Chapter IX
It seems I became a mere spectator after that; my sister’s lead was so assured for one thing, and, for another, the responsibility of leaving Mabel alone–Frances laid it bodily upon my shoulders–was a little more than I cared about. Moreover, when we all three met later in the day, things went on so exactly as before, so absolutely without friction or distress, that to present a sudden, obvious excuse for cutting our visit short seemed ill-judged. And on the lowest grounds it would have been desertion. At any rate, it was beyond my powers, and Frances was quite firm that she must stay. We therefore did stay. Things that happen in the night always seem exaggerated and distorted when the sun shines brightly next morning; no one can reconstruct the terror of a nightmare afterwards, nor comprehend why it seemed so overwhelming at the time.
I slept till ten o’clock, and when I rang for breakfast, a note from my sister lay upon the tray, its message of counsel couched in a calm and comforting strain. Mabel, she assured me, was herself again and remembered nothing of what had happened; there was no need of any violent measures; I was to treat her exactly as if I knew nothing. “And, if you don’t mind, Bill, let us leave the matter unmentioned between ourselves as well. Discussion exaggerates; such things are best not talked about. I’m sorry I disturbed you so unnecessarily; I was stupidly excited. Please forget all the things I said at the moment.” She had written “nonsense” first instead of “things,” then scratched it out. She wished to convey that hysteria had been abroad in the night, and I readily gulped the explanation down, though it could not satisfy me in the smallest degree.
There was another week of our visit still, and we stayed it out to the end without disaster. My desire to leave at times became that frantic thing, desire to escape; but I controlled it, kept silent, watched and wondered. Nothing happened. As before, and everywhere, there was no sequence of development, no connection between cause and effect; and climax, none whatever. The thing swayed up and down, backwards and forwards like a great loose curtain in the wind, and I could only vaguely surmise what caused the draught or why there was a curtain at all. A novelist might mold the queer material into coherent sequence that would be interesting but could not be true.
It remains, therefore, not a story but a history. Nothing happened.
Perhaps my intense dislike of the fall of darkness was due wholly to my stirred imagination, and perhaps my anger when I learned that Frances now occupied a bed in our hostess’s room was unreasonable. Nerves were unquestionably on edge. I was forever on the lookout for some event that should make escape imperative, but yet that never presented itself. I slept lightly, left my door ajar to catch the slightest sound, even made stealthy tours of the house below-stairs while everybody dreamed in their beds. But I discovered nothing; the doors were always locked; I neither saw the housekeeper again in unreasonable times and places, nor heard a footstep in the passages and halls. The Noise was never once repeated. That horrible, ultimate thunder, my intensest dread of all, lay withdrawn into the abyss whence it had twice arisen. And though in my thoughts it was sternly denied existence, the great black reason for the fact afflicted me unbelievably. Since Mabel’s fruitless effort to escape, the Doors kept closed remorselessly. She had failed; they gave up hope. For this was the explanation that haunted the region of my mind where feelings stir and hint before they clothe themselves in actual language. Only I firmly kept it there; it never knew expression.
But, if my ears were open, my eyes were opened too, and it were idle to pretend that I did not notice a hundred details that were capable of sinister interpretation had I been weak enough to yield. Some protective barrier had fallen into ruins round me, so that Terror stalked behind the general collapse, feeling for me through all the gaping fissures. Much of this, I admit, must have been merely the elaboration of those sensations I had first vaguely felt, before subsequent events and my talks with Frances had dramatized them into living thoughts. I therefore leave them unmentioned in this history, just as my mind left them unmentioned in that interminable final week. Our life went on precisely as before–Mabel unreal and outwardly so still; Frances, secretive, anxious, tactful to the point of slyness, and keen to save to the point of self-forgetfulness.
There were the same stupid meals, the same wearisome long evenings, the stifling ugliness of house and grounds, the Shadow settling in so thickly that it seemed almost a visible, tangible thing. I came to feel the only friendly things in all this hostile, cruel place were the robins that hopped boldly over the monstrous terraces and even up to the windows of the unsightly house itself. The robins alone knew joy; they danced, believing no evil thing was possible in all God’s radiant world. They believed in everybody; their god’s plan of life had no room in it for hell, damnation, and lakes of brimstone. I came to love the little birds. Had Samuel Franklyn known them, he might have preached a different sermon, bequeathing love in place of terror!
Most of my time I spent writing; but it was a pretence at best, and rather a dangerous one besides. For it stirred the mind to production, with the result that other things came pouring in as well. With reading it was the same. In the end I found an aggressive, deliberate resistance to be the only way of feasible defense. To walk far afield was out of the question, for it meant leaving my sister too long alone, so that my exercise was confined to nearer home. My saunters in the grounds, however, never surprised the goblin garden again. It was close at hand, but I seemed unable to get wholly into it. Too many things assailed my mind for any one to hold exclusive possession, perhaps.
Indeed, all the interpretations, all the “layers,” to use my sister’s phrase, slipped in by turns and lodged there for a time. They came day and night, and though my reason denied them entrance they held their own as by a kind of squatter’s right. They stirred moods already in me, that is, and did not introduce entirely new ones; for every mind conceals ancestral deposits that have been cultivated in turn along the whole line of its descent. Any day a chance shower may cause this one or that to blossom. Thus it came to me, at any rate. After darkness the Inquisition paced the empty corridors and set up ghastly apparatus in the dismal halls; and once, in the library, there swept over me that easy and delicious conviction that by confessing my wickedness I could resume it later, since Confession is expression, and expression brings relief and leaves one ready to accumulate again. And in such mood I felt bitter and unforgiving towards all others who thought differently. Another time it was a Pagan thing that assaulted me–so trivial yet oh, so significant at the time–when I dreamed that a herd of centaurs rolled up with a great stamping of hoofs round the house to destroy it, and then woke to hear the horses tramping across the field below the lawns; they neighed ominously and their noisy panting was audible as if it were just outside my windows.
But the tree episode, I think, was the most curious of all–except, perhaps, the incident with the children which I shall mention in a moment–for its closeness to reality was so unforgettable.
Outside the east window of my room stood a giant wellingtonia on the lawn, its head rising level with the upper sash. It grew some twenty feet away, planted on the highest terrace, and I often saw it when closing my curtains for the night, noticing how it drew its heavy skirts about it, and how the light from other windows threw glimmering streaks and patches that turned it into the semblance of a towering, solemn image. It stood there then so strikingly, somehow like a great old-world idol, that it claimed attention. Its appearance was curiously formidable. Its branches rustled without visibly moving and it had a certain portentous, forbidding air, so grand and dark and monstrous in the night that I was always glad when my curtains shut it out. Yet, once in bed, I had never thought about it one way or the other, and by day had certainly never sought it out.
One night, then, as I went to bed and closed this window against a cutting easterly wind, I saw–that there were two of these trees. A brother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equally towering, equally monstrous. The menacing pair of them faced me there upon the lawn. But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion that frightened me before I could argue it away. Exact counterpart of its giant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all my sister’s paintings held. I got the odd impression that the rest of these trees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, were similar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldly closer to my windows. At the same moment a blind was drawn down over an upper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness.
It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the field of vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it from view, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it had slipped into its companion–almost that it had been an emanation of the one I so disliked, and not really a tree at all! In this way the garden turned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all …!
The behavior of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcely worth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of their own accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and to tell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving. Indeed, only after frequent repetitions did the detail force itself upon me, when, having noticed one, I noticed all. It produced, however, the unpleasant impression of a continual coming and going in the house, as though, screened cleverly and purposely from actual sight, some one in the building held constant invisible intercourse with–others.
Upon detailed descriptions of these uncertain incidents I do not venture, individually so trivial, but taken all together so impressive and so insolent. But the episode of the children, mentioned above, was different. And I give it because it showed how vividly the intuitive child-mind received the impression–one impression, at any rate–of what was in the air. It may be told in a very few words. I believe they were the coachman’s children, and that the man had been in Mr. Franklyn’s service; but of neither point am I quite positive.
I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls– it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour–and on hurrying up I found a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat, and two other children–boys, one about twelve and one much younger– gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose trees. The girl was white and frightened, but the others were laughing and talking among themselves so busily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival. Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become too serious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in the girl’s eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed. I unfastened her at once; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had not hurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale. She collapsed a moment upon the bench, then picked up her tiny skirts and dived away at full speed into the safety of the stable-yard.
There was no response to my brief comforting, but she ran as though for her life, and I divined that some horrid boys’ cruelty had been afoot. It was probably mere thoughtlessness, as cruelty with children usually is, but something in me decided to discover exactly what it was.
And the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughed shyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told me frankly what their “gime” had been. There was no vestige of shame in them, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality.
That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there. To them, though make-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right and natural and in no sense cruel. Grown-ups did it too. It was necessary for her good.
“We was going to burn her up, sir,” the older one informed me, answering my “Why?” with the explanation, “Because she wouldn’t believe what we wanted ‘er to believe.”
And, game though it was, the feeling of reality about the little episode was so arresting, so terrific in some way, that only with difficulty did I confine my admonitions on this occasion to mere words. The boys slunk off, frightened in their turn, yet not, I felt, convinced that they had erred in principle. It was their inheritance. They had breathed it in with the atmosphere of their bringing-up. They would renew the salutary torture when they could–till she “believed” as they did.
I went back into the house, afflicted with a passion of mingled pity and distress impossible to describe, yet on my short way across the garden was attacked by other moods in turn, each more real and bitter than its predecessor. I received the whole series, as it were, at once. I felt like a diver rising to the surface through layers of water at different temperatures, though here the natural order was reversed, and the cooler strata were uppermost, the heated ones below. Thus, I was caught by the goblin touch of the willows that fringed the field; by the sensuous curving of the twisted ash that formed a gateway to the little grove of sapling oaks where fauns and satyrs lurked to play in the moonlight before Pagan altars; and by the cloaking darkness, next, of the copse of stunted pines, close gathered each to each, where hooded figures stalked behind an awful cross. The episode with the children seemed to have opened me like a knife. The whole Place rushed at me.
I suspect this synthesis of many moods produced in me that climax of loathing and disgust which made me feel the limit of bearable emotion had been reached, so that I made straight to find Frances in order to convince her that at any rate I must leave. For, although this was our last day in the house, and we had arranged to go next day, the dread was in me that she would still find some persuasive reason for staying on. And an unexpected incident then made my dread unnecessary. The front door was open and a cab stood in the drive; a tall, elderly man was gravely talking in the hall with the parlor maid we called the Grenadier. He held a piece of paper in his hand. “I have called to see the house,” I heard him say, as I ran up the stairs to Frances, who was peering like an inquisitive child over the banisters….
“Yes,” she told me with a sigh, I know not whether of resignation or relief, “the house is to be let or sold. Mabel has decided. Some Society or other, I believe–“
I was overjoyed: this made our leaving right and possible. “You never told me, Frances!”
“Mabel only heard of it a few days ago. She told me herself this morning. It is a chance, she says. Alone she cannot get it ‘straight’.
“Defeat?” I asked, watching her closely.
“She thinks she has found a way out. It’s not a family, you see, it’s a Society, a sort of Community–they go in for thought–“
“A Community!” I gasped. “You mean religious?”
She shook her head. “Not exactly,” she said smiling, “but some kind of association of men and women who want a headquarters in the country–a place where they can write and meditate–think–mature their plans and all the rest–I don’t know exactly what.”
“Utopian dreamers?” I asked, yet feeling an immense relief come over me as I heard. But I asked in ignorance, not cynically. Frances would know. She knew all this kind of thing.
“No, not that exactly,” she smiled. “Their teachings are grand and simple–old as the world too, really–the basis of every religion before men’s minds perverted them with their manufactured creeds–“
Footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of voices, interrupted our odd impromptu conversation, as the Grenadier came up, followed by the tall, grave gentleman who was being shown over the house. My sister drew me along the corridor towards her room, where she went in and closed the door behind me, yet not before I had stolen a good look at the caller– long enough, at least, for his face and general appearance to have made a definite impression on me. For something strong and peaceful emanated from his presence; he moved with such quiet dignity; the glance of his eyes was so steady and reassuring, that my mind labeled him instantly as a type of man one would turn to in an emergency and not be disappointed. I had seen him but for a passing moment, but I had seen him twice, and the way he walked down the passage, looking competently about him, conveyed the same impression as when I saw him standing at the door– fearless, tolerant, wise. “A sincere and kindly character,” I judged instantly, “a man whom some big kind of love has trained in sweetness towards the world; no hate in him anywhere.” A great deal, no doubt, to read in so brief a glance! Yet his voice confirmed my intuition, a deep and very gentle voice, great firmness in it too.
“Have I become suddenly sensitive to people’s atmospheres in this extraordinary fashion?” I asked myself, smiling, as I stood in the room and heard the door close behind me. “Have I developed some clairvoyant faculty here?” At any other time I should have mocked.
And I sat down and faced my sister, feeling strangely comforted and at peace for the first time since I had stepped beneath The Towers’ roof a month ago. Frances, I then saw, was smiling a little as she watched me.
“You know him?” I asked.
“You felt it too?” was her question in reply. “No,” she added, “I don’t know him–beyond the fact that he is a leader in the Movement and has devoted years and money to its objects. Mabel felt the same thing in him that you have felt–and jumped at it.”
“But you’ve seen him before?” I urged, for the certainty was in me that he was no stranger to her.
She shook her head. “He called one day early this week, when you were out. Mabel saw him. I believe–” she hesitated a moment, as though expecting me to stop her with my usual impatience of such subjects–“I believe he has explained everything to her–the beliefs he embodies, she declares, are her salvation–might be, rather, if she could adopt them.”
“Conversion again!” For I remembered her riches, and how gladly a Society would gobble them.
“The layers I told you about,” she continued calmly, shrugging her shoulders slightly–“the deposits that are left behind by strong thinking and real belief–but especially by ugly, hateful belief, because, you see–unfortunately there’s more vital passion in that sort–“
“Frances, I don’t understand a bit,” I said out loud, but said it a little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had somehow introduced. The horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves, doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it must sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a moment at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of patience in me, continued more fluently.
“Of course you don’t understand, Bill? Why should you? You’ve never thought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think all creeds are rubbish.”
“I’m open to conviction–I’m tolerant,” I interrupted.
“You’re as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice,” she answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.
“Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society’s beliefs?” I asked, feeling no desire to argue, “and how are they going to prove your Mabel’s salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate and ugliness?”
“Certain hope and peace,” she said, “that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them.”
“Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! His pet word is damnation–“
“Tolerates them,” she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion, “because it includes them all.”
“Fine, if true” I admitted, “very fine. But how, pray, does it include them all?”
“Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, ‘There is no religion higher than Truth,’ and it has no single dogma of any kind. Above all,” she went on, “because it claims that no individual can be ‘lost.’ It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders is uncivilized, childish, impure. Some take longer than others–it’s according to the way they think and live–but all find peace, through development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation–“
“Well, well,” I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby horse too wildly, too roughly over me, “but what is the bearing of all this upon this dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I’ll admit that there is this atmosphere–this–er–inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I’m not too prejudiced to deny that, for I’ve felt it myself.”
To my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to take it or reject it as I would.
“The thought and belief its former occupants–have left behind. For there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. The site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid–the Druid stones still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes behind the drive. The older building Sam Franklyn altered and practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it, Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable–so they all have left their–“
“Even so,” I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, “what of it?”
“Simply this,” said Frances with conviction, “that each in turn has left his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each believed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt –the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere today, the kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts, in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and all preached that implicitly if not explicitly. It’s the root of every creed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn.”
I listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this point her explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study in psychology if it were true.
“Then why does nothing ever happen?” I enquired mildly. “A place so thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!”
“There lies the proof,” she went on in a lowered voice, “the proof of the horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupant in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the moment there’s an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative state, believing nothing positive herself the place for the first time found itself free to reproduce its buried stores.
“Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest–the most permanent and vital thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the world–broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back. Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of agonized, bitter warring to find safety, peace–salvation. The place is saturated by that appalling stream of thinking–the terror of the damned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished the channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy with her, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layer could ever gain the supremacy.”
I was so interested–I dare not say amused–that I stared in silence while she paused a moment, afraid that she would draw rein and end the fairy tale too soon.
“The beliefs of this man, of his Society rather, vigorously thought and therefore vigorously given out here, will put the whole place straight. It will act as a solvent. These vitriolic layers actively denied, will fuse and disappear in the stream of gentle, tolerant sympathy which is love. For each member, worthy of the name, loves the world, and all creeds go into the melting-pot; Mabel, too, if she joins them out of real conviction, will find salvation–“
“Thinking, I know, is of the first importance,” I objected, “but don’t you, perhaps, exaggerate the power of feeling and emotion which in religion are au fond always hysterical?”
“What is the world,” she told me, “but thinking and feeling? An individual’s world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes –interpretation. There is no other. And unless he really thinks and really believes, he has no permanent world at all. I grant that few people think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-made suits and make them do. Only the strong make their own things; the lesser fry, Mabel among them, are merely swept up into what has been manufactured for them. They get along somehow. You and I have made for ourselves, Mabel has not. She is a nonentity, and when her belief is taken from her, she goes with it.”
It was not in me just then to criticize the evasion, or pick out the sophistry from the truth. I merely waited for her to continue.
“None of us have Truth, my dear Frances,” I ventured presently, seeing that she kept silent.
“Precisely,” she answered, “but most of us have beliefs. And what one believes and thinks affects the world at large. Consider the legacy of hatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into their creeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of one particular set of views or else perishing everlastingly–for only by repudiating history can they disavow it–“
“You’re not quite accurate,” I put in. “Not all the creeds teach damnation, do they? Franklyn did, of course, but the others are a bit modernized now surely?”
“Trying to get out of it,” she admitted, “perhaps they are, but damnation of unbelievers–of most of the world, that is–is their rather favorite idea if you talk with them.”
“I never have.”
She smiled. “But I have,” she said significantly, “so, if you consider what the various occupants of this house have so strongly held and thought and believed, you need not be surprised that the influence they have left behind them should be a dark and dreadful legacy. For thought, you know, does leave–“
The opening of the door, to my great relief, interrupted her, as the Grenadier led in the visitor to see the room. He bowed to both of us with a brief word of apology, looked round him, and withdrew, and with his departure the conversation between us came naturally to an end. I followed him out. Neither of us in any case, I think, cared to argue further.
And, so far as I am aware, the curious history of The Towers ends here too. There was no climax in the story sense. Nothing ever really happened. We left next morning for London. I only know that the Society in question took the house and have since occupied it to their entire satisfaction, and that Mabel, who became a member shortly afterwards, now stays there frequently when in need of repose from the arduous and unselfish labors she took upon herself under its aegis. She dined with us only the other night, here in our tiny Chelsea flat, and a jollier, saner, more interesting and happy guest I could hardly wish for. She was vital–in the best sense; the lay figure had come to life. I found it difficult to believe she was the same woman whose fearful effigy had floated down those dreary corridors and almost disappeared in the depths of that atrocious Shadow.
What her beliefs were now I was wise enough to leave unquestioned, and Frances, to my great relief, kept the conversation well away from such inappropriate topics. It was clear, however, that the woman had in herself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive, positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing in heaven or hell. She radiated something very like hope and courage about her, and talked as though the world were a glorious place and everybody in it kind and beautiful. Her optimism was certainly infectious.
The Towers were mentioned only in passing. The name of Marsh came up– not the Marsh, it so happened, but a name in some book that was being discussed–and I was unable to restrain myself. Curiosity was too strong. I threw out a casual enquiry Mabel could leave unanswered if she wished. But there was no desire to avoid it. Her reply was frank and smiling.
“Would you believe it? She married,” Mabel told me, though obviously surprised that I remembered the housekeeper at all; “and is happy as the day is long. She’s found her right niche in life. A sergeant–“
“The army!” I ejaculated.
“Salvation Army,” she explained merrily.
Frances exchanged a glance with me. I laughed too, for the information took me by surprise. I cannot say why exactly, but I expected at least to hear that the woman had met some dreadful end, not impossibly by burning.
“And The Towers, now called the Rest House,” Mabel chattered on, “seems to me the most peaceful and delightful spot in England–“
“Really,” I said politely.
“When I lived there in the old days–while you were there, perhaps, though I won’t be sure.”
Mabel went on, “the story got abroad that it was haunted. Wasn’t it odd? A less likely place for a ghost I’ve never seen. Why, it had no atmosphere at all.” She said this to Frances, glancing up at me with a smile that apparently had no hidden meaning. “Did you notice anything queer about it when you were there?”
This was plainly addressed to me.
“I found it–er–difficult to settle down to anything,” I said, after an instant’s hesitation. “I couldn’t work there–“
“But I thought you wrote that wonderful book on the Deaf and Blind while you stayed with me,” she asked innocently.
I stammered a little. “Oh no, not then. I only made a few notes–er–at The Towers. My mind, oddly enough, refused to produce at all down there. But–why do you ask? Did anything–was anything supposed to happen there?”
She looked searchingly into my eyes a moment before she answered:
“Not that I know of,” she said simply.
