Chapter VII
That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my door, and before Icould answer, Frances stood beside my bed. She had switched on the lightas she came in. Her hair fell straggling over her dressing gown. Herface was deathly pale, its expression so distraught it was almosthaggard.
The eyes were very wide. She looked almost like another woman.
She was whispering at a great pace: "Bill, Bill, wake up, quick!"
"I am awake. What is it?" I whispered too. I was startled.
"Listen!" was all she said. Her eyes stared into vacancy.
There was not a sound in the great house. The wind had dropped, and allwas still. Only the tapping seemed to continue endlessly in my brain.The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past two.
"I heard nothing, Frances. What is it?" I rubbed my eyes; I had beenvery deeply asleep.
"Listen!" she repeated very softly, holding up one finger and turningher eyes towards the door she had left ajar. Her usual calmness haddeserted her. She was in the grip of some distressing terror.
For a full minute we held our breath and listened. Then her eyes rolledround again and met my own, and her skin went even whiter than before.
"It woke me," she said beneath her breath, and moving a step nearer tomy bed. "It was the Noise." Even her whisper trembled.
"The Noise!" The word repeated itself dully of its own accord. I wouldrather it had been anything in the world but that--earthquake, foreigncannon, collapse of the house above our heads! "The Noise, Frances! Areyou sure?" I was playing really for a little time.
"It was like thunder. At first I thought it was thunder. But a minutelater it came again--from underground. It's appalling." She muttered thewords, her voice not properly under control.
There was a pause of perhaps a minute, and then we both spoke at once.We said foolish, obvious things that neither of us believed in for asecond. The roof had fallen in, there were burglars downstairs, thesafes had been blown open. It was to comfort each other as children dothat we said these things; also it was to gain further time.
"There's some one in the house, of course," I heard my voice sayfinally, as I sprang out of bed and hurried into dressing gown andslippers. "Don't be alarmed. I'll go down and see," and from the drawerI took a pistol it was my habit to carry everywhere with me. I loaded itcarefully while Frances stood stock-still beside the bed and watched. Imoved towards the open door.
"You stay here, Frances," I whispered, the beating of my heart makingthe words uneven, "while I go down and make a search. Lock yourself in,girl. Nothing can happen to you. It was downstairs, you said?"
"Underneath," she answered faintly, pointing through the floor.
She moved suddenly between me and the door.
"Listen! Hark!" she said, the eyes in her face quite fixed; "it's comingagain," and she turned her head to catch the slightest sound. I stoodthere watching her, and while I watched her, shook.
But nothing stirred. From the halls below rose only the whirr and quietticking of the numerous clocks. The blind by the open window behind usflapped out a little into the room as the draught caught it.
"I'll come with you, Bill--to the next floor," she broke the silence."Then I'll stay with Mabel--till you come up again." The blind sank downwith a long sigh as she said it.
The question jumped to my lips before I could repress it:
"Mabel is awake. She heard it too?"
I hardly know why horror caught me at her answer. All was so vague andterrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister housewhere nothing ever happened.
"We met in the passage. She was on her way to me."
What shook in me, shook inwardly. Frances, I mean, did not see it. I hadthe feeling just that the Noise was upon us, that any second it wouldboom and roar about our ears. But the deep silence held. I only heard mysister's little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question:
"Then what is Mabel doing now?"
And her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadfultension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence.With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplesslyat me like a child:
"She is weeping and gna--"
My expression must have stopped her. I believe I clapped both hands uponher mouth, though when I realized things clearly again, I found theywere covering my own ears instead. It was a moment of unutterablehorror. The revulsion I felt was actually physical. It would have givenme pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the airabove my head; the sound--a definite, wholesome sound that explaineditself--would have been a positive relief. Other feelings, though, werein me too, all over me, rushing to and fro. It was vain to seek theirdisentanglement; it was impossible. I confess that I experienced, amongthem, a touch of paralyzing fear--though for a moment only; it passed assharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the facesuch as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspirationover the entire body. Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinarypersonal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury. It was,rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking--a sympathetic shrinking--from theagony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt forthemselves. The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in thatinstant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery tortureof the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered.... It was ofincredible power. It was real. The vain, intolerable hope swept over me.
I mastered myself, though hardly knowing how, and took my sister's hand.It was as cold as ice, as I led her firmly to the door and out into thepassage. Apparently she noticed nothing of my so near collapse, for Icaught her whisper as we went. "You are brave, Bill; splendidly brave."
The upper corridors of the great sleeping house were brightly lit; onher way to me she had turned on every electric switch her hand couldreach; and as we passed the final flight of stairs to the floor below, Iheard a door shut softly and knew that Mabel had been listening--waitingfor us. I led my sister up to it. She knocked, and the door was openedcautiously an inch or so. The room was pitch black. I caught no glimpseof Mabel standing there. Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper,"Billy, you will be careful, won't you?" and went in. I just had time toanswer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, "You'll find ushere" when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end.
But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words.Frances--by the way she disappeared I knew it--had made a swift andviolent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang. Sheleaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for,simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was alsostopped--stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it. Yetnot in time. I heard it--a hard and horrible sound that explained boththe leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words.
I stood irresolute a moment. It was as though all the bones had beenwithdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall. That sound pluckedthem out, and plucked out my self-possession with them. I am not surethat it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I halfremembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not whatthey did. In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it. Iassociated it with animals rather--horribly. In the history of theworld, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately todaythere can be but few who know it, or would recognize it even when heard.The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot andburning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn betweenthe desire to break down the door and enter, and to run--run for my lifefrom a thing I dared not face.
Out of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course. Withoutreflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for mysister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had beeninterrupted. I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards thehead of the stairs.
But that dreadful little sou
nd came with me. I believe my own teethchattered. It seemed all over the house--in the empty halls that openedinto the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the groundsoutside the building. From the lawns and barren garden, from the uglyterraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came acurious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing fordeliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and drybeseeching of hopeless spirits in prison.
That I could have taken the little sound from the bedroom where Iactually heard it, and spread it thus over the entire house and grounds,is evidence, perhaps, of the state my nerves were in.
The wailing assuredly was in my mind alone. But the longer I hesitated,the more difficult became my task, and, gathering up my dressing gown,lest I should trip in the darkness, I passed slowly down the staircaseinto the hail below. I carried neither candle nor matches; every switchin room and corridor was known to me. The covering of darkness wasindeed rather comforting than otherwise, for if it prevented seeing, italso prevented being seen. The heavy pistol, knocking against my thighas I moved, made me feel I was carrying a child's toy, foolishly. Iexperienced in every nerve that primitive vast dread which is the Thrillof darkness. Merely the child in me was comforted by that pistol.
The night was not entirely black; the iron bars across the glass frontdoor were visible, and, equally, I discerned the big, stiff woodenchairs in the hall, the gaping fireplace, the upright pillars supportingthe staircase, the round table in the center with its books andflower-vases, and the basket that held visitors' cards. There, too, wasthe stick and umbrella stand and the shelf with railway guides,directory, and telegraph forms. Clocks ticked everywhere with soundslike quiet footfalls. Light fell here and there in patches from thefloor above. I stood a moment in the hall, letting my eyes grow moreaccustomed to the gloom, while deciding on a plan of search. I made outthe ivy trailing outside over one of the big windows ... and then thetall clock by the front door made a grating noise deep down inside itsbody--it was the Presentation clock, large and hideous, given by thecongregation of his church--and, dreading the booming strike it seemedto threaten, I made a quick decision. If others beside myself were aboutin the night, the sound of that striking might cover their approach.
So I tiptoed to the right, where the passage led towards the diningroom. In the other direction were the morning- and drawing rooms, bothlittle used, and various other rooms beyond that had been his, generallynow kept locked. I thought of my sister, waiting upstairs with thatfrightened woman for my return. I went quickly, yet stealthily.
And, to my surprise, the door of the dining room was open. It had beenopened. I paused on the threshold, staring about me. I think I fullyexpected to see a figure blocked in the shadows against the heavysideboard, or looming on the other side beneath his portrait. But theroom was empty; I felt it empty. Through the wide bow-windows that gaveon to the verandah came an uncertain glimmer that even shone reflectedin the polished surface of the dinner-table, and again I perceived thestiff outline of chairs, waiting tenantless all round it, two largerones with high carved backs at either end. The monkey trees on the upperterrace, too, were visible outside against the sky, and the solemncrests of the wellingtonias on the terraces below. The enormous clock onthe mantelpiece ticked very slowly, as though its machinery were runningdown, and I made out the pale round patch that was its face. Resistingmy first inclination to turn the lights up--my hand had gone so far asto finger the friendly knob--I crossed the room so carefully that nosingle board creaked, nor a single chair, as I rested a hand upon itsback, moved on the parquet flooring. I turned neither to the right norleft, nor did I once look back.
I went towards the long corridor filled with priceless _objets d'art_,that led through various antechambers into the spacious music-room, andonly at the mouth of this corridor did I next halt a moment inuncertainty. For this long corridor, lit faintly by high windows on theleft from the verandah, was very narrow, owing to the mass of shelvesand fancy tables it contained. It was not that I feared to knock overprecious things as I went, but, that, because of its ungenerous width,there would be no room to pass another person--if I met one. And thecertainty had suddenly come upon me that somewhere in this corridoranother person at this actual moment stood. Here, somehow, amid all thisdead atmosphere of furniture and impersonal emptiness, lay the hint of aliving human presence; and with such conviction did it come upon me,that my hand instinctively gripped the pistol in my pocket before Icould even think. Either some one had passed along this corridor justbefore me, or some one lay waiting at its farther end--withdrawn orflattened into one of the little recesses, to let me pass. It was theperson who had opened the door. And the blood ran from my heart as Irealized it.
It was not courage that sent me on, but rather a strong impulsion frombehind that made it impossible to retreat: the feeling that a throngpressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already halfsurrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where therewas wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and theirfire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm ofirrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring downthe length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end,I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that thenegative emotion of fear was swamped in this vast sea of pity andcommiseration for others that surged upon me.
My senses, at least, were no whit confused; if anything, my brainregistered impressions with keener accuracy than usual. I noticed, forinstance, that the two swinging doors of baize that cut the corridorinto definite lengths, making little rooms of the spaces between them,were both wide-open--in the dim light no mean achievement. Also that thefronds of a palm plant, some ten feet in front of me, still stirredgently from the air of someone who had recently gone past them. The longgreen leaves waved to and fro like hands. Then I went stealthily forwarddown the narrow space, proud even that I had this command of myself, andso carefully that my feet made no sound upon the Japanese matting on thefloor.
It was a journey that seemed timeless. I have no idea how fast or slow Iwent, but I remember that I deliberately examined articles on each sideof me, peering with particular closeness into the recesses of wall andwindow. I passed the first baize doors, and the passage beyond themwidened out to hold shelves of books; there were sofas and smallreading-tables against the wall.
It narrowed again presently, as I entered the second stretch. Thewindows here were higher and smaller, and marble statuettes of classicalsubject lined the walls, watching me like figures of the dead. Theirwhite and shining faces saw me, yet made no sign. I passed next betweenthe second baize doors. They, too, had been fastened back with hooksagainst the wall. Thus all doors were open--had been recently opened.
And so, at length, I found myself in the final widening of the corridorwhich formed an antechamber to the music-room itself. It had been usedformerly to hold the overflow of meetings. No door separated it from thegreat hall beyond, but heavy curtains hung usually to close it off, andthese curtains were invariably drawn. They now stood wide. And here--Ican merely state the impression that came upon me--I knew myself at lastsurrounded. The throng that pressed behind me, also surged in front:facing me in the big room, and waiting for my entry, stood a multitude;on either side of me, in the very air above my head, the vast assemblagepaused upon my coming. The pause, however, was momentary, for instantlythe deep, tumultuous movement was resumed that yet was silent as acavern underground. I felt the agony that was in it, the passionatestriving, the awful struggle to escape. The semi-darkness heldbeseeching faces that fought to press themselves upon my vision,yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened toimplore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury ofmisery and hate that made the life in me stop dead, frozen by the horrorof vain pity. That intolerable, vain Hope was everywhere.
And the multitude, it came to me, was not a single multitude, but many;for, as soon a
s one huge division pressed too close upon the edge ofescape, it was dragged back by another and prevented. The wild host wasdivided against itself. Here dwelt the Shadow I had "imagined" weeksago, and in it struggled armies of lost souls as in the depths of somebottomless pit whence there is no escape. The layers mingled, fightingagainst themselves in endless torture. It was in this great Shadow I hadclairvoyantly seen Mabel, but about its fearful mouth, I now wascertain, hovered another figure of darkness, a figure who sought to keepit in existence, since to her thought were due those lampless depths ofwoe without escape.... Towards me the multitudes now surged.
It was a sound and a movement that brought me back into myself. Thegreat dock at the farther end of the room just then struck the hour ofthree. That was the sound. And the movement--? I was aware that a figurewas passing across the distant center of the floor. Instantly I droppedback into the arena of my little human terror. My hand again clutchedstupidly at the pistol butt. I drew back into the folds of the heavycurtain. And the figure advanced.
I remember every detail. At first it seemed to me enormous--thisadvancing shadow--far beyond human scale; but as it came nearer, Imeasured it, though not consciously, by the organ pipes that gleamed infaint colors, just above its gradual soft approach. It passed them,already halfway across the great room. I saw then that its stature wasthat of ordinary men. The prolonged booming of the clock died away. Iheard the footfall, shuffling upon the polished boards. I heard anothersound--a voice, low and monotonous, droning as in prayer. The figure wasspeaking. It was a woman. And she carried in both hands before her asmall object that faintly shimmered--a glass of water. And then Irecognized her.
There was still an instant's time before she reached me, and I made useof it. I shrank back, flattening myself against the wall. Her voiceceased a moment, as she turned and carefully drew the curtains togetherbehind her, dosing them with one hand. Oblivious of my presence, thoughshe actually touched my dressing gown with the hand that pulled thecords, she resumed her dreadful, solemn march, disappearing at lengthdown the long vista of the corridor like a shadow.
But as she passed me, her voice began again, so that I heard each worddistinctly as she uttered it, her head aloft, her figure upright, asthough she moved at the head of a procession:
"A drop of cold water, given in His name, shall moisten their burningtongues."
It was repeated monotonously over and over again, droning down into thedistance as she went, until at length both voice and figure faded intothe shadows at the farther end.
For a time, I have no means of measuring precisely, I stood in that darkcorner, pressing my back against the wall, and would have drawn thecurtains down to hide me had I dared to stretch an arm out. The dreadthat presently the woman would return passed gradually away. I realizedthat the air had emptied, the crowd her presence had stirred intoactivity had retreated; I was alone in the gloomy under-space of theodious building.... Then I remembered suddenly again the terrified womenwaiting for me on that upper landing; and realized that my skin was wetand freezing cold after a profuse perspiration. I prepared to retrace mysteps. I remember the effort it cost me to leave the support of the walland covering darkness of my corner, and step out into the grey light ofthe corridor. At first I sidled, then, finding this mode of walkingimpossible, turned my face boldly and walked quickly, regardless that mydressing gown set the precious objects shaking as I passed. A wind thatsighed mournfully against the high, small windows seemed to have gotinside the corridor as well; it felt so cold; and every moment I dreadedto see the outline of the woman's figure as she waited in recess orangle against the wall for me to pass.
Was there another thing I dreaded even more? I cannot say. I only knowthat the first baize doors had swung to behind me, and the second oneswere close at hand, when the great dim thunder caught me, pouring upwith prodigious volume so that it, seemed to roll out from anotherworld. It shook the very bowels of the building. I was closer to it thanthat other time, when it had followed me from the goblin garden. Therewas strength and hardness in it, as of metal reverberation. Some touchof numbness, almost of paralysis, must surely have been upon me that Ifelt no actual terror, for I remember even turning and standing still tohear it better. "That is the Noise," my thought ran stupidly, and Ithink I whispered it aloud; "the Doors are closing." The wind outsideagainst the windows was audible, so it cannot have been really loud, yetto me it was the biggest, deepest sound I have ever heard, but so faraway, with such awful remoteness in it, that I had to doubt my own earsat the same time. It seemed underground--the rumbling of earthquakegates that shut remorselessly within the rocky Earth--stupendousultimate thunder. They were shut off from help again. The doors hadclosed.
I felt a storm of pity, an agony of bitter, futile hate sweep throughme. My memory of the figure changed then. The Woman with the glass ofcooling water had stepped down from Heaven; but the Man--or was it Men?--who smeared this terrible layer of belief and Thought upon theworld!...
I crossed the dining room--it was fancy, of course, that held my eyesfrom glancing at the portrait for fear I should see it smiling approval--and so finally reached the hall, where the light from the floor aboveseemed now quite bright in comparison. All the doors I closed carefullybehind me; but first I had to open them. The woman had closed every one.Up the stairs, then, I actually ran, two steps at a time. My sister wasstanding outside Mabel's door. By her face I knew that she had alsoheard. There was no need to ask. I quickly made my mind up.
"There's nothing," I said, and detailed briefly my tour of search. "Allis quiet and undisturbed downstairs." May God forgive me!
She beckoned to me, closing the door softly behind her. My heart beatviolently a moment, then stood still.
"Mabel," she said aloud.
It was like the sentence of a judge, that one short word.
I tried to push past her and go in, but she stopped me with her arm. Shewas wholly mistress of herself, I saw.
"Hush!" she said in a lower voice. "I've got her round again withbrandy. She's sleeping quietly now. We won't disturb her."
She drew me farther out into the landing, and as she did so, the clockin the hall below struck half-past three. I had stood, then, thirtyminutes in the corridor below. "You've been such a long time." she saidsimply. "I feared for you," and she took my hand in her own that wascold and clammy.