In the darkest corner,
where the firelight could not reach him, he sat listening to the
stories. His young hostess occupied the corner on the other side; she
was also screened by shadows; and between them stretched the horse-shoe
of eager, frightened faces that seemed all eyes. Behind yawned the
blackness of the big room, running as it were without a break into the
night.
Some one crossed on tiptoe and drew a blind up with
a rattle, and at the sound all started: through the window, opened at
the top, came a rustle of the poplar leaves that stirred like footsteps
in the wind. ‘There’s a strange man walking past the shrubberies,’
whispered a nervous girl; ‘I saw him crouch and hide. I saw his
eyes!’ ‘Nonsense! came sharply from a male member of the group;
‘it’s far too dark to see. You heard the wind.’ For mist had risen
from the river just below the lawn, pressing close against the windows
of the old house like a soft grey hand, and through it the stir of
leaves was faintly audible.... Then, while several called for lights,
others remembered that hop-pickers were still about in the lanes, and
the tramps this autumn overbold and insolent. All, perhaps, wished
secretly for the sun. Only the elderly man in the corner sat quiet and
unmoved, contributing nothing. He had told no fearsome story. He had
evaded, indeed, many openings expressly made for him, though fully aware
that to his well-known interest in psychical things was partly due his
presence in the week-end party. ‘I never have experiences—that
way,’ he said shortly when some one asked him point blank for a tale;
‘I have no unusual powers.’ There was perhaps the merest hint of
contempt in his tone, but the hostess from her darkened corner quickly
and tactfully covered his retreat. And he wondered. For he knew why she
invited him. The haunted room, he was well aware, had been specially
allotted to him.
And then, most opportunely, the door opened noisily
and the host came in. He
sniffed at the darkness, rang at once for lamps, puffed at his big
curved pipe, and generally, by his mere presence, made the group feel
rather foolish. Light streamed past him from the corridor. His white
hair shone like silver. And with him came the atmosphere of common
sense, of shooting, agriculture, motors, and the rest. Age entered at
that door. And his young wife sprang up instantly to greet him, as
though his disapproval of this kind of entertainment might need
humouring.
It may have been the light—that witchery of
half-lights from the fire and the corridor, or it may have been the
abrupt entrance of the Practical upon the soft Imaginative that traced
the outline with such pitiless, sharp conviction. At any rate, the
contrast—for those who had this inner clairvoyant sight all had been
prating of so glibly!—was unmistakably revealed. It was poignantly
dramatic, pain somewhere in it—naked pain. For, as she paused a moment
there beside him in the light, this childless wife of three years’
standing, picture of youth and beauty, there stood upon the threshold of
that room the presence of a true ghost story.
And most marevellously she changed—her
lineaments, her very figure, her whole presentment. Etched against the
gloom, the delicate, unmarked face shone suddenly keen and anguished,
and a rich maturity, deeper than any mere age, flushed all her little
person with its secret grandeur. Lines started into being upon the pale
skin of the girlish face, lines of pleading, pity, and love the daylight
did not show, and with them an air of magic tenderness that betrayed,
though for a second only, the full soft glory of a motherhood denied,
yet somehow mysteriously enjoyed. About her slenderness rose all the
deep-bosomed sweetness of maternity, a potential mother of the world,
and a mother, though she might know no dear fulfilment, who yet yearned
to sweep into her immense embrace all the little helpless things that
ever lived.
Light, like emotion, can play strangest tricks. The
change pressed almost upon the edge of revelation.... Yet, when a moment
later lamps were brought, it is doubtful if any but the silent guest who
had told no marvellous tale, knew no psychical experience, and
disclaimed the smallest clairvoyant faculty, had received and registered
the vivid, poignant picture. For an instant it had flashed there,
mercilessly clear for all to see who were not blind to subtle spiritual
wonder thick with pain. And it was not so much mere picture of youth and
age ill-matched, as of youth that yearned with the oldest craving in the
world, and of age that had slipped beyond the power of sympathetically
divining it.... It passed, and all was as before.
The husband laughed with genial good-nature, not
one whit annoyed. ‘They’ve been frightening you with stories,
child,’ he said in his jolly way, and put a protective arm about her.
‘Haven’t they now? Tell me the truth. Much better,’ he added,
‘have joined me instead at billiards, or for a game of Patience,
eh?’ She looked up shyly into his face, and he kissed her on the
forehead. ‘Perhaps they have—a little, dear,’ she said, ‘but now
that you’ve come, I feel all right again.’ ‘Another night of
this,’ he added in a graver tone, ‘and you’d be at your old trick
of putting guests to sleep in the haunted room. I was right after all,
you see, to make it out of bounds.’ He glanced fondly, paternally down
upon her. Then he went over and poked the fire into a blaze. Some one
struck up a waltz on the piano, and couples danced. All trace of
nervousness vanished, and the butler presently brought in the tray with
drinks and biscuits. And slowly the group dispersed. Candles were lit.
They passed down the passage into the big hail, talking in lowered
voices of to-morrow’s plans. The laughter died away as they went up
the stairs to bed, the silent guest and the young wife lingering a
moment over the embers.
‘You have not, after all then, put me in your
haunted room?’ he asked quietly. ‘You mentioned, you remember, in
your letter—’
‘I admit,’ she replied at once, her manner
gracious beyond her years, her voice quite different, ‘that I wanted
you to sleep there—some one, I mean, who really knows, and is not
merely curious. But—forgive my saying so—when I saw
you’—she laughed very slowly—‘and when you told no
marvellous story like the others, I somehow felt—’
‘But I never see
anything—’ he put in hurriedly.
‘You feel, though,’
she interrupted swiftly, the passionate tenderness in her voice but half
suppressed. ‘I can tell it from your—’
‘Others, then,’ he interrupted abruptly, almost
bluntly, ‘have slept there—sat up, rather?’
‘Not recently. My husband stopped it.’ She
paused a second, then added, ‘I had that room — for a year—when
first we married.’
The other’s anguished look flew back upon her
little face like a shadow and was gone, while at the sight of it there
rose in himself a sudden deep rush of wonderful amazement beckoning
almost towards worship. He did not speak, for his voice would tremble.
‘I had to give it up,’ she finished, very low.
‘Was it so terrible?’ after a pause he
ventured.
She bowed her head. ‘I had to change,’ she
repeated softly.
‘And since then—now—you see nothing?’ he
asked.
Her reply was singular. ‘Because I will not, not
because it’s gone.’ ... He
followed her in silence to the door, and as they passed along the
passage, again that curious great pain of emptiness, of loneliness, of
yearning rose upon him, as of a sea that never, never can swim beyond
the shore to reach the flowers that it loves ...
‘Hurry up,
child, or a ghost will catch you,’ cried her husband, leaning over the
banisters, as the pair moved slowly up the stairs towards him. There was
a moment’s silence when they met. The guest took his lighted candle
and went down the corridor. Good-nights were said again. They moved
away, she to her loneliness, he to his unhaunted room. And at his door
he turned. At the far end of the passage, silhouetted against the
candle-light, he watched them—the fine old man with his silvered hair
and heavy shoulders, and the slim young wife with that amazing air as of
some great bountiful mother of the world for whom the years yet passed
hungry and un-harvested. They turned the corner, and he went in and
closed his door.
Sleep took him very quickly, and while the mist
rose up and veiled the countryside, something else, veiled equally for
all other sleepers in that house but two, drew on towards its climax.... Some hours later he awoke; the world was stills and it seemed
the whole house listened; for with that clear vision which some bring
out of sleep, he remembered that there had been no direct denial, and of
a sudden realised that this big, gaunt chamber where he lay was after
all the haunted room. For him, however, the entire world, not merely
separate rooms in it, was ever haunted; and he knew no terror to find
the space about him charged with thronging life quite other than his
own.... He rose and lit the candle, crossed over to the window where the
mist shone grey, knowing that no barriers of walls or door or ceiling
could keep out this host of Presences that poured so thickly everywhere
about him. It was like a wall of being, with peering eyes, small hands
stretched out, a thousand pattering wee feet, and tiny voices crying in
a chorus very faintly and beseeching.... The haunted room! Was it not,
rather, a temple vestibule, prepared and sanctified by yearning rites
few men might ever guess, for all the childless women of the world? How
could she know that he would
understand—this woman he had seen but twice in all his life? And how
entrust to him so great a mystery that was her secret? Had she so easily
divined in him a similar yearning to which, long years ago, death had
denied fulfilment? Was she clairvoyant in the true sense, and did all
faces bear on them so legibly this great map that sorrow traced?...
And then, with awful suddenness, mere feelings
dipped away, and something concrete happened. The handle of the door had
faintly rattled. He turned. The round brass knob was slowly moving. And
first, at the sight, something of common fear did grip him, as though
his heart had missed a beat, but on the instant he heard the voice of
his own mother, now long beyond the stars, calling to him to go softly
yet with speed. He watched a moment the feeble efforts to undo the door,
yet never afterwards could swear that he saw actual movement, for
something in him, tragic as blindness, rose through a mist of tears and
darkened vision utterly....
He went towards the door. He took the handle very
gently, and very softly then he opened it. Beyond was darkness. He saw
the empty passage, the edge of the banisters where the great hall yawned
below, and, dimly, the outline of the Alpine photograph and the stuffed
deer’s head upon the wall. And then he dropped upon his knees and
opened wide his arms to something that came in upon uncertain, viewless
feet. All the young winds and flowers and dews of dawn passed with it ...
filling him to the brim ... covering
closely his breast and eyes and lips. There clung to him all the small
beginnings of life that cannot stand alone ...
the little helpless hands and arms that have no confidence ... and when the wealth of tears and love that flooded his heart
seemed to break upon the frontiers of some mysterious yet impossible
fulfilment, he rose and went with curious small steps towards the window
to taste the cooling, misty air of that other dark Emptiness that waited
so patiently there above the entire world. He drew the sash up. The air
felt soft and tender as though there were somewhere children in it
too—children of stars and flowers, of mists and wings and music, all
that the Universe contains unborn and tiny.... And when at length he
turned again the door was closed. The room was empty of any life but
that which lay so wonderfully blessed within himself. And this, he felt,
had marvelously increased and multiplied....
Sleep then came back to him, and in the morning he
left the house before the others were astir, pleading some overlooked
engagement. For he had seen Ghosts indeed, but yet no ghost that he
could talk about with others round an open fire.
<<---
From Your Dark Side
