He counted his hundred, he gave ten beats more for good luck. ‘Good night, you old fraud,’ he said, and went in and secured the door.
It seemed indeed for the week that followed that he had rightly gauged the nature of the hallucination which had threatened to establish its awful dominion over him. Never once, whether by day or night, did there come to his ears that footfall which he feared and listened for, nor, if in the dead hours of the darkness he lay for a while between sleep and waking, did he quake with a sense that something unseen and aware was watching him. A little courage, a flat denial of his fears had been sufficient not only to scotch them, but to snuff out the manifestation which had caused them. He kept his thoughts well in hand, he would not even conjecture what had been the cause of that visitation. Occasionally, while it still vexed him, he had cast about for the origin of it, he had wondered whether that shrill Levantine hag calling curses on him could somehow have found root in his mind. But now it was past and done with: he would have a few days’ remission from work, if it was overwork that had been at the bottom of it, at Christmas, and perhaps it would be prudent not to be quite so free with the club brandy.
On Christmas Eve he and his friends sat at their bridge till close on midnight, then lingered over a drink, wished each other seasonable greetings and dispersed. Cresswell hesitated as to whether he should not take a taxi home, for the object with which he had trudged back there so often seemed to be gained, and he no longer feared the recurrence of the step. But he thought he would just set the seal on his victory and went on foot.
He had come to the point in his walk where he had first heard the step. Tonight, as usual, there was none, and he stopped a moment looking round him securely and serenely. It was a bright night, luminous with a moon a little after the full, and it amazed him to think that he had ever fashioned a terror to himself in this quiet, orderly street. From not far ahead there came the sound of the bells of the church saluting Christmas morning. They would have been holding their midnight Mass there. He breathed the night air with content, and throwing the butt of his spent cigar into the roadway, he walked on again.
With a sudden sinking of his heart, he heard behind him the step which he thought he had silenced for ever. It was faint at first, but tonight, instead of keeping at a uniform distance behind him, it was approaching. Louder and more crisp it sounded, until it was close to him. On and on it came, still gaining on him, and now there brushed by him, though not quite touching him, the figure of a man in European dress, with his head wrapped in a shawl.
‘Hullo, you there,’ called Cresswell. ‘You’re the skunk who’s been following me, are you, and slipping out of sight again? No more of your damned conjuring tricks. Let’s have a look at you.’
The figure, now some two or three yards ahead of him, stopped at the sound of his voice and turned round. The shawl covered its face, but for a narrow chink between the edges.
‘So you understand English,’ said Cresswell. ‘Now I’ll thank you to take that shawl off your face, and let me see who it is that’s been dogging me.’
The man raised his hands and threw back the shawl. The moonlight shone on his face, and that face was just a slab of smooth yellowish flesh extending from ear to ear, empty as the oval of an egg without eyes or nose or mouth. From the upper edge of the shawl where it crossed the forehead there depended a few wisps of grey hair.
Cresswell looked, and a wave of panic fear submerged his very soul. He gave a little thin squeal and started to run, listening the while in an agony of terror to hear if the steps of that nameless, faceless, creature were following. He must run, he must run, to get away from that thing out of hell which had manifested itself.
Then close at hand he saw the lights of the church, and there perhaps he could find sanctuary from it. The door was open, and he sprang up the steps. Close by there were lights burning on the altar of a side chapel, and he flung himself on his knees. Not for years had he attempted to pray, and now in the agony of his soul he could but say in a gabbling whisper, ‘O my God: O my God.’ Over and over he said it.
By degrees some sort of self-control came back to him. There were holy images, there was a sacred picture above the altar, a smell of hallowing incense was in the air. Surely there was protection here, a power that would intervene between him and the terror of that face. A sort of tranquillity overscored his panic, and he began to look round.
The church was darker than it had been when he entered, and he saw that some of those cowled brown-habited men of the order were moving quietly about, quenching the lights. Those at the altar in front of which he knelt were still bright, and now he saw one of these cowled figures move up close to him, as if waiting for him to finish his devotions. He was calm now, his panic had quite passed, and he rose from his knees.
‘I’ve had a terrible fright, Father,’ he said to the monk. ‘I saw something just now out in the street which must have come out of hell.’
The figure turned a little towards him: the cowl concealed its face altogether, and the voice came muffled.
‘Indeed, my son,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it is that frightened you.’
Cresswell felt some backwash of his panic returning
‘A man passed me as I was going back to my house,’ he said, ‘and I told him to stop and let me have a look at him. He wore a shawl over his head and he threw it back. Oh, my God, that face!’
The monk quietly raised his hands and grasped the edges of his cowl. Then with a quick movement he threw it back.
‘That sort of face?’ he said.
The Bed by the Window
My friend Lionel Bailey understands the works of Mr Einstein, and he reads them with the rapt, thrilled attention that more ordinary people give to detective stories. He says they are so exciting that he cannot put them down: they make him late for dinner. It may be owing to this unusual mental conformation of his that he talks about time and space in a manner that is occasionally puzzling, for he thinks of them as something quite different from our accepted notions of them, and tonight, as we sat over my fire hearing a spring-gale of March bugling outside, and dashing solid sheets of rain against my window, I had found him very difficult to follow. But though he thinks in terms which the average man finds unintelligible, he is always ready (though with an effort) to quit the austere heights on which he naturally roams, and explain. And his explanations are often so lucid that the average man (I allude to myself) can generally get some idea of what he means. Just now he had made some extremely cryptic remark about the real dimensions of time, and of the palpable incorrectness of our conception of it; but rightly interpreting the moaning sound with which I received this, he very kindly came to my aid.
‘You see, time, as we think of it,’ he said, ‘is a most meaningless convention. We talk of the future and the past as if they were opposite poles, whereas they are really the same. What we thought of as the future a minute ago or a century ago, we now see to be the past; the future is always in process of becoming the past. The two are the same, as I said just now, looked at from different points.’
‘But they aren’t the same,’ said I, rather incautiously. ‘The future may become the past, but the past never becomes the future.’
Lionel sighed.
‘A most unfortunate remark,’ he said. ‘Why, the whole of the future is made up of the past; it entirely depends on it; the future consists of nothing else but the past.’
I did see what he meant. There was no denying it, so I tried something else.
‘A slippery slidey affair altogether,’ I said. ‘The future becomes the past, and the past the future. But luckily there’s one firm spot in this welter, and that’s the present. That’s solid; there’s nothing wrong with the present, is there?’
Lionel moved slightly in his chair – an indulgent, patient movement.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he said. ‘You??
?ve chosen as your firm, solid point the most shifting and unstable of all. What is the present? By the time you’ve said “This is the present”, it has slid away into the past. The past has got some sort of real existence and we know that the future will blossom out of it. But the present hardly can be said to exist at all, for the moment you say that it is here, it has changed. It is far the most elusive part of the phantom which we call Time. It is the door, that is the most that can be said for it, through which the future passes into the past. And somehow, though it scarcely exists, we can see from it into the past and into the future.’
I felt I could venture to contradict that.
‘Thank heaven we can’t,’ I said. ‘It would be the ultimate terror to be able to see into the future. It’s bad enough sometimes to be able to remember the past.’
He shook his head.
‘But we can see into the future,’ he said. ‘The future is entirely evolved out of the past, and if we knew everything about the past, we should equally know everything about the future. Everything that happens is merely a fresh link in the chain of unalterable consequences. The little we know about the solar system, for instance, makes it a certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow.’
‘Oh, that kind of thing,’ said I. ‘Just material, mathematical deductions.’
‘No, all kinds of things. For instance, I’m sure you know the certainty that we all have now and then that somebody present is about to say some particular definite sentence. A few seconds pass, and then out it comes precisely as we had known it would. That’s not so material and mathematical. It’s a little instance of a very big thing called clairvoyance.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘But it may be some trick of the brain. It isn’t a normal experience.’
‘Everything is normal,’ said Lionel. ‘Everything depends on some rule. We only call things abnormal when we don’t know what the rule is. Then there are mediums: mediums constantly see into the future, and to some extent everyone is a medium: we’ve all had glimpses.’
He paused a moment.
‘And there is such a simple explanation,’ he said. ‘You see, we’re all existing in eternity, though just for the span of our lifetime we’re also existing in Time. But there’s eternity outside Time: Time is a sort of mist lying round us. Now and then the mist clears, and then – how shall I express anything so simple? – then we look down on Time, like a little speck of an island below us, quite clear, future and past and present, and awfully small. We get just a glimpse, no more, and then the mist closes round us again. But on these occasions we can see into the future just as clearly as we can look into the past, and we can see not only those who have passed outside the mist of material phenomena, whom we call ghosts, but the future or the past of those who are still inside it. They all appear to us then as they are in eternity, where there is neither past nor future.’
I suddenly found that my grip on what he was saying was beginning to give way.
‘That’s enough for one night,’ said I flippantly. ‘The future is the past, and the past is the future, and there isn’t any present, and ghosts may come from what has happened or what will happen. I should like to see a ghost out of the future . . . And as you’ve had a whisky and soda in the immediate past, I feel sure you will have one in the immediate future, as it’s the same thing. Say when.’
I was off into the country next day in order to make amends for a couple of months of wilful idleness in London by hermitising myself in a small village on the coast of Norfolk, where I knew nobody, and where, I was credibly informed, there was nothing to do; I should thus have to work in order to get through the hours of the day. There was a house there, kept by a man and his wife who took in lodgers, and there I proposed to plant myself till I had got through these criminal arrears. Mr Hopkins had been a butler, and his wife a cook, and – so I was told by a friend who had made trial of their ministrations – they made their inmates extremely comfortable. There were a couple of other folk, Mr Hopkins had written to me, now staying in the house, and he regretted he could not give me a sitting-room to myself. But he could provide me with a big double bedroom, where there was ample room for a writing-table and my books. That was good enough.
Hopkins had ordered a car to convey me from the nearest railway-station, six miles distant, to Faringham, and a little before sunset, on a bright windy day of March, I came to the village. Though I had certainly never been here before, I had some odd sense of remote familiarity with it, and I supposed I must have seen and forgotten some hamlet which was like it. There was just one street lined with fishermen’s houses, built of rounded flints, with nets hung up to dry on the walls of small plots in front, and a few miscellaneous shops. We passed through the length of this, and came at the end to a much bigger, three-storeyed house, at the gate of which we stopped. A spacious square of garden separated it from the road, with espaliered pear-trees bordering the path that led to the front door; beyond flat open country stretched away to the horizon, intersected with big dykes and ditches, across which I could see, a mile distant, a line of white shingle where lay the sea. My arrival was hooted on the motor-horn, and Hopkins, a prim dark spare man, came out to see to my luggage. His wife was waiting inside, and she took me up to my room. Certainly it would do very well: there were two windows commanding a view of the marsh eastwards, in one of which was set a big writing-table. A fire sparkled on the hearth, two beds stood in opposite angles of the room, one near the second window, the other by the fireplace, in front of which was a large armchair. This armchair had a footstool, under the table was a waste-paper basket, and on it one of those old-fashioned but convenient contrivances which show the day of the month and the day of the week, with pegs to adjust them. Everything had been thought out for comfort, everything looked spotlessly clean and cared-for, and at once I felt myself at home here.
‘But what a charming room, Mrs Hopkins,’ I said. ‘It’s just what I want.’
She moved away from the door as I spoke, to let her husband enter with my bags. She gave him one swift ugly look, and I found myself thinking, ‘How she dislikes him!’ But the impression was momentary, and having elected to sleep in the bed by the fireplace, I went downstairs with her for a cup of tea, while her husband unpacked for me.
When I came up again the unpacking was over, and all my effects disposed, clothes laid in drawers and cupboards, and my books and papers neatly stacked on the table. There was no settling down to be done; I had stepped into possession of this pleasant room as if I had long lived and worked in it. Then my eye fell on the little adjustable contrivance on the table for displaying the current date, and I saw that this one detail had escaped the vigilance of my hosts, for it marked Tuesday, May 8th, instead of the true date, Thursday, March 22nd. I was rather pleased to observe that the Hopkinses were not too perfect, and after twisting the record back to the correct date I instantly settled down to work, for there was nothing to get used to before I felt at home.
A plain and excellent dinner was served some three hours later, and I found that one of my fellow-guests was an elderly sepulchral lady with a genteel voice who spoke but rarely and then about the weather. She had by her on the table a case of Patience cards and a bottle of medicine. She took a dose of the latter before and after her meal, and at once retired to the common sitting-room, where that night and every night she played long sad games of Patience. The other was a ruddy young man who confided to me that he was making a study of the minute fresh-water fleas that infest fresh-water snails, for which daily he dragged the dykes. He had been so fortunate as to find a new species which would undoubtedly be called Pulex Dodsoniana in his honour. Hopkins waited on us with soft velvet-footed attention, and his wife brought in the admirable fruits of her kitchen. Once there was some slight collision of crockery in her tray, and happening to look up I saw the glance he gave her. It was not mere dislike that inspired it, but some quiet, deadly hatred.
Dinner over, I went in for a few minutes to the sitting-room, where the sepulchral lady was sitting down to her Patience and Mr Dodson to his microscope, and very soon betook myself upstairs to resume my work.
The room was pleasantly warm, my things laid out for the night, and for a couple of hours I busied and buried myself. Then the door of the room, without any enquiry of knocking, silently opened, and Mrs Hopkins stood there. She gave a little gasp of dismay as she saw me.
‘I’m sure I beg your pardon, sir,’ she said. ‘I quite forgot; so stupid of me. But this is the room my husband and I usually occupy, if it is not being used. So forgetful of me.’
I awoke next morning after long traffic with troubled, nonsensical dreams to find the sun pouring in at the windows as Hopkins drew up the blinds. I thought that Mr Dodson had come in to show me a collection of the diamond-shaped fleas that battened on Patience cards, or, rather, that would be hatched on Tuesday, May 8th, for, as he pointed out, there were none there now since the present had no existence. And then Hopkins, who had been bending over the bed by the window, apologised for being in my room, and explained that he could hate his wife more intensely here: he hoped that I had not been disturbed by him. Then there was the crack of some explosion, which resolved itself into the rattle of the up-going blind, and there indeed he was . . . I was soon out of bed and dressing, but somehow that farrago of dream-stuff concocted out of actual experience, hung about me. I could not help feeling that there was significance in it, if I could only find the clue. It did not, as is usual with dreams, fade and evaporate with my waking; it seemed to retreat into hidden caves and recesses of my brain and wait in ambush there till it was called out.