Short Stories 1895-1926 (72 page)

‘I stood listening in silence for a while; madness of hunger and thirst and heat and anger and hatred of God mounting in my brain. Then, I lifted the heavy stick I carried and struck the old woman down; and when she fell I struck again till she was silent. And there she lay – an ugly old crone – without life. I carried her out through the garden and hid her in a field. I stole some bread, cheese, and some coppers, and ran off.

‘And then you came.' So I said, and finished my story.

The blood was washed from my hand; I dried it on the grass. My companion had never stirred. Then, after a long silence, ‘Well,' he said, ‘you were hard driven. I'll bring something out to you, and a mug of beer.' He fumbled in his bag – ‘And here's a bit of money. You'll be safe for the time hiding here. I fancy I know the woman; she's a long talker, and of a shrill temper. Stone dead! A bloody death, too. You must fly, man – soon. But first something to eat.' He drew back a little from me. I saw his face in the early starlight.

Once more we paced the roadway, but he had stopped chattering. The spirit had gone out of him and he stalked on, solemn and silent at my elbow. And I – I cared not, so long as I had his companionship! I simply could not face the night alone, with the eyes of the old woman staring up at me from low down deep in the corn.

‘Here lies a shorter way,' says he, jumping a fence.

‘So the body will be left unfound,' thought I, and noticed a pool of deep cool water. I would live till he was gone, and then I would come back. And before I had looked round me again, he and I were skirting the field of corn.

He heard my low cry, and turned his head.

‘My old mother!' he said.

And he said no more, and I couldn't run away, but led him to where she lay low there, huddled up half-hidden in the corn, with open eyes.

He put some pieces of money into my hand; and I left him sitting there in the corn and the poppies, the grey old head of his mother resting on his hands.

I ran off away to the pool – stayed hesitating there, and, being a fool and a coward, I shuddered, and ran on.

A Mote

A Mote
1

I awoke from a dream of a gruesome fight with a giant geranium. I surveyed, with drowsy satisfaction and complacency, the eccentric jogs and jerks of my aunt's head. Dozing in her basket chair, she reminded me of an Oriental doll decked in a bunch of gaudy fabrics. Her cap squatted unsafely and awry upon her pendulous curls; her yellow, glossy-skinned, emeraldringed hands lay loosely upon her silken lap. I sat in my chair like some gorged spider surveying his grey expanse of web, more placid than malevolent concerning this meagre fly. The sleepy sun leered upon the garden with blowzy face. I turned from my aunt to the black cat. The luminous green of his eye glowered with lazy spitefulness upon the manoeuvres of a regiment of gnats. Him too, with sleepy amusement, I wove into the tapestry of my dreams. Presently, beyond measure vexed, the beast sprang into the air and buffeted right and left with his forepaws. I turned towards my uncle to enjoy with him a smile at his behaviour, and thus on a sudden perceived his odd posture. His bald mauve head was propped upon his right hand, and his elbow was supported by his chequered knee. He seemed to be watching with minute attention a sun-beetle diligently labouring between the stubborn grass-blades. His attitude was conventional, but his gaze was extraordinary; for he was looking at the beetle with the whites of his eyes.

So that there might be no doubt in the matter, I dropped cautiously upon my knees and peered up at his face from underneath. His mouth was open, just wide enough to betray the glint of gold between his teeth; a faint, infantile flush reddened his cheeks; his lids were uncommon wide apart, disclosing, not two grey pupils, but simply two unrelieved ovals of yellowish white. I was amazed. In my amazement I forgot discretion; I stayed upon my knees in the soft turf – thus becoming an insurmountable obstacle to the beetle – and thought hard. Perhaps my fixed attention troubled my uncle; perhaps he heard me breathing. For, on an alarming sudden, his orbs revolved as it were on greased hinges, and his two pale grey pupils, with an unwonted glitter in them, gazed full into mine. The pink flush upon his cheek deepened into an unwholesome ruddiness. His teeth clicked together. He fastened an icy finger and thumb upon my wrist, and, stealthily craning his neck, looked back upon my aunt. Audibly satisfied with her serene helplessness, and still bent almost double, he beckoned me over the lawn towards the apple trees. This obscure conduct in a man of transparent respectability – the admiration of every comfortable widow of the neighbourhood, a man of ponderous jollity and bellicose good-humour – gave me not a little satisfaction. I congratulated myself on his lapse from sobriety. It had always seemed to me a misfortune that so potential a Falstaff should be a saint. Under cover of the apple trees, with red cheeks made ruddier by the belated beams of the sun through the twinkling leaves, he looked as bibulous a sinner as one might wish. I was to be disappointed.

‘What were they like?' said he anxiously.

‘All white,' said I laughing.

‘Ah! don't giggle, my boy!' said he. ‘I see, you are yet in your veal. Drunkenness and women are the whole duty of the twenties. I am not drunk.' (His manner defied incredulity.) ‘One minute's silence, my boy. I must see the end of this. The place is black under the pines, and soon the moon will be swallowed up by the drift. Two minutes!' Whereupon he rolled back his pupils, and with white blind eyes stood gently swaying to and fro in a yellow ribbon of sunlight. Through the green of the trees I could see the unrhythmic flutter of my aunt's lavender ribbons. Patiently, and with some alarm, I awaited the return of Uncle's pupils. Presently they again revolved, and returned to their normal position. Trouble is brewing,' said he, blinking at the sun, ‘but yet he stalks on inscrutable.' He heaved a prodigious sigh, and clutched at my wrist. ‘My heart will knuckle under some day,' said he. ‘Feel that!' He placed my hand upon a piston-rod just above his watch fob. Blue had mingled with the red in his face. I deemed it better to be dumb. ‘You see, my boy,' he continued in an asthmatic voice, ‘if your aunt knew of these things, it would be farewell to quiet. She would never cease to worry. Besides, your aunt is not fanciful. Why should she be?' he asked himself strenuously.

‘Can I be of any help?' said I. ‘I have skimmed a few medical books. I know a chap in Guy's. I might, you know —'

‘Medical books be damned!' said my uncle. This I took to be a reassuring symptom. ‘I am not a monstrosity,' he added irritably; ‘my carcase is my own. Hang it! I'll tell you, Edmond. Let me tell you all from the beginning; the burden grows irksome upon my back. Only the night shares it with me. He is on his trackless travels even now, and I am not there to see. Scoff if you please, but do not preach. Sit down, my boy; your aunt is good for ten minutes.'

His gravity astonished me even more than his eccentricity. I sat down at the foot of an apple tree and leaned my back against its whitewashed trunk. My uncle did likewise.

‘I remember,' said he, wrinkling his lids, ‘I remember a dream frequently dreamed when I was about six or seven years old; I used to wake wet and shaking. It was a simple dream of an interminable path between walls of white smooth stone. By that way one might walk to eternity, or space, or infinity. You understand?'

I nodded my head.

‘Remember, my boy, I find it hard work to prose – I would sooner be watching. The dream never came back to me after I was twelve years old, but since then I have had other dreams, as false to the Ten Commandments. I have seen things which Nature would spit out of her mouth. Yet each one has been threaded, each has been one of an interminable sequence. There's a theory written under the letter D in a little book I used to keep when I first entered the bank, “A Theory concerning Dreams Expressed Algebraically” – the result of mental flatulency. So far you are clear?'

‘Yes,' said I.

‘Well, last autumn, towards the end of October, a time of strong winds, I was troubled with many sleepless nights. Being retired from the bank I could not occupy my mind with mental arithmetic, so, having no dry goods to carry in my head, I simply gave unlimited rope to my thoughts. Now
I
wear the halter. On 5th November, Guy Fawkes' Day (I remember that your aunt complained of a strong smell of gunpowder in the bedroom), at a quarter to two, by St Simon's clock, I was lying flat upon my back and wide awake. My eyes were naturally attracted by the white circle of light thrown by the gas globe upon the ceiling. Your aunt will not sleep without a glimmer of light in the room. Without danger of lying I may say that I was thinking absolutely of nothing. It is a vulgar but discredited practice. However, let it be agreed that whatever thoughts I had lay between my retina and the end of my optic nerve. Theory is easier than science. Suddenly, as I watched idly, a little figure – a tiny insect-like figure crawled in at the left of my eye, and slowly traversing a small segment of the luminous disc upon the ceiling crawled out at the right. In my astonishment my lids blinked rapidly, my eyes moved of their own volition in an odd, perplexing manner. Please to mark that it was precisely at that moment when I discovered that my eyes had tricked me. Perhaps they had revolted from the uncommon and disagreeable fixity of sleeplessness and had revolved upon their axes inward. Perhaps I do not know the reason. Whatever it may have been, I know now that I had been looking under the bows of my eyebones into my skull. In all likelihood the grey circle of light which I had seen was the natural stored light of my eyes glowing in the darkness. If this was so, I had mistaken the personal, perhaps imaginary, light of my eye for the actual light of the gas-globe. It's not science, but it's common sense. Such, I say, were my conclusions some time subsequently, after many nights' experience. Try as I pleased in my wakefulness, the creature would not walk again upon the ceiling, for the very excellent reason that in my excitement and ignorance
I
w
as looking in exactly the
opposite direction
. But invisible, unfelt, undreamed, there it was, there it had always been, and there it will be until – Heaven knows.'

My uncle patted his brow, eyes, and cheeks with his bandana handkerchief, and (in a manner not unlike that of the black cat) gazed up at the patches of blue between the green boughs. ‘The boom of that bee seemed to make the scent of the blossoms stronger, didn't it?' said he, with his handkerchief poised on the top of his head.

‘What happened then?' said I.

‘Upon the next night,' continued my uncle, ‘as I purposely lay in the same position, I fancy that I almost fell asleep. So it seemed, although all the time I could hear your aunt snoring – 'twas time reckoned by a dream-clock. There was the circle of light; there was the gas-globe, the venetian blind, the embroidered watch-holder. But almost imperceptibly the light circle was becoming blurred at the circumference; it still possessed the same shiver, but now there were faint marks upon it, permanent stains in its whitest places; it was not without shadows. I gripped the bed-clothes and strangled my thoughts. And again, again, Edmond, the tiny figure walked out of the east into the west. I watched. The dim shapes in the centre moved and trembled, but took no nameable form. Again I saw the transit of the figure, but now it toiled more slowly. Soon the circumference seemed to widen. The figure took bulk and distinction. At the base of the disc a flatness became discernible encompassed by a huge bow of grey (my skull, perhaps) lightening and deepening into white and pink. A white thread suddenly crept out of the obscurity at the base, crept and wriggled between masses of black (masses like flour seen through a microscope). Presently the black masses caught colour and motion. Sudden glaring spots pricked my eye, and slow-moving blotches writhed into being with a dull pain as though my eyeballs were bringing them forth. Then I perceived slender lines and tassels of elegant grace and wide expanses of smooth, restful green, lit by jewels and trills and spears of yellow light. I seemed to be striving rather to remember than to see. If I am not deceived, albeit my eyes watched the process with curiosity, yet I clearly foresaw the result. The dimness and distortion fell away like smoke. And now, I was looking at a white, caked, trampled path, over which a black-green army of trees stood sentinel. I was round-eyed at gorgeous birds on the wing, and flowers waxen, gaudy and gleaming. My boy, there are none such here. There huge monsters wallowed in heat, and unimaginable wee things leapt and scrambled and minced from bough to bough. The whole air shook with their chirrup and purr and drone; the baked earth sweated a dry scent. Monstrous bat-winged insects speckled profusely the black boughs. Honey scent whetted the tongue and the tartness of resinous bark cried out from beneath the honey scent. Deep in the lazy foetid green of the underwood sparkled quick eyes, and smooth, glossy skins shimmered. There was an atmosphere of ages over the place, and a distressing suggestion that all upon which my eyes looked was of me and in me – my own creatures and creations. But this I know, that myself magnified the scene. The heavy sky, the trees, and all the living things, were a picture painted on a pin's head. God knows more than a German philosopher. So, too, my dear boy, as in a dream of Job, a figure naked and familiar (although his face was turned from me) stalked upon the trampled path. And that figure of a man brought me very near to the terror of my babyhood's dream. I turned to your aunt for comfort, and could not see her. Nor did I awake. Then the awful thought clawed me that I was alive and awake, and with that thought the vision was blinded (so sudden was its going). Then followed a slow easy movement of my eyes, and immediately I was looking upon your aunt's face, bland and young in sleep. I hid my face in her sweet laces, and like any dipsomaniac sobbed loudly. ‘Why, John,' said your aunt sleepily, ‘you've had a bad dream!' Again my uncle paused. ‘This wholesome cleanliness of air is admirable,' he added under his breath, sniffing the evening.

I looked at my uncle uneasily. ‘More of a nightmare than a dream,' said I.

‘It's getting chilly for your aunt,' he replied. Then, after spying through the trunks upon the old lady, he came close to me, and, on tiptoe, whispered this in my ear: ‘In eight months that wee creature has walked through centuries. Would dreams be so vile and consistent? Would I, the manager of a bank, cry like any girl at night if every living thing, every tree, rock and cloud of the world in my skull were not of mine own image? That mote of a man – although he will never turn and show his face to me, try as I may to peer round – that mote of a man is me – me, your uncle. Quick, she's stirring.'

I hastened at his heels to my chair. My aunt woke from her nap, a little peevish. She complained of the dampness. But my uncle, giving her tongue no opportunity to wag nor her mood to fester, taught me how to snare a woman into smiling. Quick to profit, he wrapped a knitted shawl of gaudy wool about my aunt's shoulders, lifted her from the ground with a prodigious puff and a coy scream from the little lady, and trotted away with her into the house. I followed with two basket chairs.