by which he sought to divert my attention --- the perceptible increase of movement.

I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind – I scarce know what to call it – to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing him fairly to the wall. He had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal when he went to me to ask for help and to bring me here ; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat ; and I remember how on this occasion – for the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and my watch seemed to help – I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain.

That strange figure and my host had been perpetually together, rather mentally ! What was going on between these two wretches ? only I have not my dreadful boldness of mind, and I keep back, out of timidity, even the impression that in the past, when I had to flounder about in silence, most of all made me miserable. "There was something in my host that suggested to me, I thought, "his covering and concealing their relation."

I waited and waited, and the days took as they elapsed something from my consternation. A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my host, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights. It would doubtless have been a greater tension still, however, had it not been so frequently successful. I trembled lest they should see that he was so immensely more interesting. It occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for him, so too I remember asking if I might not see a question in the traceable increase of his own demonstrations.

Sam Neil was at this period extravagantly and preternaturally fond of me.

I find that I really hang back ; but I must take my horrid plunge. In going on with the record of what hideous at that place I not only challenge the most liberal faith ----- for which I little care ; but I renew what I myself suffered, I again push my dreadful way through it to the end. There came suddenly an hour after which the business seems to me to have been all pure suffering ; but I have at least reached the heart of it, and the straightest road out is doubtless to advance. One twilight evening --- with nothing to lead up or prepare it --- I felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then, I should probably have made little of in memory had my subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed ; I sat reading by a lamp . there was a roomful of books at the house --- eighteenth century fiction some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth. It was horribly late . Though I was deeply interested in my author, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something undefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of a deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there been any one to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet and, went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which I saw a little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door.

I did not know what guided me at that moment, but I went straight along the lobby till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the great turn of the staircase. I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. Darkness closed in on me. Even in that depth of the darkness, I knew that there was a figure on the stair, I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for another encounter with that figure. The apparition had reached the landing half-way up and was on the spot near the window, where, at the sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed me before. He knew me as well as I knew him ; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was a living, detestable presence. I felt, in a fierce rigour of confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease – for the time at least --- to have him to reckon with. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I was in life !

The silence itself became the element into which I saw the figure disappear ; in which I saw it turn, as I might have seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness.

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone ; then I returned to my room. But something inside me awakened me from my dream and I came out of my room and rushed through the dark corridor, with an alarm that perilously skirted it and that indeed, from the particular quality of its unexpectedness, proved quite my sharpest shock. I had my eyes on my host's door, which was but ten steps off and which, indescribably, produced in me a renewal of the strange impulse that I felt as my temptation. I paused for a moment. I preternaturally listened ; I figured to myself what might portentously be ; I wondered if his bed was empty. It was a deep soundless minute, at the end of which my impulse failed. Something forced me to turn away. I found a figure in the grounds – a figure prowling for a sight, that same visitor. I hesitated afresh, but only a few seconds. There were empty rooms enough in the whole house, and it was only a question of choosing the right one. The right one suddenly presented itself to me as the lower one --- though high above the gardens ---- in the corner of the house. I had only, after just faltering at the chill gloom of its disguise, to pass across it and unbolt in all quietness one of the shutters. I uncovered the glass without a sound and, applying my face to the pane, was able, the darkness without being much less than within, to see that I commanded the right direction. But I did also see something more. I found a person, diminished by distance, who stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared --- looking, not so much straight at me as at something that was apparently above me. The presence on the lawn --- I felt sick as I made it out – was poor my host Mr. Sam Neil himself !






--:6:--



I decided not to create any suspicion of a secret flurry or of a discussion of mysteries. Suddenly I got him into his house, my host met my final articulate challenge. As soon as I appeared on the terrace he had come to me as straight as possible ; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him, through the dark spaces, up the staircase where that dreaded figure had so hungrily hovered for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to his forsaken room.

Not a sound, on the way, had passed between us, and I had wondered if he was groping about in his dreadful mind for something plausible and not too grotesque. He could do what he liked. He 'had' me indeed. I should be unhung, if, by the faintest tremor of an overture. I was the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire ?

"You must tell me now –all the truth. What were you doing there ?"

I saw his dreadful smile, uncovering his clear teeth, shine to me in the darkness. "if I tell you, will you understand ?" I found no words on my lips, as I found that he knew what I knew.

"Well," he said at last, "I'm bad."

I shall never forget the gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he bent forward. He repeated, "and at midnight...when I'm bad I am bad !"

And I stood there motionless, while he went into his room.

For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful moments, the person put into them. And to ply him with that evil still, to keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back. There is a deep design on either side, to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle : so the success of the tempters is only a question of time. He is only to keep to his suggestion of danger.

"And perish in the attempt !" I shuddered with this thought.

Afterwards I thought for the rest of the night : "He's not yet a fiend, at any rate. I must prevent it. I 've to make him at any rate come to me."




It was all very well to join Sam in the next morning, but speaking to him proved quite as much as ever an effort beyond my strength ---- offered, in close quarters, difficulties as insurmountable as before. This situation continued a week, and with new aggravations, sharper and sharper, of the small ironic consciousness on the part of him. I was not sure then, my mere infernal imagination : it was absolutely traceable that he was aware of my predicament and that this strange relation made, in a manner, for a long time, the air in which we moved. I do mean that the element of the unnamed and untouched became, between us, greater than any other, and that so much avoidance could not have been made successful without a great deal of tacit arrangement. There were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground. Forbidden ground was the question of the return of the dead in general and of whatever, in especial, might survive, for memory, of the friends he might have lost . he was in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance, the story of my smallest adventures. He pulled with an art of his own the strings of my invention and my memory ; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought later, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover.

It was partly at such junctures as these, with the turn my matters had now taken, my predicament grew most sensible. The fact that the days passed for me without another encounter ought, it would have appeared, to have done something toward soothing my nerves. Since



Short story by dibyendu ghosal
Read 481 times
Written on 2009-02-04 at 08:55

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