Part 5 (2/2)

”No, not in this light. What do you mean to do with it?”

”Oh, well, when I get back to Cambridge I shall submit it to some of the archeologists there, and see what they think of it; and very likely, if they consider it worth having, I may present it to one of the museums.”

”'M!” said the colonel. ”Well, you may be right. All I know is that, if it were mine, I should chuck it straight into the sea. It's no use talking, I'm well aware, but I expect that with you it's a case of live and learn. I hope so, I'm sure, and I wish you a good night.”

He turned away, leaving Parkins in act to speak at the bottom of the stair, and soon each was in his own bedroom.

By some unfortunate accident, there were neither blinds nor curtains to the windows of the professor's room. The previous night he had thought little of this, but tonight there seemed every prospect of a bright moon rising to s.h.i.+ne directly on his bed, and probably wake him later on. When he noticed this he was a good deal annoyed, but, with an ingenuity which I can only envy, he succeeded in rigging up, with the help of a railway rug, some safety pins, and a stick and umbrella, a screen which, if it only held together, would completely keep the moonlight off his bed. And shortly afterward he was comfortable in that bed. When he had read a somewhat solid work long enough to produce a decided wish for sleep, he cast a drowsy glance round the room, blew out the candle, and fell back upon the pillow.

He must have slept soundly for an hour or more, when a sudden clatter shook him up in a most unwelcome manner. In a moment he realized what had happened. His carefully constructed screen had given way, and a very bright frosty moon was s.h.i.+ning directly on his face. This was highly annoying. Could he possibly get up and reconstruct the screen? Or could he manage to sleep if he did not?

For some minutes he lay and pondered over the possibilities; then he turned over sharply, and with all his eyes open lay breathlessly listening. There had been a movement, he was sure, in the empty bed on the opposite side of the room. Tomorrow he would have it moved, for there must be rats or something playing about in it. It was quiet now. No! the commotion began again. There was a rustling and shaking; surely more than any rat could cause.

I can figure to myself something of the professor's bewilderment and horror, for I have in a dream 30 years back seen the same thing happen; but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed. He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash toward the window, where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped his screen. This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne - he didn't know why - to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its m.u.f.fled arms in a groping and random fas.h.i.+on. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted toward it, and bent over and felt the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time what manner of thing it was.

Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen. What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.

But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins's face. He could not - though he knew how perilous a sound was - he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leaped toward him upon the instant, and the next moment he was halfway through the window backward, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed. The colonel burst the door open and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bedclothes.

Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed; and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed for the rest of the night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he would have been a day before, and the three of them held a very long consultation in the professor's room. At the end of it the colonel left the hotel door carrying a small object between his finger and thumb, which he cast as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it. Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from the back premises of the Globe.

Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and visitors at the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The professor was somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of the reputation of a troubled house.

There is not much question as to what would have happened to Parkins if the colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have fallen out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done than frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it save the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body. The colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the professor's views on certain points are less clear-cut then they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered. He cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

AMBROSE BIERCE.

ONE SUMMER NIGHT.

The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit. His posture - flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation - the strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to controvert and he accepted it without cavil.

But dead - no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the invalid's apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was he - just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with a pathological indifference; the organ that he feared consequences with was torpid. So, with no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep, and all was peace with Henry Armstrong.

But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night, shot through with infrequent s.h.i.+mmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying low in the west and portending a storm. These brief, stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the monuments and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.

Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away; the third was a gigantic Negro known as Jess. For many years Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it was his favorite pleasantry that he ”knew every soul in the place.” From the nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the place was not so populous as its register may have shown it to be.

Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.

The work of excavation was not difficult; the earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little resistance and was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in black trousers and white s.h.i.+rt.

At that instant the air sprang to flame, a cracking shot of thunder shook the stunned world, and Henry Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was of another breed.

In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and haggard from anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously in their blood, met at the medical college.

”You saw it?” cried one.

”G.o.d! yes - what are we to do?”

They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse, attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the dissecting-room. Mechanically they entered the room. On a bench in the obscurity sat the Negro Jess. He rose, grinning, all eyes and teeth.

”I'm waiting for my pay,” he said.

Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from the blow of a spade.

ELIZABETH BOWEN.

TELLING.

Terry looked up; Josephine lay still. He felt shy, embarra.s.sed all at once at the idea of anyone coming here. His brain was ticking like a watch; he looked up warily.

But there was n.o.body. Outside the high, cold walls, beyond the ragged arch of the chapel, delphiniums crowded in suns.h.i.+ne - straining with brightness, burning each other up - bars of color that, while one watched them, seemed to turn round slowly. But there was n.o.body there.

The chapel was a ruin, roofed by daylight, floored with lawn. In a corner the gardener had tipped out a heap of cut gra.s.s from the lawnmower. The daisy-heads wilted, the cut gra.s.s smelled stuffy and sweet. Everywhere cigarette ends, scattered last night by the couples who'd come here to kiss. First the dance, thought Terry, then this. The servants will never get straight. The cigarette ends would lie here for days, till after the rain, and go brown and rotten.

Then he noticed a charred cigarette stump in Josephine's hair. The short wavy ends of her hair fell back - still in lines of perfection - from temples and ears; by her left ear the charred stump showed through. For that, he thought, she would never forgive him; fastidiousness was her sensibility, always tormented. (”If you must know,” she had said, ”well, you've got dirty nails, haven't you? Look.”) He bent down and picked the cigarette end out of her hair; the fine ends fluttered under his breath. As he threw it away, he noticed his nails were still dirty. His hands were stained now - naturally - but his nails must have been dirty before. Had she noticed again?

But had she, perhaps, for a moment been proud of him? Had she had just a glimpse of the something he'd told her about? He wanted to ask her, ”What do you feel now? Do you believe in me?” He felt sure of himself, certain, justified. For n.o.body else would have done this to Josephine.

Himself they had all - always - deprecated. He felt a shrug in this att.i.tude, a thinly disguised kind of hopelessness. ”Oh, Terry -” they'd say, and break off. He was no good; he couldn't even put up a tennis net. He never could see properly (whisky helped that at first, then it didn't), his hands wouldn't serve him, things he wanted them to hold slipped away from them. He was no good; the younger ones laughed at him till they, like their brothers and sisters, grew up and were schooled into bitter kindliness. Again and again he'd been sent back to them all (and repet.i.tion never blunted the bleak edge of these homecomings) from school, from Cambridge, now - a month ago - from Ceylon. ”The bad penny!” he would remark, very jocular. ”If I could just think things out,” he had tried to explain to his father, ”I know I could do something.” And once he had said to Josephine, ”I know there is Something I could do.”

”And they will know now,” he said, looking round (for the strange new pleasure of clearly and sharply seeing) from Josephine's face to her stained breast (her heavy blue beads slipped sideways over her shoulder and soiled on the gra.s.s - touched, surrounded now by the unhesitant trickle); from her breast up the walls to their top, the top crumbling, the tufts of valerian trembling against the sky. It was as though the dark-paned window through which he had so long looked out had swung open suddenly. He saw (clear as the walls and the sky) Right and Wrong, the old childish fixities. I have done right, he thought (but his brain was still ticking). She ought not to live with this flaw in her. Josephine ought not to live, had to die.

All night he had thought this out, walking alone in the shrubberies, helped by the dance music, dodging the others. His mind had been kindled, like a dull coal suddenly blazing. He was not angry; he kept saying, ”I must not be angry, I must be just.” He was in a blaze (it seemed to himself) of justice. The couples who came face to face with him down the paths started away. Someone spoke of a minor prophet, someone breathed, ”Caliban.” - He kept saying, ”That flaw right through her. She damages truth. She kills souls; she's killed mine.” So he had come to see, before morning, his purpose as G.o.d's purpose.

She had laughed, you see. She had been pretending. There was a tender and lovely thing he kept hidden, a spark in him; she had touched it and made it the whole of him, made him a man. She had said, ”Yes, I believe, Terry. I understand.” That had been everything. He had thrown off the old dull armor - Then she had laughed.

Then he had understood what other men meant when they spoke of her. He had seen at once what he was meant to do. ”This is for me,” he said. ”No one but I can do it.”

All night he walked alone in the garden. Then he watched the French windows, and when they were open again stepped in quickly and took down the African knife from the dining-room wall. He had always wanted that African knife. Then he had gone upstairs (remembering, on the way, all those meetings with Josephine, shaving, tying of ties), shaved, changed into flannels, put the knife into his blazer pocket (it was too long, more than an inch of the blade came out through the inside lining) and sat on his window sill, watching sunlight brighten and broaden from a yellow agitation behind the trees into swathes of color across the lawn. He did not think; his mind was like somebody singing, somebody able to sing.

And, later, it had all been arranged for him. He fell into, had his part in, some kind of design. Josephine had come down in her pleated white dress (when she turned the pleats whirled). He had said, ”Come out!” and she gave that light, distant look, still with a laugh at the back of it, and said, ”Oh - right-o, little Terry.” And she had walked down the garden ahead of him, past the delphiniums into the chapel. Here, to make justice perfect, he had asked once more, ”Do you believe in me?” She had laughed again.

She lay now with her feet and body in suns.h.i.+ne (the sun was just high enough), her arms flung out wide at him - desperately, generously - her head rolling sideways in shadow on the enclosed, silky gra.s.s. On her face was a dazzled look (eyes half closed, lips drawn back), and expression almost of diffidence. Her blood quietly soaked through the gra.s.s, sinking through to the roots of it.

He crouched a moment and, touching her eyelids - still warm - tried to shut her eyes. But he didn't know how. Then he got up and wiped the blade of the African knife with a handful of gra.s.s, then scattered the handful away. All the time he was listening; he felt shy, embarra.s.sed at the thought of anyone finding him here. And his brain, like a watch, was still ticking.

On his way to the house he stooped down and dipped his hands in the garden tank. Someone might scream; he felt embarra.s.sed at the thought of somebody screaming. The red curled away through the water and melted.

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