Aaron presumably knew about it—but did he? This wretched woman had seemed to dislike Aaron; supposing he didn’t know! It didn’t seem very likely he’d let her meander round the house in a blanket after a kitten, nor a young ruffian covered only by a coat that didn’t fit him—not anyhow with Nancy and Sybil about. Sybil, it was true, had seemed to get on with them remarkably well, but even so … Suppose Nancy had met them … what on earth would a—for all her faults—ordinary nice young girl do? Suppose the old devil dropped the blanket by accident—or purposely? Mr. Coningsby revolted at the idea—revolted against the whole mad fact. He let go of the handle and said in a surprisingly firm voice, “Hello, there!”
No one took the smallest notice of him. By now he couldn’t see the kitten, but the procession was nearing the end of the corridor. At least he ought to see where they went. It was possible that they’d been having baths or something, like himself—no, not like himself. The notion that he and the old woman had shared a bath, that they could have anything at all in common—even the very idea of a bath—was extraordinarily offensive. Besides, why the kitten? The kitten might, from the way it was going, have been a maid showing a visitor to her room, but of course it wasn’t. Unless it was a new kind of marionette. If any kitten started to show him to his room——Well, he was going after them, he was going to make quite certain that they didn’t run into Nancy. It’d be enough to give her a shock. And he wasn’t going to have Sybil kneeling down as if she were in church; she’d been to church once today already. Blessing, indeed! Mr. Coningsby went down the corridor after the others with a firm determination to allow no sort of blessing whatever within any reasonable distance of him while he was alive and sane. Except, of course, in a church.
They were outside the door of Aaron’s study; he heard the kitten mewing at it. Joanna—if that was her name—opened it. Mr. Coningsby called out again, quite loudly this time, “Hello, you there!” But the “you there” took no notice; they were going in. Mr. Coningsby broke into a run and then checked—after all, his host might have given Joanna the use of the room. He considered the possibility and rejected it; Aaron had apparently had a quite different view of Joanna. No, there was some hanky-panky about.
An awful thought for a moment occurred to him that she might be merely going to let the kitten out into the garden or somewhere; people did let kittens out into gardens, and a nice fool he’d look if that were so. But surely on a night like this—and anyhow not on the first floor—and not into a study. He became shocked at himself; he was almost vulgar. Very much more angry, he reached the study door.
The others, including the kitten, were inside. As Mr. Coningsby came into the room he heard the mewing again, plaintive and insistent; he saw the little beast on its hind legs against the inner door—not that it was so little; it struck him that it was within an inch or so of being a proper cat, and the noise it was making was much louder than feline infancy produces. Joanna was almost beside it, but she had to go round Aaron’s great table while the cat had dashed below it. And a little behind her, just turning the table-corner, was Stephen. Mr. Coningsby remembered that behind that other door were the images of gold. Those were what she was after, of course—gipsies—golden statues—theft. He said loudly, “Now then, now then, what are you doing there?”
She stopped, for this time she heard him, and looked over at him. Her eyes blinked at him from the tanned wrinkled old face under the matted hair, over the blanket fastened together (he now saw) by a strap round her. She said, “Keep away; you’re too late.”
“I fancy you’ll find I’m just in time,” Mr. Coningsby answered, and walked into the room, going round the table on the opposite side to Stephen. “Does Mr. Lee know you’re here?”
She chuckled unpleasantly, then nodded at him. “He’ll know,” she said, “he’ll soon know. Wait till I bring him out.”
“Out?” Mr. Coningsby said. “What do you mean—out?”
She pointed to the door, and her voice sank to a whisper as she said, “What he has there.”
“What he has there,” Mr. Coningsby said, “is his business. I thought that was what you were after, and it’s a good thing for you I happened to be about. I suppose you were going to rob him? Well, you won’t this time. Now you get away, and take your damned kitten with you—if it is yours.”
She clutched the handle of the door and began to speak, but Mr. Coningsby, in the full tide of satisfaction, swept on.
“Leave go of that door. Come on; we’ll go downstairs together. A nice piece of work, upon my word! You ought to know better, at your age.”
The cat yowled at the door. Joanna glowered, and then said, “You—you’ll stop me finding my baby?”
“Your what?” Mr. Coningsby exclaimed. “Oh don’t be silly; there’s no baby there. There’s only a set of marionettes—pretty things, but nothing like a baby. And don’t you try and put me off with that kind of talk. Get you away.”
“Ah! ah!” the old creature cried out with extraordinary force, “you’re one of them, you’re one of the sons of Set.”
The cat yowled louder than ever. For a moment Mr. Coningsby felt strangely alone, as the sound went through the room, and he heard and saw the claws tearing at the door. He thought of that continuous movement behind it; he saw the straining beast and the snarling woman; he saw the dull face of the idiot behind her; he heard the noise of the storm without—and he wished very much that someone else was by his side. There was something wrong about the images, the house, the very wind; cat and storm howled together, and the old woman suddenly shrieked, “He’s over you, he’s over you. Get away before he strikes. All his enemies are close to death. The cats are up; the god’s coming.”
“Nothing is over me,” Mr. Coningsby said in a voice that became high and shrill in spite of himself. “Leave that door alone.”
“It isn’t you that’ll stop it,” she screeched back, “nor a million like you. They’ll take you and cut you in a thousand pieces; they’ll embalm you alive in the pyramids of hell; they’ll drown you among the crocodiles that are tearing your father; they’ll flay you with the burning knives of Anubis, and your heart shall be eaten in the place of justice.” She moved towards the door and turned the handle. Mr. Coningsby was on her in a moment, pressing it shut, and incidentally kicking the cat away. As he jumped he almost wished that he’d left her alone; it was all horrible, and he loathed the old voice screaming curses at him. It was of course absolute nonsense, but some minute atom of his mind dragged on the words “embalmed alive.” Embalmed alive—he of all people!
“No, you don’t!” he said. “Leave that door alone. Ah! ow!”
The cat had leaped back at him and was madly clawing at his legs. Mr. Coningsby kicked at it and missed. It hung on to his trousers, then it fell off and flung itself at his ankles. It was in a state of raging lunacy, almost as wild as Joanna, who dropped the blanket so that it fell back from her shoulders and herself clutched at him with clawing fingers. Mr. Coningsby avoided her, kicked again at the cat, and desperately held on to the door. But he was suddenly torn from it. Joanna, as she clawed at his throat, had shrieked out a call to her companion, and Stephen, leaping past her, caught Coningsby round the waist, and with a great heave wrenched him away from the door and held him high in the air. Head and feet downwards, he hung, jerking kicking, choking out anathemas.
“What shall I do with him, grandmother?” Stephen said. “Shall I throw him out into the storm?”
The old woman turned her eyes to the window, but, alert in hatred, saw that it was too small; to push a struggling full-sized body through it would not easily be done even by Stephen. “Throw him there,” she said, pointing across the room, and at once Stephen obeyed. Mr. Coningsby was sent hurtling through the air into the extreme corner of the room, where he hit the walls first and then crashed to the floor. By mere chance his head escaped; he fell bruised, shocked, and dazed, but still in some sort of consciousness. For one fratricidal second fear and pride warr
ed in his heart, and pride won. He lay for some minutes where he had been flung, till rage so bubbled in him that he began painfully to wriggle over, obstinately determined to see what those creatures were doing. He could not see, for the inner door was open and they had disappeared. They were busy then—he had been right—about the golden images; robbery—robbery with violence. A long, long, long sentence for Stephen, and Joanna—Mr. Coningsby’s professional knowledge supplied him with a clear view of Joanna’s future. But that couldn’t happen if they got away, and unless he did something they might get away. He was too confused by his fall to think of the extreme unlikelihood of Joanna’s going out into the storm clothed only in a blanket and carrying in a fold of it a collection of little golden figures; had he thought of it he would have believed Joanna capable of it, and perhaps he would have been right. For when she stood on the threshold of that inner room and peered into the cloud that filled it, when she beheld the rich mystery that enveloped the symbols of our origins, she had cried out once upon the name of the god, and from that moment she lost touch with the actualities of this world. She pressed on. Stephen, behind her, made violent movements and noises as if to hold her back, but over her shoulder she turned on him a face of such destructive malignity that he shrank back and crouched defensively down by the door, only whispering from there, “Don’t go, don’t go.”
All this was hidden from Mr. Coningsby, who, with a growing determination to stop it, was getting, slowly and gruntingly, to his feet. “Fortunate,” he thought as he did so, “fortunate I brought my other glasses with me! Losing one pair in the storm—shouldn’t have seen anything of this—didn’t someone say Ralph had called? Get hold of Ralph—not always thoughtful—couldn’t stand seeing his father thrown about the room, like a … like a quoit. Just as well he didn’t see—soon settle this nonsense. Ugh! What’s that?”
As he came finally to his feet and adjusted the extra pair of glasses, the gold chain of which had kept them attached if not in position, he saw the first wraiths of mist faintly exuding from the inner room. “What the devil is it?” he thought, staring. “’Tisn’t snow; ’tisn’t smoke … or is it? Has that infernal old woman set the place on fire?” He went forward a little, keeping the big table between himself and the other door, just in case Joanna and Stephen dashed out at him again, and then he saw the whole doorway filling with it. He had an impression that there were a great many people before his eyes, a crowd of them, just there in the doorway, but that could hardly be so, unless of course other wanderers had taken refuge in this house from the storm, but then they wouldn’t be here, they’d be in the kitchen or somewhere. It wasn’t people; it was mist or smoke or something. He remembered suddenly that such a faint vapor had seemed to enwrap Nancy and the table when she had her fortune told, but he hadn’t taken much notice, because he had then been, as ostentatiously as possible, looking another way. If the old woman was asking about her fortune, Mr. Coningsby felt he could tell exactly what it would be, only she wasn’t there to be told. Nothing was there but the cloud and … again … an indefinable sensation of lots of people, all moving and turning.
“It’s those damned figures,” Mr. Coningsby thought. “I expect they shake everything, all that gyrating nonsense. Good God, it’s getting thicker.” He turned, ran through the outer door, and shouted as loudly as he could, “Fire! Fire!”
As he opened his mouth for the third shout, he stopped on the “F——” For there came from below a sudden crash, a crash that was answered from different parts of the house by a noise of smashing and splintering, and then the wind was howling louder and nearer than before. “Great Christ!” Mr. Coningsby cried out, in mere ingenuity of perplexed anxiety, “what the devil’s that?” He had guessed even as he spoke; the doors and windows were giving way before the blizzard. “The snow’s getting in and the fire’s getting out,” he thought, distractedly staring back over his shoulder. “O my Father in heaven, what a Christmas!”
Downstairs, Aaron and Ralph were still gazing at one another in the dining-room when the crash came. At the noise of it they both exclaimed, but Ralph was the first in the hall. He saw there how the front door had given way under the tireless assaults of the storm, which, as if imbued with a conscious knowledge of its aim, had been driving like a battering-ram at the house since the return of Sybil and her brother. It might have been pursuing and hunting him down; the loosened leaves of invocation might have been infused—beyond any intention—with Henry’s purpose, and the vague shapes whom Lothair Coningsby had thought he saw in the snow-swept roads might have been hammering with a more terrible intensity at the door which had closed behind him. At last those crashing buffets had torn lock and bolt from the doorpost; the door was flung back, and the invading masses of snow and wind swept in. The floor of the hall was covered before anyone could speak; the wind—if it were not rather the dance of searching shapes—swept into every corner. A picture or two on the walls were torn off and flung down lest they concealed the fugitive; tables were tossed about; an umbrella stand was kicked to the extreme end of the hall. A howl of disappointment went up, and the snow drove over the first few stairs, as if the pursuit was determined never to stop until its prey had been discovered.
Ralph gaped for a moment, then plunged for the door. “Come on!” he yelled. “Call everyone! Come and shut it.” He pulled it a little forward and was thrown back again along with it. “Come on!” he cried stentorianly to Aaron. “No time to waste! Call the others!”
But Aaron was stupefied. The comfortable reassurances in which he had clothed himself were torn away by the same giant hands that were wrecking his house. This was no unexpected winter storm, but supernaturally contrived death, and, whatever scope it had, this place was its center. If it were to sweep, eschatological and ultimate, over the world, that destruction was but an accident. The elementals, summoned from their symbols, were still half obedient to the will that had called them. His brain called to him to give him their desire, to take the stranger and throw him out beyond the threshold, that he might there be beaten and stunned and crushed and stifled and buried, a sacrifice now not to magical knowledge but to the very hope of life. And again his brain answered and told him that he could not, that the storm itself had brought to the stranger a friend and to himself two enemies. There was no one in the house but Henry who would do his bidding, and even if Henry could be found in the darkness where he had hidden himself, what could he and Henry do against Coningsby and his son? A more sinister thought leaped in his mind—what if Henry himself could be made the offering? might not these raging powers be satisfied with the body of the sorcerer who had invoked them? might not Coningsby and his son and he himself manage to make that offering? At least then Aaron Lee would be alive, and now nothing in the whole universe mattered but the safety of Aaron Lee. He looked wildly round, and then Ralph left the door and ran back to him, seizing his arm, and crying, “Call someone! We’ve got to shut the door and barricade it—then the windows! Hello, everybody! Hello! Come here! you’re wanted! Come—here—everyone!”
The servants—which meant two maids and the cook—had come already, bursting into the hall from their own quarters and screaming that the back doors were broken down. One of the maids was hysterical with the continued roar of the blizzard and was screaming and howling continuously. The other, almost equally alarmed, was quieter, and it was on her that Ralph fixed.
“Hello!” he said, “come along! Look here, we’ve got to try and get the door held. We’ll get a good big table and barge it to with that behind it, and someone else can get some rope or something. The dining-room table’s best, don’t you think? It’s the biggest thing I’ve seen.” He had her by the arm and was rushing her to the dining-room. “O lor’, won’t anything keep that gramophoning misery behind us quiet? No, don’t go back, for God’s sake. Here—now smash everything off it—that’s right! Oh don’t stop to pick them up, girl!—What’s your name? what? Amabel?—all right, Amabel, just pitch them off, so! Now this
way—that’s it! careful! careful! blast that leg!—sideways, I think—so; yes, so—gently; don’t get flustered. Hark at the polish!” as the table-top screeched against the doorpost. They tottered out with it.
“Can I help, Ralph?” his aunt’s voice said behind him. Sybil had been half upstairs when the door had given way, and she had come quickly back to the hall, but her arrival had been unnoticed in the feminine rush that had preceded it.
“Hello!” said Ralph breathlessly, as they fought to get the table long-side on to the storm; it was only the accident of a recess that had enabled them to get it out of the dining-room at all, and at the moment it was being driven steadily toward the stairs, with Ralph and Amabel holding on to it at each end, like the two victims who were dragged prisoners to the power of Set in the Tarot paintings. Sybil caught Amabel’s end, and her extra weight brought the other round. Ralph was suddenly spun round in a quarter of a circle, and then they were all pushing towards the door. Ralph, over his shoulder, yelled at Aaron, the cook, and the hysterical maid, “Cord! Miles of cords!”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to close the door first, Ralph?” Sybil said, looking back at him.
“Be better” Ralph said, “but easier? You try it.”
Sybil looked at Amabel. “Can you hold it?” she said. “I think if we shut the wind out first …” She let go of the table, went down the hall, took hold of the door, and pushed it gradually shut. “There,” she said, “that’s what I meant. Don’t you think that’s simpler, Ralph?”
“Much,” said Ralph, a little astonished either at his aunt’s suggestion or at her expert dealing with the door, he wasn’t sure which; but he assumed there must have been a momentary lull. He and Amabel rushed the heavy table up and were just setting it with its broad top against the door as Ralph said, “Now we’ve only got to fix——” when another voice joined in. From high above them—“Fire!” called Mr. Coningsby. “Fire!”