Short Stories 1895-1926 (14 page)

The colours of autumn were over the village when I arrived. A beautiful late afternoon sunlight bathed thatch and meadow. But it was close and hot. A child, two dogs, a very old woman with a heavy basket I encountered. One or two incurious tradesmen looked idly up as I passed by. It was all so rural and remote, my whimsical impulse had so much flagged, that for a while I hesitated to venture under the shadow of the sycamore-tree to enquire after the happy pair. Indeed I first passed by the faint-blue gates and continued my walk under the high, green and tufted wall. Hollyhocks had attained their topmost bud and seeded in the little cottage gardens beyond; the Michaelmas daisies were in flower; a sweet warm aromatic smell of fading leaves was in the air. Beyond the cottages lay a field where cattle were grazing, and beyond that I came to a little churchyard. Then the road wound on, pathless and houseless, among gorse and bracken. I turned impatiently and walked quickly back to the house and rang the bell.

The rather colourless elderly woman who answered my enquiry informed me that Miss Seaton was at home, as if only taciturnity forbade her adding, ‘But she doesn't want to see
you
'

‘Might I, do you think, have Mr Arthur's address?' I said.

She looked at me with quiet astonishment, as if waiting for an explanation. Not the faintest of smiles came into her thin face.

‘I will tell Miss Seaton,' she said after a pause. ‘Please walk in.'

She showed me into the dingy undusted drawing-room, filled with evening sunshine and with the green-dyed light that penetrated the leaves overhanging the long french windows. I sat down and waited on and on, occasionally aware of a creaking footfall overhead. At last the door opened a little, and the great face I had once known peered round at me. For it was enormously changed; mainly, I think, because the aged eyes had rather suddenly failed, and so a kind of stillness and darkness lay over its calm and wrinkled pallor.

‘Who is it?' she asked.

I explained myself and told her the occasion of my visit. She came in, shut the door carefully after her, and, though the fumbling was scarcely perceptible, groped her way to a chair. She had on an old dressing-gown, like a cassock, of a patterned cinnamon colour.

‘What is it you want?' she said, seating herself and lifting her blank face to mine.

‘Might I just have Arthur's address?' I said deferentially, ‘I am so sorry to have disturbed you.'

‘H'm. You have come to see my nephew?'

‘Not necessarily to see him, only to hear how he is, and, of course, Mrs Seaton, too. I am afraid my silence must have appeared …'

‘He hasn't noticed your silence,' croaked the old voice out of the great mask; ‘besides, there isn't any Mrs Seaton.'

‘Ah, then,' I answered, after a momentary pause, ‘I have not seemed so black as I painted myself! And how is Miss Outram?'

‘She's gone into Yorkshire,' answered Seaton's aunt.

‘And Arthur too?'

She did not reply, but simply sat blinking at me with lifted chin, as if listening, but certainly not for what I might have to say. I began to feel rather at a loss.

‘You were no close friend of my nephew's, Mr Smithers?' she said presently.

‘No,' I answered, welcoming the cue, ‘and yet, do you know, Miss Seaton, he is one of the very few of my old schoolfellows I have come across in the last few years, and I suppose as one gets older one begins to value old associations …' My voice seemed to trail off into a vacuum. ‘I thought Miss Outram', I hastily began again, ‘a particularly charming girl. I hope they are both quite well.'

Still the old face solemnly blinked at me in silence.

‘You must find it very lonely, Miss Seaton, with Arthur away?'

‘I was never lonely in my life,' she said sourly. ‘I don't look to flesh and blood for my company. When you've got to be my age, Mr Smithers (which God forbid), you'll find life a very different affair from what you seem to think it is now. You won't seek company then, I'll be bound. It's thrust on you.' Her face edged round into the clear green light, and her eyes groped, as it were, over my vacant, disconcerted face. ‘I dare say, now,' she said, composing her mouth, ‘I dare say my nephew told you a good many tarradiddles in his time. Oh, yes, a good many, eh? He was always a liar. What, now, did he say of me? Tell me, now.' She leant forward as far as she could, trembling, with an ingratiating smile.

‘I think he is rather superstitious,' I said coldly, ‘but, honestly, I have a very poor memory, Miss Seaton.'

‘Why?' she said. ‘I haven't.'

‘The engagement hasn't been broken off, I hope.'

‘Well, between you and me,' she said, shrinking up and with an immensely confidential grimace, ‘it has.'

‘I'm sure I'm very sorry to hear it. And where is Arthur?'

‘Eh?'

‘Where is Arthur?'

We faced each other mutely among the dead old bygone furniture. Past all my analysis was that large, flat, grey, cryptic countenance. And then, suddenly, our eyes for the first time really met. In some indescribable way out of that thick-lidded obscurity a far, small something stooped and looked out at me for a mere instant of time that seemed of almost intolerable protraction. Involuntarily I blinked and shook my head. She muttered something with great rapidity, but quite inarticulately; rose and hobbled to the door. I thought I heard, mingled in broken mutterings, something about tea.

‘Please, please, don't trouble,' I began, but could say no more, for the door was already shut between us. I stood and looked out on the long-neglected garden. I could just see the bright weedy greenness of Seaton's tadpole pond. I wandered about the room. Dusk began to gather, the last birds in that dense shadowiness of trees had ceased to sing. And not a sound was to be heard in the house. I waited on and on, vainly speculating. I even attempted to ring the bell; but the wire was broken, and only jangled loosely at my efforts.

I hesitated, unwilling to call or to venture out, and yet more unwilling to linger on, waiting for a tea that promised to be an exceedingly comfortless supper. And as darkness drew down, a feeling of the utmost unease and disquietude came over me. All my talks with Seaton returned on me with a suddenly enriched meaning. I recalled again his face as we had stood hanging over the staircase, listening in the small hours to the inexplicable stirrings of the night. There were no candles in the room; every minute the autumnal darkness deepened. I cautiously opened the door and listened, and with some little dismay withdrew, for I was uncertain of my way out. I even tried the garden, but was confronted under a veritable thicket of foliage by a padlocked gate. It would be a little too ignominious to be caught scaling a friend's garden fence!

Cautiously returning into the still and musty drawing-room, I took out my watch, and gave the incredible old woman ten minutes in which to reappear. And when that tedious ten minutes had ticked by I could scarcely distinguish its hands. I determined to wait no longer, drew open the door and, trusting to my sense of direction, groped my way through the corridor that I vaguely remembered led to the front of the house.

I mounted three or four stairs and, lifting a heavy curtain, found myself facing the starry fanlight of the porch. From here I glanced into the gloom of the dining-room. My fingers were on the latch of the outer door when I heard a faint stirring in the darkness above the hall. I looked up and became conscious of, rather than saw, the huddled old figure looking down on me.

There was an immense hushed pause. Then, ‘Arthur, Arthur,' whispered an inexpressibly peevish rasping voice, ‘is that you? Is that you, Arthur?'

I can scarcely say why, but the question horribly startled me. No conceivable answer occurred to me. With head craned back, hand clenched on my umbrella, I continued to stare up into the gloom, in this fatuous confrontation.

‘Oh, oh,' the voice croaked. ‘It is
you,
is it?
That
disgusting man! … Go away out. Go away out.'

At this dismissal, I wrenched open the door and, rudely slamming it behind me, ran out into the garden, under the gigantic old sycamore, and so out at the open gate.

I found myself half up the village street before I stopped running. The local butcher was sitting in his shop reading a piece of newspaper by the light of a small oil-lamp. I crossed the road and enquired the way to the station. And after he had with minute and needless care directed me, I asked casually if Mr Arthur Seaton still lived with his aunt at the big house just beyond the village. He poked his head in at the little parlour door.

‘Here's a gentleman enquiring after young Mr Seaton, Millie,' he said. ‘He's dead, ain't he?'

‘Why, yes, bless you,' replied a cheerful voice from within. ‘Dead and buried these three months or more – young Mr Seaton. And just before he was to be married, don't you remember, Bob?'

I saw a fair young woman's face peer over the muslin of the little door at me.

‘Thank you,' I replied, ‘then I go straight on?'

‘That's it, sir; past the pond, bear up the hill a bit to the left, and then there's the station lights before your eyes.'

We looked intelligently into each other's faces in the beam of the smoky lamp. But not one of the many questions in my mind could I put into words.

And again I paused irresolutely a few paces further on. It was not, I fancy, merely a foolish apprehension of what the raw-boned butcher might ‘think' that prevented my going back to see if I could find Seaton's grave in the benighted churchyard. There was precious little use in pottering about in the muddy dark merely to discover where he was buried. And yet I felt a little uneasy. My rather horrible thought was that, so far as I was concerned – one of his extremely few friends – he had never been much better than ‘buried' in my mind.

The Bird of Travel

The Bird of Travel
1

We had been talking of houses – their looks and ways and influences. What shallow defences they were, we agreed, even for the materialist, with their brittle glass, and baked clay bricks; and what mere fungi most of them. Worse still – the dreadful species that isn't haunted
at
all, not even by the graces or disgraces of its inmates – mere barracks deaf to life and insensitive even to the weathers of heaven. A cherry-eyed little man of the name of Bateson, I remember, told us of a house he had known that had year by year gently and furtively shifted itself a few feet down its valley towards the sea. A full green mile to go. He said it was the property of a family so fair of skin and hair as to be almost albinos – but still, a happy one.

Somebody capped this with the ancient yarn of Lord Montberris, who built a new wing to his family edifice every year, till the estate was utterly ruined. Whereupon he set fire to the place in the vain hope of getting rid of its Devil
that
way. And at last a quaint old creature whose name I have forgotten, but who, so I was told, had been something of a versifier in his younger days, told us the following rather pointless story, about a house called the Wood.

‘I must have been scarcely in my first breeches,' he began, rubbing his hand down his face, as if he was sleepy, ‘when I first heard of the old house called the Wood. We lived then – my own people I mean – some few miles distant from it as the crow flies. There was a remote kinship with its inmates – people of a restless blood and with a fair acreage of wild oats to their credit. A quarrel, a mild feud of the Montague and Capulet order, had   separated us; and – well, we rarely mentioned them; their name was seldom heard. But an old relative of my mother's who lived with us in those days used to tell us about the house, warning us, in that peculiarly enticing fashion old people have, not to tempt Providence in that direction. Let but its evil genius squawk once in our young ears – we might never come back. That kind of thing.

The consequence was that while we were still mere infants, my younger sister and I – she in a dark green tartan frock, I remember – set out one early morning, fully intending to see or hear the strange Bird that was reported to haunt its chaces and its glades. What if it did instil into us the wander-lust? It was just what we wanted – Seven League Boots. We hoped – with beating hearts – even to sprinkle a grain or two of salt on its tail!

‘But we never pushed as far as the house itself, nor even into the denser woods amongst which it lay. We sat in the sun-glazed buttercups and ate our dinner, and, I think, forgot our errand beneath the blossoming may-trees.

‘Later, I tried the same experiment alone. It was winter then. Deep snow lay on the ground, and I pushed on through the woods until I was actually in sight of the upper windows of the house. Dusk was beginning to thicken – its strange thievish blur creeping across the whiteness of the snow. Presently, I found myself in a sort of walk or alley between a high hedge of yew and beech. And as I stood there, hesitating whether to go on or to turn back, a figure – a child of about my own age – appeared at its further end. She was dressed, I remember, in a cloak with a hood – crimson, I think, and carried a muff.

‘At that very instant, as our young eyes met across the wintry air, the last of the evening's robins broke into its tiny, shrill, almost deafening peal of notes. And fled. What is it in such moments that catches the heart back, and stamps them on the memory as if they were tidings of another world? Neither of us stirred. A little snow fell from the vacant twig.

The scarcely visible, narrow, and, to my young eyes, strangely beautiful face gazed on at me. I might even then have realized that we were fated some day to meet again. But even if I had, I should hardly have surmised it would prove as eventlessly.

‘Then I was shy – a gawkish boy. Moreover, I was on forbidden ground. I naturally fancied, too, any such distant cousin might resent my being there – a stranger and uninvited. With a curious drag of my body in the dead silence that had followed the song, I began a tuneless sort of airy whistling, turned on my heel and crunched off in the snow. When in the white darkening alley I cast back this phantom creature a thief-like glance out of the corner of my eye, she had vanished.

‘I don't suggest that this incident left much impression on me – though I remember every detail of it to this day. Then Life called me away; and it was at least a score or so of years afterwards, while wandering one afternoon in the neighbourhood of my old home again, that I chanced on a finger-post pointing and stooping towards a thicket of trees beyond a grassy lane, and marked “To the Wood”.

‘I had seen something of the world by then, and without excessive satisfaction. The old story came back to mind. It linked up two selves rather crudely severed. I dropped a friendly nod at the post and turned off in its direction. The path – a pretty soggy one after the heavy summer rains – led through neglected preserves, and after walking for half an hour or so, I came out into a kind of clearing. And there amid the serene quietude of its remarkably dense woods was the long, low house.

‘Its walls, once grey, were now densely mantled with greenery – rose, jasmine, wistaria. It showed, however, little trace of age or change. An unusual silence hung over its scene. No smoke, or sign of occupancy; indeed, all but one of the windows within view were shuttered. I doubt if the Ancient Mariner's spectral barque more eloquently expressed desertion and vacancy.

‘For a few minutes I leaned over a decrepit gate, my eyes roving to and fro across the wide stone façade. The whole place looked as if it had settled its eyelids and composed its mouth for a protracted and stagnant sleep. I have heard of toads being found immured but yet alive in the virgin rock of a coal mine: it looked like that. At last I made my way up the weedy path, and, at the back of the house, where even yet a few hardy human vegetables contested the soil with Nature's wildings, I discovered a door on the latch.

‘I tapped and listened; tapped and listened again; and, as if it were Echo herself, some hidden thrush's rapping of a snail's shell against its sacrificial stone was my only answer. Then, at a venture, I pushed open the door, stepped in, and making my way along a narrow passage, entered a little morning room whose air was burdened with a faint odour as of sweetish mildew – long-faded flowers perhaps. A piano stood where the window might best illuminate the singer, and a few pictures in water-colour hung on the low walls. A volume of music lay open on the table: It was Gounod's “How Beautiful Upon the Mountains”.

‘I passed from room to room, and from an attic window surveyed many acres –
versts,
one might say – of the tree-tops – of the motionless woods. And there my mind lapsed into a sort of daydream. So closely familiar seemed all around me that I even began to doubt my own memory. The chests and cupboards, the posied carpets on the uneven floors, the faint nosegays of the wall-paper – surely one couldn't so instantly “recognize”, so to speak, objects seen for the first time. And yet – well, most rare human experience is like that.

‘One talks of the
years
of childhood: centuries would be a better word. The sense of this familiarity, this recognition – was only the sharper, the more wistful (to use an old-fashioned word) for the fact that the house was vacant, except for the faces upon its walls. Through narrow crannies sunshine had sucked the brightness of their colours from tapestry and curtain. The she-spider had woven and withered in her snares; and a legionary dust, like fine gold, floated and whirled in a beam of the declining sun, when I drew the shutter.

‘I spent the next hour or so that remained of daylight in roaming the woods, half-elated, half-ashamed at my trespass, descending into every hollow, ascending every steep, but, nowhere surprised any secret, and nowhere confronted hint of ghost of man or beast. Indeed, so shut in was the house by its trees that from no point of vantage, so far as I could discover, could one command any glimpse of the country beyond the valley. It had been built in a bowl of verdure and foliage. And for those who had occupied it, rumour of the world must have been carried by the winds across the hills, unheeded in this hollow.

‘And then, while I was slowly returning towards it once more, under the still, reddish, evening sky, suddenly I heard thrice repeated an extraordinary call. It pierced my mind like an arrow. It almost absurdly startled me – like the shrilling of a decoy, as if my own name had been called in a strange or forgotten tongue.

‘Of English birds, the blackcap, perhaps, sings with a vestige of that wild and piercing sweetness. Imagine such a voice twenty times more vigorous suddenly breaking in upon that evening silence – falling on from note to note as if some unearthly traveller were summoning from afar his strayed dog on the hillside!

‘Yet it was evidently a bird that had screamed, for presently after, as I stood hotly, attentively listening, I saw mount nobly into the deep blue air and wheel into the darker thicket a bird of the form and wing of a kestrel, but much larger – its plumage of an almost snowy whiteness, and of a flight inexpressively serene.

‘I heard no more his cry, though I listened long; nor did I set eyes on the bird again, either then, or afterwards: though the woods were motionless and so silent the gloaming it seemed as if the world had swooned.

‘I was ridiculously elated with my adventure. Had I not now encountered the veritable Bird of Travel, which childish legend had credited with such fabulous powers? Here was the deserted house, and still echoing in my heart that cry, the lure, as of some innocent Banshee. Who, I wondered, had last heard the call in the green spring, and felt leap and kindle insatiable desire. The past slid back. I was a child again; looking up into the withered old face of my childhood:

‘“But is it
true,
grandmamma? Please tell us, is it
true?
”'

‘“True, my dears? Why I myself perfectly well remember Hamilton and Paul when they were boys not so very many years older than yourselves. I remember, too, my father telling me how, one autumn evening, while he and these two friends of his were returning with their guns and spaniels through the woods, the bird had flown out screaming above their heads.
He
stopped up his ears.
He
had his work to do. But the other two lads watched it in the air, drinking in its forbidden song. Nothing anyone could say could restrain them then. Poor fellows! – fine handsome fellows. And now, Hamilton lies far away, unburied amid the Andes, and Paul drowned in the Straits of Magellan.”

‘It didn't matter how far the old lady wandered from her theme of this family's destiny, and of their house, and of this ominous bird, she invariably concluded her narrative with this faint, high trembling
refrain –
“And now, Hamilton lies far away, unburied amid the Andes, and Paul drowned in the Straits of Magellan.”'

‘
O
Keith of Ravelston, the sorrows of thy line!'

‘So ran the ancient story. And had I not that very afternoon returned the painted gaze of these young gentlemen? It seems to me, too, though you may build pretty strongly in this world, even the most substantial of us must depart in time. All the long annals of this family, anyhow, were a record of unrest, of fruitless (or worse) venture, of that absurd nomad instinct – travellers to whom had come eventually, far from home, the same practised, inevitable guide. Well, there are some of us who prefer the kind of travel that can be enjoyed in an armchair!

‘I had cast one last full look behind me and was returning by the path I have mentioned, cumbered with weeds and brambles, when I looked up from out of my thoughts, and saw approaching me a lady. A bright chill half-moon had now risen in the twilight above the woods, and I could see her face distinctly in its thin radiance. The brows were high and narrow (for she was carrying her hat in her hand), the nose was long, like the noses in some old Italian pictures; the chin firm, yet rounded to a point.

‘I could see her plainly in the silverish dusk-light: and yet, oddly enough, for a moment no flash of recognition told me who she was. And then I knew. She eyed me sharply and fully, almost arrogantly, a dark flush in her cheeks, and bowed. I apologized as best as I could for my intrusion. I reminded her of the former neighbourhood and acquaintance of our families; and told her of my childish curiosity to explore the woods, yes, and confessed to having heard the wondrous phoenix, and confronted its victims.

‘She listened with face slightly averted, and now turned with a lively smile. “You have guessed right,” she said, “the portraits are of my great-uncles; and I am the child you – but evidently you don't remember that … So please say no more. How I love those pictures – those two outlandish brilliant faces. A bad painter may be a queerly telling artist.”