Readings

He

by
H. P. Lovecraft

Written on August 11, 1925

Published in September 1926
in
Weird Tales

He

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me. The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my fancy-narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and paneled coaches – and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time a poet. But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart. So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before – the unwhisperable secret of secrets – the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat. Then, on a sleepless night’s walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all the revellers had slunk away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and brood upon the curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept my soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far within me cried out. The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by vague rumor, and realized that they could not be upon any map of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to me, so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind archways unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite publicity or the light of day. He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I studied certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was in shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight; thin almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of one long practised in these explorations, and possessed of local information profoundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could possibly have gained? As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a solitary attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome elderly countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its features pleased me – perhaps it was too white, or too expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favor of Fate to fall in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much farther than mine. Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence and for a long hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the briefest of comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes, and directing my progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed through interstices, tiptoed through corridors clambered over brick walls, and once crawled on hands and knees through a low, arched passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced at last every hint of geographical location I had managed to preserve. The things we saw were very old and marvelous, or at least they seemed so in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them, and I shall never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and urn-headed iron fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and decorative fanlights that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the deeper we advanced into this inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity. We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer and fewer. The streetlights we first encountered had been of oil, and of the ancient lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles; and at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide had to lead with his gloved hand through total blackness to a narrow wooded gate in a high wall, we came upon a fragment of alley lit only by lanterns in front of every seventh house – unbelievably Colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the sides. This alley led steeply uphill – more steeply than I thought possible in this part of New York – and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-clad wall of a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops of trees waving against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched gate of nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter blackness over what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a flight of stone steps to the door of the house, which he unlocked and opened for me. We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite mustiness which welled out to meet us, and which must have been the fruit of unwholesome centuries of decay. My host appeared not to notice this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me up a curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room whose door I heard him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three small-paned windows that barely showed themselves against the lightening sky; after which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and made a gesture enjoining soft-toned speech. In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious, well-furnished and paneled library dating from the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century, with splendid doorway pediments, a delightful Doric cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at intervals along the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man who now motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table. Before seating himself across the tahle from me, my host paused for a moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves, wide-brimmed hat, and cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to eye me intently. Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not one of the sources of my disquiet. When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled voice not infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and half-disavowed alarm which grew each instant. “You behold, Sir,” my host began, “a man of very eccentrical habits for whose costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations. Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to ascertain their ways, and adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence which offends none if practised without ostentation. It hath been my good fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up hither after 1800, then New York, which joined on near 1830. There were many reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with influences residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to show you, under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my judgement of men enough to have no distrust of either your interest or your fidelity.” He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to my soul nothing was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York, and whether this man were a harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts, I had no choice save to follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to offer. So I listened. “To – my ancestor,” he softly continued, “there appeared to reside some very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one’s self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as space and time and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These Indians showed choler when the place was built, and were plaguey pestilent in asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed sartain acts. Then, in ‘68, the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did, larning that their grandfathers got part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in the time of the States-General. Arid pox on him, I’m afeared the squire must have sarved them monstrous bad rum – whether or not by intent – for a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me if I’d have risked tampering that much with – the powers – had ye not been so hot after bygone things.” I shuddered as the man grew colloquial – and with the familiar speech of another day. He went on. “But you must know, Sir, that what – the squire – got from those mongrel savages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away. I won’t say that all this is wholly true in body, but ’tis sufficient true to furnish a very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled hy a better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I design to show. Come to the window and be quiet.” My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window, the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an insidious motion of my host’s hand, a flash of heat-lightning played over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage – foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer. “That was before my time – before the new squire’s time. Pray let us try again.” I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had made me. “Good God!” I whispered, “can you do that for any time?” And as he nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his insidious gesture. Again the lightning flashed – but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul’s and the Brick Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, hut not so much from the sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly conjured up. “Can you – dare you – go far?” I spoke with awe and I think he shared it for a second, but the evil grin returned. “Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back – forward, forward – look ye puling lackwit!” And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen. I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind’s ear the blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me. Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a look of shocking fear half-blotting from his face the serpent distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly, like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the feeble candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow curtain he clutched. “The full moon – damn ye – ye… ye yelping dog – ye called ‘em, and they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet – dead men – Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours – han’t I kept your pox-rotted magic safe – ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and yet must needs blame the squire – let go, you! Unhand that latch – I’ve naught for ye here – ” At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of the door, and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the room a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy paneling, sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too, whether from the same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive, dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and dwindled. The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time bore a hint of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal malice. Now swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly panels, and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the rending wood. I did not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in pieces to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and finally flowed under the table and across the room to where the blackened head with the eyes still glared at me. Around that head it closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another moment it had begun to recede; bearing away its invisible burden without touching me, and flowing again out that black doorway and down the unseen stairs, which creaked as before, though in reverse order. Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the nighted chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with terror. The green moon, shining through broken windows, showed me the hall door half open; and as I rose from the plaster-strewn floor and twisted myself free from the sagged ceiling, I saw sweep past it an awful torrent of blackness, with scores of baleful eyes glowing in it. It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it found it, vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been followed by the fall past the west window of some thing which must have been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I rushed through the hall to the front door and finding myself unable to open it, seized a chair and broke a window, climbing frenziedly out upon the unkempt lawn where moon light danced over yard-high grass and weeds. The wall was high and all the gates were locked but moving a pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to the great stone urn set there. About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows and old gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere visible, and the little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that rolled in from the river despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if sharing my own lethal dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging downward to I knew not what fate. The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite my broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look. The gathering rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I had appeared from a place unknown, at the entrance to a little black court off Perry Street. I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors. Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.

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Pomegranate Seed*
originally from the Saturday Evening Post (1931-apr-25)
by Edith Wharton
(1862-1937)
*Persephone, daughter of Demeter, goddess of fertility, was abducted and taken to Hades by Pluto, the god of the underworld. Her mother begged Jupiter to intercede, and he did so. But Persephone had broken her vow of abstinence in Hades by eating some pomegranate seeds. She was therefore required to spend a certain number of months each year essentially the winter months — with Pluto.
I
CHARLOTTE ASHBY paused on her doorstep. Dark had descended on the brilliancy of the March afternoon, and the grinding, rasping street life of the city was at its highest. She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old-fashioned, marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed. It was the hour when, in the first months of her marriage to Kenneth Ashby, she had most liked to return to that quiet house in a street long since deserted by business and fashion. The contrast between the soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights, the oppression of its congested traffic, congested houses, lives, minds and this veiled sanctuary she called home, always stirred her profoundly. In the very heart of the hurricane she had found her tiny islet — or thought she had. And now, in the last months, everything was changed, and she always wavered on the doorstep and had to force herself to enter.
While she stood there she called up the scene within: the hall hung with old prints, the ladder-like stairs, and on the left her husband’s long shabby library, full of books and pipes and worn armchairs inviting to meditation. How she had loved that room! Then, upstairs, her own drawing room, in which, since the death of Kenneth’s first wife, neither furniture nor hangings had been changed, because there had never been money enough, but which Charlotte had made her own by moving furniture about and adding more books, another lamp, a table for the new reviews. Even on the occasion of her only visit to the first Mrs. Ashby — a distant, self-centered woman, whom she had known very slightly — she had looked about her with an innocent envy, feeling it to be exactly the drawing room she would have liked for herself; and now for more than a year it had been hers to deal with as she chose — the room to which she hastened back at dusk on winter days, where she sat reading by the fire, or answering notes at the pleasant roomy desk, or going over her stepchildren’s copybooks, till she heard her husband’s step.
Sometimes friends dropped in; sometimes — oftener — she was alone; and she liked that best, since it was another way of being with Kenneth, thinking over what he had said when they parted in the morning, imagining what he would say when he sprang up the stairs, found her by herself and caught her to him.
Now, instead of this, she thought of one thing only — the letter she might or might not find on the hall table. Until she had made sure whether or not it was there, her mind had no room for anything else. The letter was always the same — a square grayish envelope with “Kenneth Ashby, Esquire,” written on it in bold but faint characters. From the first it had struck Charlotte as peculiar that anyone who wrote such a firm hand should trace the letters so lightly; the address was always written as though there were not enough ink in the pen, or the writer’s wrist were too weak to bear upon it. Another curious thing was that, in spite of its masculine curves, the writing was so visibly feminine. Some hands are sexless, some masculine, at first glance; the writing on the gray envelope, for all its strength and assurance, was without doubt a woman’s. The envelope never bore anything but the recipient’s name; no stamp, no address. The letter was presumably delivered by hand — but by whose? No doubt it was slipped into the letter box, whence the parlormaid, when she closed the shutters and lit the lights, probably extracted it. At any rate, it was always in the evening, after dark, that Charlotte saw it lying there. She thought of the letter in the singular, as “it,” because, though there had been several since her marriage — seven, to be exact — they were so alike in appearance that they had become merged in one another in her mind, become one letter, become “it.”
The first had come the day after their return from their honeymoon — a journey prolonged to the West Indies, from which they had returned to New York after an absence of more than two months. Re-entering the house with her husband, late on that first evening — they had dined at his mother’s — she had seen, alone on the hall table, the gray envelope. Her eye fell on it before Kenneth’s, and her first thought was: “Why, I’ve seen that writing before”; but where she could not recall. The memory was just definite enough for her to identify the script whenever it looked up at her faintly from the same pale envelope; but on that first day she would have thought no more of the letter if, when her husband’s glance lit on it, she had not chanced to be looking at him. It all happened in a flash — his seeing the letter, putting out his hand for it, raising it to his shortsighted eyes to decipher the faint writing, and then abruptly withdrawing the arm he had slipped through Charlotte’s, and moving away to the hanging light, his back turned to her. She had waited — waited for a sound, an exclamation; waited for him to open the letter; but he had slipped it into his pocket without a word and followed her into the library. And there they had sat down by the fire and lit their cigarettes, and he had remained silent, his head thrown back broodingly against the armchair, his eyes fixed on the hearth, and presently had passed his hand over his forehead and said: “Wasn’t it unusually hot at my mother’s tonight? I’ve got a splitting head. Mind if I take myself off to bed?”
That was the first time. Since then Charlotte had never been present when he had received the letter. It usually came before he got home from his office, and she had to go upstairs and leave it lying there. But even if she had not seen it, she would have known it had come by the change in his face when he joined her — which, on those evenings, he seldom did before they met for dinner. Evidently, whatever the letter contained, he wanted to be by himself to deal with it; and when he reappeared he looked years older, looked emptied of life and courage, and hardly conscious of her presence. Sometimes he was silent for the rest of the evening; and if he spoke, it was usually to hint some criticism of her household arrangements, suggest some change in the domestic administration, to ask, a little nervously, if she didn’t think Joyce’s nursery governess was rather young and flighty, or if she herself always saw to it that Peter — whose throat was delicate — was properly wrapped up when he went to school. At such times Charlotte would remember the friendly warnings she had received when she became engaged to Kenneth Ashby: “Marrying a heartbroken widower! Isn’t that rather risky? You know Elsie Ashby absolutely dominated him”; and how she had jokingly replied: “He may be glad of a little liberty for a change.” And in this respect she had been right. She had needed no one to tell her, during the first months, that her husband was perfectly happy with her. When they came back from their protracted honeymoon the same friends said: “What have you done to Kenneth? He looks twenty years younger”; and this time she answered with careless joy: “I suppose I’ve got him out of his groove.”
But what she noticed after the gray letters began to come was not so much his nervous tentative faultfinding — which always seemed to be uttered against his will — as the look in his eyes when he joined her after receiving one of the letters. The look was not unloving, not even indifferent; it was the look of a man who had been so far away from ordinary events that when he returns to familiar things they seem strange. She minded that more than the faultfinding.
Though she had been sure from the first that the handwriting on the gray envelope was a woman’s, it was long before she associated the mysterious letters with any sentimental secret. She was too sure of her husband’s love, too confident of filling his life, for such an idea to occur to her. It seemed far more likely that the letters — which certainly did not appear to cause him any sentimental pleasure — were addressed to the busy lawyer than to the private person. Probably they were from some tiresome client — women, he had often told her, were nearly always tiresome as clients — who did not want her letters opened by his secretary and therefore had them carried to his house. Yes; but in that case the unknown female must be unusually troublesome, judging from the effect her letters produced. Then again, though his professional discretion was exemplary, it was odd that he had never uttered an impatient comment, never remarked to Charlotte, in a moment of expansion, that there was a nuisance of a woman who kept badgering him about a case that had gone against her. He had made more than one semiconfidence of the kind — of course without giving names or details; but concerning this mysterious correspondent his lips were sealed.
There was another possibility: what is euphemistically called an “old entanglement.” Charlotte Ashby was a sophisticated woman. She had few illusions about the intricacies of the human heart; she knew that there were often old entanglements. But when she had married Kenneth Ashby, her friends, instead of hinting at such a possibility, had said: “You’ve got your work cut out for you. Marrying a Don Juan is a sinecure to it. Kenneth’s never looked at another woman since he first saw Elsie Corder. During all the years of their marriage he was more like an unhappy lover than a comfortably contented husband. He’ll never let you move an armchair or change the place of a lamp; and whatever you venture to do, he’ll mentally compare with what Elsie would have done in your place.”
Except for an occasional nervous mistrust as to her ability to manage the children — a mistrust gradually dispelled by her good humor and the children’s obvious fondness for her — none of these forebodings had come true. The desolate widower, of whom his nearest friends said that only his absorbing professional interests had kept him from suicide after his first wife’s death, had fallen in love, two years later, with Charlotte Gorse, and after an impetuous wooing had married her and carried her off on a tropical honeymoon. And ever since he had been as tender and lover-like as during those first radiant weeks. Before asking her to marry him he had spoken to her frankly of his great love for his first wife and his despair after her sudden death; but even then he had assumed no stricken attitude, or implied that life offered no possibility of renewal. He had been perfectly simple and natural, and had confessed to Charlotte that from the beginning he had hoped the future held new gifts for him. And when, after their marriage, they returned to the house where his twelve years with his first wife had been spent, he had told Charlotte at once that he was sorry he couldn’t afford to do the place over for her, but that he knew every woman had her own views about furniture and all sorts of household arrangements a man would never notice, and had begged her to make any changes she saw fit without bothering to consult him. As a result, she made as few as possible; but his way of beginning their new life in the old setting was so frank and unembarrassed that it put her immediately at her ease, and she was almost sorry to find that the portrait of Elsie Ashby, which used to hang over the desk in his library, had been transferred in their absence to the children’s nursery. Knowing herself to be the indirect cause of this banishment, she spoke of it to her husband; but he answered: “Oh, I thought they ought to grow up with her looking down on them.” The answer moved Charlotte, and satisfied her; and as time went by she had to confess that she felt more at home in her house, more at ease and in confidence with her husband, since that long coldly beautiful face on the library wall no longer followed her with guarded eyes. It was as if Kenneth’s love had penetrated to the secret she hardly acknowledged to her own heart — her passionate need to feel herself the sovereign even of his past.
With all this stored-up happiness to sustain her, it was curious that she had lately found herself yielding to a nervous apprehension. But there the apprehension was; and on this particular afternoon — perhaps because she was more tired than usual, or because of the trouble of finding a new cook or, for some other ridiculously trivial reason, moral or physical — she found herself unable to react against the feeling. Latchkey in hand, she looked back down the silent street to the whirl and illumination of the great thoroughfare beyond, and up at the sky already aflare with the city’s nocturnal life. “Outside there,” she thought, “skyscrapers, advertisements, telephones, wireless, airplanes, movies, motors, and all the rest of the twentieth century; and on the other side of the door something I can’t explain, can’t relate to them. Something as old as the world, as mysterious as life . . . . Nonsense! What am I worrying about? There hasn’t been a letter for three months now — not since the day we came back from the country after Christmas . . . . Queer that they always seem to come after our holidays! . . . Why should I imagine there’s going to be one tonight!”
No reason why, but that was the worst of it — one of the worst! — that there were days when she would stand there cold and shivering with the premonition of something inexplicable, intolerable, to be faced on the other side of the curtained panes; and when she opened the door and went in, there would be nothing; and on other days when she felt the same premonitory chill, it was justified by the sight of the gray envelope. So that ever since the last had come she had taken to feeling cold and premonitory every evening, because she never opened the door without thinking the letter might be there.
Well, she’d had enough of it: that was certain. She couldn’t go on like that. If her husband turned white and had a headache on the days when the letter came, he seemed to recover afterward; but she couldn’t. With her the strain had become chronic, and the reason was not far to seek. Her husband knew from whom the letter came and what was in it; he was prepared beforehand for whatever he had to deal with, and master of the situation, however bad; whereas she was shut out in the dark with her conjectures.
“I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it another day!” she exclaimed aloud, as she put her key in the lock. She turned the key and went in; and there, on the table, lay the letter.
II
She was almost glad of the sight. It seemed to justify everything, to put a seal of definiteness on the whole blurred business. A letter for her husband; a letter from a woman — no doubt another vulgar case of “old entanglement.” What a fool she had been ever to doubt it, to rack her brains for less obvious explanations! She took up the envelope with a steady contemptuous hand, looked closely at the faint letters, held it against the light and just discerned the outline of the folded sheet within. She knew that now she would have no peace till she found out what was written on that sheet.
Her husband had not come in; he seldom got back from his office before half-past six or seven, and it was not yet six. She would have time to take the letter up to the drawing room, hold it over the tea kettle which at that hour always simmered by the fire in expectation of her return, solve the mystery and replace the letter where she had found it. No one would be the wiser, and her gnawing uncertainty would be over. The alternative, of course, was to question her husband; but to do that seemed even more difficult. She weighed the letter between thumb and finger, looked at it again under the light, started up the stairs with the envelope — and came down again and laid it on the table.
“No, I evidently can’t,” she said, disappointed.
What should she do, then? She couldn’t go up alone to that warm welcoming room, pour out her tea, look over her correspondence, glance at a book or review — not with that letter lying below and the knowledge that in a little while her husband would come in, open it and turn into the library alone, as he always did on the days when the gray envelope came.
Suddenly she decided. She would wait in the library and see for herself; see what happened between him and the letter when they thought themselves unobserved. She wondered the idea had never occurred to her before. By leaving the door ajar, and sitting in the corner behind it, she could watch him unseen . . . . Well, then, she would watch him! She drew a chair into the corner, sat down, her eyes on the crack, and waited.
As far as she could remember, it was the first time she had ever tried to surprise another person’s secret, but she was conscious of no compunction. She simply felt as if she were fighting her way through a stifling fog that she must at all costs get out of.
At length she heard Kenneth’s latchkey and jumped up. The impulse to rush out and meet him had nearly made her forget why she was there; but she remembered in time and sat down again. From her post she covered the whole range of his movements — saw him enter the hall, draw the key from the door and take off his hat and overcoat. Then he turned to throw his gloves on the hall table, and at that moment he saw the envelope. The light was full on his face, and what Charlotte first noted there was a look of surprise. Evidently he had not expected the letter — had not thought of the possibility of its being there that day. But though he had not expected it, now that he saw it he knew well enough what it contained. He did not open it immediately, but stood motionless, the color slowly ebbing from his face. Apparently he could not make up his mind to touch it; but at length he put out his hand, opened the envelope, and moved with it to the light. In doing so he turned his back on Charlotte, and she saw only his bent head and slightly stooping shoulders. Apparently all the writing was on one page, for he did not turn the sheet but continued to stare at it for so long that he must have reread it a dozen times — or so it seemed to the woman breathlessly watching him. At length she saw him move; he raised the letter still closer to his eyes, as though he had not fully deciphered it. Then he lowered his head, and she saw his lips touch the sheet.
“Kenneth!” she exclaimed, and went on out into the hall.
The letter clutched in his hand, her husband turned and looked at her. “Where were you?” he said, in a low bewildered voice, like a man waked out of his sleep.
“In the library, waiting for you.” She tried to steady her voice: “What’s the matter! What’s in that letter? You look ghastly.”
Her agitation seemed to calm him, and he instantly put the envelope into his pocket with a slight laugh. “Ghastly? I’m sorry. I’ve had a hard day in the office — one or two complicated cases. I look dog-tired, I suppose.”
“You didn’t look tired when you came in. It was only when you opened that letter ——”
He had followed her into the library, and they stood gazing at each other. Charlotte noticed how quickly he had regained his self-control; his profession had trained him to rapid mastery of face and voice. She saw at once that she would be at a disadvantage in any attempt to surprise his secret, but at the same moment she lost all desire to maneuver, to trick him into betraying anything he wanted to conceal. Her wish was still to penetrate the mystery, but only that she might help him to bear the burden it implied. “Even if it is another woman,” she thought.
“Kenneth,” she said, her heart beating excitedly, “I waited here on purpose to see you come in. I wanted to watch you while you opened that letter.”
His face, which had paled, turned to dark red; then it paled again. “That letter? Why especially that letter?”
“Because I’ve noticed that whenever one of those letters comes it seems to have such a strange effect on you.”
A line of anger she had never seen before came out between his eyes, and she said to herself: “The upper part of his face is too narrow; this is the first time I ever noticed it.”
She heard him continue, in the cool and faintly ironic tone of the prosecuting lawyer making a point: “Ah, so you’re in the habit of watching people open their letters when they don’t know you’re there?”
“Not in the habit. I never did such a thing before. But I had to find out what she writes to you, at regular intervals, in those gray envelopes.”
He weighed this for a moment; then: “The intervals have not been regular,” he said.
“Oh, I dare say you’ve kept a better account of the dates than I have,” she retorted, her magnanimity vanishing at his tone. “All I know is that every time that woman writes to you ——”
“Why do you assume it’s a woman?”
“It’s a woman’s writing. Do you deny it?”
He smiled. “No, I don’t deny it. I asked only because the writing is generally supposed to look more like a man’s.”
Charlotte passed this over impatiently. “And this woman — what does she write to you about?”
Again he seemed to consider a moment. “About business.”
“Legal business?”
“In a way, yes. Business in general.”
“You look after her affairs for her?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve looked after them for a long time?”
“Yes. A very long time.”
“Kenneth, dearest, won’t you tell me who she is?”
“No. I can’t.” He paused, and brought out, as if with a certain hesitation: “Professional secrecy.”
The blood rushed from Charlotte’s heart to her temples. “Don’t say that — don’t!”
“Why not?”
“Because I saw you kiss the letter.”
The effect of the words was so disconcerting that she instantly repented having spoken them. Her husband, who had submitted to her cross-questioning with a sort of contemptuous composure, as though he were humoring an unreasonable child, turned on her a face of terror and distress. For a minute he seemed unable to speak; then, collecting himself, with an effort, he stammered out: “The writing is very faint; you must have seen me holding the letter close to my eyes to try to decipher it.”
“No; I saw you kissing it.” He was silent. “Didn’t I see you kissing it?”
He sank back into indifference. “Perhaps.”
“Kenneth! You stand there and say that — to me?”
“What possible difference can it make to you? The letter is on business, as I told you. Do you suppose I’d lie about it? The writer is a very old friend whom I haven’t seen for a long time.”
“Men don’t kiss business letters, even from women who are very old friends, unless they have been their lovers, and still regret them.”
He shrugged his shoulders slightly and turned away, as if he considered the discussion at an end and were faintly disgusted at the turn it had taken.
“Kenneth!” Charlotte moved toward him and caught hold of his arm.
He paused with a look of weariness and laid his hand over hers. “Won’t you believe me?” he asked gently.
“How can I? I’ve watched these letters come to you — for months now they’ve been coming. Ever since we came back from the West Indies — one of them greeted me the very day we arrived. And after each one of them I see their mysterious effect on you, I see you disturbed, unhappy, as if someone were trying to estrange you from me.”
“No, dear; not that. Never!”
She drew back and looked at him with passionate entreaty. “Well, then, prove it to me, darling. It’s so easy!”
He forced a smile. “It’s not easy to prove anything to a woman who’s once taken an idea into her head.”
“You’ve only got to show me the letter.”
His hand slipped from hers and he drew back and shook his head.
“You won’t?”
“I can’t.”
“Then the woman who wrote it is your mistress.”
“No, dear. No.”
“Not now, perhaps. I suppose she’s trying to get you back, and you’re struggling, out of pity for me. My poor Kenneth!”
“I swear to you she never was my mistress.”
Charlotte felt the tears rushing to her eyes. “Ah, that’s worse, then — that’s hopeless! The prudent ones are the kind that keep their hold on a man. We all know that.” She lifted her hands and hid her face in them.
Her husband remained silent; he offered neither consolation nor denial, and at length, wiping away her tears, she raised her eyes almost timidly to his.
“Kenneth, think! We’ve been married such a short time. Imagine what you’re making me suffer. You say you can’t show me this letter. You refuse even to explain it.”
“I’ve told you the letter is on business. I will swear to that too.”
“A man will swear to anything to screen a woman. If you want me to believe you, at least tell me her name. If you’ll do that, I promise you I won’t ask to see the letter.”
There was a long interval of suspense, during which she felt her heart beating against her ribs in quick admonitory knocks, as if warning her of the danger she was incurring.
“I can’t,” he said at length.
“Not even her name?”
“No.”
“You can’t tell me anything more?”
“No.”
Again a pause; this time they seemed both to have reached the end of their arguments and to be helplessly facing each other across a baffling waste of incomprehension.
Charlotte stood breathing rapidly, her hands against her breast. She felt as if she had run a hard race and missed the goal. She had meant to move her husband and had succeeded only in irritating him; and this error of reckoning seemed to change him into a stranger, a mysterious incomprehensible being whom no argument or entreaty of hers could reach. The curious thing was that she was aware in him of no hostility or even impatience, but only of a remoteness, an inaccessibility, far more difficult to overcome. She felt herself excluded, ignored, blotted out of his life. But after a moment or two, looking at him more calmly, she saw that he was suffering as much as she was. His distant guarded face was drawn with pain; the coming of the gray envelope, though it always cast a shadow, had never marked him as deeply as this discussion with his wife.
Charlotte took heart; perhaps, after all, she had not spent her last shaft. She drew nearer and once more laid her hand on his arm. “Poor Kenneth! If you knew how sorry I am for you ——”
She thought he winced slightly at this expression of sympathy, but he took her hand and pressed it.
“I can think of nothing worse than to be incapable of loving long,” she continued, “to feel the beauty of a great love and to be too unstable to bear its burden.”
He turned on her a look of wistful reproach. “Oh, don’t say that of me. Unstable!”
She felt herself at last on the right tack, and her voice trembled with excitement as she went on: “Then what about me and this other woman? Haven’t you already forgotten Elsie twice within a year?”
She seldom pronounced his first wife’s name; it did not come naturally to her tongue. She flung it out now as if she were flinging some dangerous explosive into the open space between them, and drew back a step, waiting to hear the mine go off.
Her husband did not move; his expression grew sadder, but showed no resentment. “I have never forgotten Elsie,” he said.
Charlotte could not repress a faint laugh. “Then, you poor dear, between the three of us ——”
“There are not ——” he began; and then broke off and put his hand to his forehead.
“Not what?”
“I’m sorry; I don’t believe I know what I’m saying. I’ve got a blinding headache.” He looked wan and furrowed enough for the statement to be true, but she was exasperated by his evasion.
“Ah, yes; the gray envelope headache!”
She saw the surprise in his eyes. “I’d forgotten how closely I’ve been watched,” he said coldly. “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go up and try an hour in the dark, to see if I can get rid of this neuralgia.”
She wavered; then she said, with desperate resolution: “I’m sorry your head aches. But before you go I want to say that sooner or later this question must be settled between us. Someone is trying to separate us, and I don’t care what it costs me to find out who it is.” She looked him steadily in the eyes. “If it costs me your love, I don’t care! If I can’t have your confidence I don’t want anything from you.”
He still looked at her wistfully. “Give me time.”
“Time for what? It’s only a word to say.”
“Time to show you that you haven’t lost my love or my confidence.”
“Well, I’m waiting.”
He turned toward the door, and then glanced back hesitatingly. “Oh, do wait, my love,” he said, and went out of the room.
She heard his tired step on the stairs and the closing of his bedroom door above. Then she dropped into a chair and buried her face in her folded arms. Her first movement was one of compunction; she seemed to herself to have been hard, unhuman, unimaginative. “Think of telling him that I didn’t care if my insistence cost me his love! The lying rubbish!” She started up to follow him and unsay the meaningless words. But she was checked by a reflection. He had had his way, after all; he had eluded all attacks on his secret, and now he was shut up alone in his room, reading that other woman’s letter.
III
She was still reflecting on this when the surprised parlormaid came in and found her. No, Charlotte said, she wasn’t going to dress for dinner; Mr. Ashby didn’t want to dine. He was very tired and had gone up to his room to rest; later she would have something brought on a tray to the drawing room. She mounted the stairs to her bedroom. Her dinner dress was lying on the bed, and at the sight the quiet routine of her daily life took hold of her and she began to feel as if the strange talk she had just had with her husband must have taken place in another world, between two beings who were not Charlotte Gorse and Kenneth Ashby, but phantoms projected by her fevered imagination. She recalled the year since her marriage — her husband’s constant devotion; his persistent, almost too insistent tenderness; the feeling he had given her at times of being too eagerly dependent on her, too searchingly close to her, as if there were not air enough between her soul and his. It seemed preposterous, as she recalled all this, that a few moments ago she should have been accusing him of an intrigue with another woman! But, then, what ——
Again she was moved by the impulse to go up to him, beg his pardon and try to laugh away the misunderstanding. But she was restrained by the fear of forcing herself upon his privacy. He was troubled and unhappy, oppressed by some grief or fear; and he had shown her that he wanted to fight out his battle alone. It would be wiser, as well as more generous, to respect his wish. Only, how strange, how unbearable, to be there, in the next room to his, and feel herself at the other end of the world! In her nervous agitation she almost regretted not having had the courage to open the letter and put it back on the hall table before he came in. At least she would have known what his secret was, and the bogy might have been laid. For she was beginning now to think of the mystery as something conscious, malevolent: a secret persecution before which he quailed, yet from which he could not free himself. Once or twice in his evasive eyes she thought she had detected a desire for help, an impulse of confession, instantly restrained and suppressed. It was as if he felt she could have helped him if she had known, and yet had been unable to tell her!
There flashed through her mind the idea of going to his mother. She was very fond of old Mrs. Ashby, a firm-fleshed clear-eyed old lady, with an astringent bluntness of speech which responded to the forthright and simple in Charlotte’s own nature. There had been a tacit bond between them ever since the day when Mrs. Ashby Senior, coming to lunch for the first time with her new daughter-in-law, had been received by Charlotte downstairs in the library, and glancing up at the empty wall above her son’s desk, had remarked laconically: “Elsie gone, eh?” adding, at Charlotte’s murmured explanation: “Nonsense. Don’t have her back. Two’s company.” Charlotte, at this reading of her thoughts, could hardly refrain from exchanging a smile of complicity with her mother-in-law; and it seemed to her now that Mrs. Ashby’s almost uncanny directness might pierce to the core of this new mystery. But here again she hesitated, for the idea almost suggested a betrayal. What right had she to call in anyone, even so close a relation, to surprise a secret which her husband was trying to keep from her? “Perhaps, by and by, he’ll talk to his mother of his own accord,” she thought, and then ended: “But what does it matter? He and I must settle it between us.”
She was still brooding over the problem when there was a knock on the door and her husband came in. He was dressed for dinner and seemed surprised to see her sitting there, with her evening dress lying unheeded on the bed.
“Aren’t you coming down?”
“I thought you were not well and had gone to bed,” she faltered.
He forced a smile. “I’m not particularly well, but we’d better go down.” His face, though still drawn, looked calmer than when he had fled upstairs an hour earlier.
“There it is; he knows what’s in the letter and has fought his battle out again, whatever it is,” she reflected, “while I’m still in darkness.” She rang and gave a hurried order that dinner should be served as soon as possible — just a short meal, whatever could be got ready quickly, as both she and Mr. Ashby were rather tired and not very hungry.
Dinner was announced, and they sat down to it. At first neither seemed able to find a word to say; then Ashby began to make conversation with an assumption of ease that was more oppressive than his silence. “How tired he is! How terribly overtired!” Charlotte said to herself, pursuing her own thoughts while he rambled on about municipal politics, aviation, an exhibition of modern French painting, the health of an old aunt and the installing of the automatic telephone. “Good heavens, how tired he is!”
When they dined alone they usually went into the library after dinner, and Charlotte curled herself up on the divan with her knitting while he settled down in his armchair under the lamp and lit a pipe. But this evening, by tacit agreement, they avoided the room in which their strange talk had taken place, and went up to Charlotte’s drawing room.
They sat down near the fire, and Charlotte said: “Your pipe?” after he had put down his hardly tasted coffee.
He shook his head. “No, not tonight.”
“You must go to bed early; you look terribly tired. I’m sure they overwork you at the office.”
“I suppose we all overwork at times.”
She rose and stood before him with sudden resolution. “Well, I’m not going to have you use up your strength slaving in that way. It’s absurd. I can see you’re ill.” She bent over him and laid her hand on his forehead. “My poor old Kenneth. Prepare to be taken away soon on a long holiday.”
He looked up at her, startled. “A holiday?”
“Certainly. Didn’t you know I was going to carry you off at Easter? We’re going to start in a fortnight on a month’s voyage to somewhere or other. On any one of the big cruising steamers.” She paused and bent closer, touching his forehead with her lips. “I’m tired, too, Kenneth.”
He seemed to pay no heed to her last words, but sat, his hands on his knees, his head drawn back a little from her caress, and looked up at her with a stare of apprehension. “Again? My dear, we can’t; I can’t possibly go away.”
“I don’t know why you say ‘again,’ Kenneth; we haven’t taken a real holiday this year.”
“At Christmas we spent a week with the children in the country.”
“Yes, but this time I mean away from the children, from servants, from the house. From everything that’s familiar and fatiguing. Your mother will love to have Joyce and Peter with her.”
He frowned and slowly shook his head. “No, dear; I can’t leave them with my mother.”
“Why, Kenneth, how absurd! She adores them. You didn’t hesitate to leave them with her for over two months when we went to the West Indies.”
He drew a deep breath and stood up uneasily. “That was different.”
“Different? Why?”
“I mean, at that time I didn’t realize ——” He broke off as if to choose his words and then went on: “My mother adores the children, as you say. But she isn’t always very judicious. Grandmothers always spoil children. And sometimes she talks before them without thinking.” He turned to his wife with an almost pitiful gesture of entreaty. “Don’t ask me to, dear.”
Charlotte mused. It was true that the elder Mrs. Ashby had a fearless tongue, but she was the last woman in the world to say or hint anything before her grandchildren at which the most scrupulous parent could take offense. Charlotte looked at her husband in perplexity.
“I don’t understand.”
He continued to turn on her the same troubled and entreating gaze. “Don’t try to,” he muttered.
“Not try to?”
“Not now — not yet.” He put up his hands and pressed them against his temples. “Can’t you see that there’s no use in insisting? I can’t go away, no matter how much I might want to.”
Charlotte still scrutinized him gravely. “The question is, do you want to?”
He returned her gaze for a moment; then his lips began to tremble, and he said, hardly above his breath: “I want — anything you want.”
“And yet ——”
“Don’t ask me. I can’t leave — I can’t!”
“You mean that you can’t go away out of reach of those letters!”
Her husband had been standing before her in an uneasy half-hesitating attitude; now he turned abruptly away and walked once or twice up and down the length of the room, his head bent, his eyes fixed on the carpet.
Charlotte felt her resentfulness rising with her fears. “It’s that,” she persisted. “Why not admit it? You can’t live without them.”
He continued his troubled pacing of the room; then he stopped short, dropped into a chair and covered his face with his hands. From the shaking of his shoulders, Charlotte saw that he was weeping. She had never seen a man cry, except her father after her mother’s death, when she was a little girl; and she remembered still how the sight had frightened her. She was frightened now; she felt that her husband was being dragged away from her into some mysterious bondage, and that she must use up her last atom of strength in the struggle for his freedom, and for hers.
“Kenneth — Kenneth!” she pleaded, kneeling down beside him. “Won’t you listen to me? Won’t you try to see what I’m suffering? I’m not unreasonable, darling, really not. I don’t suppose I should ever have noticed the letters if it hadn’t been for their effect on you. It’s not my way to pry into other people’s affairs; and even if the effect had been different — yes, yes, listen to me — if I’d seen that the letters made you happy, that you were watching eagerly for them, counting the days between their coming, that you wanted them, that they gave you something I haven’t known how to give — why, Kenneth, I don’t say I shouldn’t have suffered from that, too; but it would. have been in a different way, and I should have had the courage to hide what I felt, and the hope that someday you’d come to feel about me as you did about the writer of the letters. But what I can’t bear is to see how you dread them, how they make you suffer, and yet how you can’t live without them and won’t go away lest you should miss one during your absence. Or perhaps,” she added, her voice breaking into a cry of accusation — “perhaps it’s because she’s actually forbidden you to leave. Kenneth, you must answer me! Is that the reason? Is it because she’s forbidden you that you won’t go away with me?”
She continued to kneel at his side, and raising her hands, she drew his gently down. She was ashamed of her persistence, ashamed of uncovering that baffled disordered face, yet resolved that no such scruples should arrest her. His eyes were lowered, the muscles of his face quivered; she was making him suffer even more than she suffered herself. Yet this no longer restrained her.
“Kenneth, is it that? She won’t let us go away together?”
Still he did not speak or turn his eyes to her; and a sense of defeat swept over her. After all, she thought, the struggle was a losing one. “You needn’t answer. I see I’m right,” she said.
Suddenly, as she rose, he turned and drew her down again. His hands caught hers and pressed them so tightly that she felt her rings cutting into her flesh. There was something frightened, convulsive in his hold; it was the clutch of a man who felt himself slipping over a precipice. He was staring up at her now as if salvation lay in the face she bent above him. “Of course we’ll go away together. We’ll go wherever you want,” he said in a low confused voice; and putting his arm about her, he drew her close and pressed his lips on hers.
IV
Charlotte had said to herself: “I shall sleep tonight,” but instead she sat before her fire into the small hours, listening for any sound that came from her husband’s room. But he, at any rate, seemed to be resting after the tumult of the evening. Once or twice she stole to the door and in the faint light that came in from the street through his open window she saw him stretched out in heavy sleep — the sleep of weakness and exhaustion. “He’s ill,” she thought “he’s undoubtedly ill. And it’s not overwork; it’s this mysterious persecution.”
She drew a breath of relief. She had fought through the weary fight and the victory was hers — at least for the moment. If only they could have started at once — started for anywhere! She knew it would be useless to ask him to leave before the holidays; and meanwhile the secret influence — as to which she was still so completely in the dark — would continue to work against her, and she would have to renew the struggle day after day till they started on their journey. But after that everything would be different. If once she could get her husband away under other skies, and all to herself, she never doubted her power to release him from the evil spell he was under. Lulled to quiet by the thought, she too slept at last.
When she woke, it was long past her usual hour, and she sat up in bed surprised and vexed at having overslept herself. She always liked to be down to share her husband’s breakfast by the library fire; but a glance at the clock made it clear that he must have started long since for his office. To make sure, she jumped out of bed and went into his room, but it was empty. No doubt he had looked in on her before leaving, seen that she still slept, and gone downstairs without disturbing her; and their relations were sufficiently lover-like for her to regret having missed their morning hour.
She rang and asked if Mr. Ashby had already gone. Yes, nearly an hour ago, the maid said. He had given orders that Mrs. Ashby should not be waked and that the children should not come to her till she sent for them . . . . Yes, he had gone up to the nursery himself to give the order. All this sounded usual enough, and Charlotte hardly knew why she asked: “And did Mr. Ashby leave no other message?”
Yes, the maid said, he did; she was so sorry she’d forgotten. He’d told her, just as he was leaving, to say to Mrs. Ashby that he was going to see about their passages, and would she please be ready to sail tomorrow?
Charlotte echoed the woman’s “Tomorrow,” and sat staring at her incredulously. “Tomorrow — you’re sure he said to sail tomorrow?”
“Oh, ever so sure, ma’am. I don’t know how I could have forgotten to mention it.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Draw my bath, please.” Charlotte sprang up, dashed through her dressing, and caught herself singing at her image in the glass as she sat brushing her hair. It made her feel young again to have scored such a victory. The other woman vanished to a speck on the horizon, as this one, who ruled the foreground, smiled back at the reflection of her lips and eyes. He loved her, then — he loved her as passionately as ever. He had divined what she had suffered, had understood that their happiness depended on their getting away at once, and finding each other again after yesterday’s desperate groping in the fog. The nature of the influence that had come between them did not much matter to Charlotte now; she had faced the phantom and dispelled it. “Courage — that’s the secret! If only people who are in love weren’t always so afraid of risking their happiness by looking it in the eyes.” As she brushed back her light abundant hair it waved electrically above her head, like the palms of victory. Ah, well, some women knew how to manage men, and some didn’t — and only the fair — she gaily paraphrased — deserve the brave! Certainly she was looking very pretty.
The morning danced along like a cockleshell on a bright sea — such a sea as they would soon be speeding over. She ordered a particularly good dinner, saw the children off to their classes, had her trunks brought down, consulted with the maid about getting out summer clothes — for of course they would be heading for heat and sunshine — and wondered if she oughtn’t to take Kenneth’s flannel suits out of camphor. “But how absurd,” she reflected, “that I don’t yet know where we’re going!” She looked at the clock, saw that it was close on noon, and decided to call him up at his office. There was a slight delay; then she heard his secretary’s voice saying that Mr. Ashby had looked in for a moment early, and left again almost immediately . . . . Oh, very well; Charlotte would ring up later. How soon was he likely to be back? The secretary answered that she couldn’t tell; all they knew in the office was that when he left he had said he was in a hurry because he had to go out of town.
Out of town! Charlotte hung up the receiver and sat blankly gazing into new darkness. Why had he gone out of town? And where had he gone? And of all days, why should he have chosen the eve of their suddenly planned departure? She felt a faint shiver of apprehension. Of course he had gone to see that woman — no doubt to get her permission to leave. He was as completely in bondage as that; and Charlotte had been fatuous enough to see the palms of victory on her forehead. She burst into a laugh and, walking across the room, sat down again before her mirror. What a different face she saw! The smile on her pale lips seemed to mock the rosy vision of the other Charlotte. But gradually her color crept back. After all, she had a right to claim the victory, since her husband was doing what she wanted, not what the other woman exacted of him. It was natural enough, in view of his abrupt decision to leave the next day, that he should have arrangements to make, business matters to wind up; it was not even necessary to suppose that his mysterious trip was a visit to the writer of the letters. He might simply have gone to see a client who lived out of town. Of course they would not tell Charlotte at the office; the secretary had hesitated before imparting even such meager information as the fact of Mr. Ashby’s absence. Meanwhile she would go on with her joyful preparations, content to learn later in the day to what particular island of the blest she was to be carried.
The hours wore on, or rather were swept forward on a rush of eager preparations. At last the entrance of the maid who came to draw the curtains roused Charlotte from her labors, and she saw to her surprise that the clock marked five. And she did not yet know where they were going the next day! She rang up her husband’s office and was told that Mr. Ashby had not been there since the early morning. She asked for his partner, but the partner could add nothing to her information, for he himself, his suburban train having been behind time, had reached the office after Ashby had come and gone. Charlotte stood perplexed; then she decided to telephone to her mother-in-law. Of course Kenneth, on the eve of a month’s absence, must have gone to see his mother. The mere fact that the children — in spite of his vague objections — would certainly have to be left with old Mrs. Ashby, made it obvious that he would have all sorts of matters to decide with her. At another time Charlotte might have felt a little hurt at being excluded from their conference, but nothing mattered now but that she had won the day, that her husband was still hers and not another woman’s. Gaily she called up Mrs. Ashby, heard her friendly voice, and began: “Well, did Kenneth’s news surprise you? What do you think of our elopement?”
Almost instantly, before Mrs. Ashby could answer, Charlotte knew what her reply would be. Mrs. Ashby had not seen her son, she had had no word from him and did not know what her daughter-in-law meant. Charlotte stood silent in the intensity of her surprise. “But then, where has he been?” she thought. Then, recovering herself, she explained their sudden decision to Mrs. Ashby, and in doing so, gradually regained her own self-confidence, her conviction that nothing could ever again come between Kenneth and herself. Mrs. Ashby took the news calmly and approvingly. She, too, had thought that Kenneth looked worried and overtired, and she agreed with her daughter-in-law that in such cases change was the surest remedy. “I’m always so glad when he gets away. Elsie hated traveling; she was always finding pretexts to prevent his going anywhere. With you, thank goodness, it’s different.” Nor was Mrs. Ashby surprised at his not having had time to let her know of his departure. He must have been in a rush from the moment the decision was taken; but no doubt he’d drop in before dinner. Five minutes’ talk was really all they needed. “I hope you’ll gradually cure Kenneth of his mania for going over and over a question that could be settled in a dozen words. He never used to be like that, and if he carried the habit into his professional work he’d soon lose all his clients . . . . Yes, do come in for a minute, dear, if you have time; no doubt he’ll turn up while you’re here.” The tonic ring of Mrs. Ashby’s voice echoed on reassuringly in the silent room while Charlotte continued her preparations.
Toward seven the telephone rang, and she darted to it. Now she would know! But it was only from the conscientious secretary, to say that Mr. Ashby hadn’t been back, or sent any word, and before the office closed she thought she ought to let Mrs. Ashby know. “Oh, that’s all right. Thanks a lot!” Charlotte called out cheerfully, and hung up the receiver with a trembling hand. But perhaps by this time, she reflected, he was at his mother’s. She shut her drawers and cupboards, put on her hat and coat and called up to the nursery that she was going out for a minute to see the children’s grandmother.
Mrs. Ashby lived nearby, and during her brief walk through the cold spring dusk Charlotte imagined that every advancing figure was her husband’s. But she did not meet him on the way, and when she entered the house she found her mother-in-law alone. Kenneth had neither telephoned nor come. Old Mrs. Ashby sat by her bright fire, her knitting needles flashing steadily through her active old hands, and her mere bodily presence gave reassurance to Charlotte. Yes, it was certainly odd that Kenneth had gone off for the whole day without letting any of them know; but, after all, it was to be expected. A busy lawyer held so many threads in his hands that any sudden change of plan would oblige him to make all sorts of unforeseen arrangements and adjustments. He might have gone to see some client in the suburbs and been detained there; his mother remembered his telling her that he had charge of the legal business of a queer old recluse somewhere in New Jersey, who was immensely rich but too mean to have a telephone. Very likely Kenneth had been stranded there.
But Charlotte felt her nervousness gaining on her. When Mrs. Ashby asked her at what hour they were sailing the next day and she had to say she didn’t know — that Kenneth had simply sent her word he was going to take their passages — the uttering of the words again brought home to her the strangeness of the situation. Even Mrs. Ashby conceded that it was odd; but she immediately added that it only showed what a rush he was in.
“But, mother, it’s nearly eight o’clock! He must realize that I’ve got to know when we’re starting tomorrow.”
“Oh, the boat probably doesn’t sail till evening. Sometimes they have to wait till midnight for the tide. Kenneth’s probably counting on that. After all, he has a level head.”
Charlotte stood up. “It’s not that. Something has happened to him.”
Mrs. Ashby took off her spectacles and rolled up her knitting. “If you begin to let yourself imagine things ——”
“Aren’t you in the least anxious?”
“I never am till I have to be. I wish you’d ring for dinner, my dear. You’ll stay and dine? He’s sure to drop in here on his way home.”
Charlotte called up her own house. No, the maid said, Mr. Ashby hadn’t come in and hadn’t telephoned. She would tell him as soon as he came that Mrs. Ashby was dining at his mother’s. Charlotte followed her mother-in-law into the dining room and sat with parched throat before her empty plate, while Mrs. Ashby dealt calmly and efficiently with a short but carefully prepared repast. “You’d better eat something, child, or you’ll be as bad as Kenneth . . . . Yes, a little more asparagus, please, Jane.”
She insisted on Charlotte’s drinking a glass of sherry and nibbling a bit of toast; then they returned to the drawing room, where the fire had been made up, and the cushions in Mrs. Ashby’s armchair shaken out and smoothed. How safe and familiar it all looked; and out there, somewhere in the uncertainty and mystery of the night, lurked the answer to the two women’s conjectures, like an indistinguishable figure prowling on the threshold.
At last Charlotte got up and said: “I’d better go back. At this hour Kenneth will certainly go straight home.”
Mrs. Ashby smiled indulgently. “It’s not very late, my dear. It doesn’t take two sparrows long to dine.”
“It’s after nine.” Charlotte bent down to kiss her. “The fact is, I can’t keep still.”
Mrs. Ashby pushed aside her work and rested her two hands on the arms of her chair. “I’m going with you,” she said, helping herself up.
Charlotte protested that it was too late, that it was not necessary, that she would call up as soon as Kenneth came in, but Mrs. Ashby had already rung for her maid. She was slightly lame, and stood resting on her stick while her wraps were brought. “If Mr. Kenneth turns up, tell him he’ll find me at his own house,” she instructed the maid as the two women got into the taxi which had been summoned. During the short drive Charlotte gave thanks that she was not returning home alone. There was something warm and substantial in the mere fact of Mrs. Ashby’s nearness, something that corresponded with the clearness of her eyes and the texture of her fresh firm complexion. As the taxi drew up she laid her hand encouragingly on Charlotte’s. “You’ll see; there’ll be a message.”
The door opened at Charlotte’s ring and the two entered. Charlotte’s heart beat excitedly; the stimulus of her mother-in-law’s confidence was beginning to flow through her veins.
“You’ll see — you’ll see,” Mrs. Ashby repeated.
The maid who opened the door said no, Mr. Ashby had not come in, and there had been no message from him.
“You’re sure the telephone’s not out of order?” his mother suggested; and the maid said, well, it certainly wasn’t half an hour ago; but she’d just go and ring up to make sure. She disappeared, and Charlotte turned to take off her hat and cloak. As she did so her eyes lit on the hall table, and there lay a gray envelope, her husband’s name faintly traced on it. “Oh!” she cried out, suddenly aware that for the first time in months she had entered her house without wondering if one of the gray letters would be there.
“What is it, my dear?” Mrs. Ashby asked with a glance of surprise.
Charlotte did not answer. She took up the envelope and stood staring at it as if she could force her gaze to penetrate to what was within. Then an idea occurred to her. She turned and held out the envelope to her mother-in-law.
“Do you know that writing?” she asked.
Mrs. Ashby took the letter. She had to feel with her other hand for her eyeglasses, and when she had adjusted them she lifted the envelope to the light. “Why!” she exclaimed; and then stopped. Charlotte noticed that the letter shook in her usually firm hand. “But this is addressed to Kenneth,” Mrs. Ashby said at length, in a low voice. Her tone seemed to imply that she felt her daughter-in-law’s question to be slightly indiscreet.
“Yes, but no matter,” Charlotte spoke with sudden decision. “I want to know — do you know the writing?”
Mrs. Ashby handed back the letter. “No,” she said distinctly.
The two women had turned into the library. Charlotte switched on the electric light and shut the door. She still held the envelope in her hand.
“I’m going to open it,” she announced.
She caught her mother-in-law’s startled glance. “But, dearest — a letter not addressed to you? My dear, you can’t!”
“As if I cared about that — now!” She continued to look intently at Mrs. Ashby. “This letter may tell me where Kenneth is.”
Mrs. Ashby’s glossy bloom was effaced by a quick pallor; her firm cheeks seemed to shrink and wither. “Why should it? What makes you believe —— It can’t possibly ——”
Charlotte held her eyes steadily on that altered face. “Ah, then you do know the writing?” she flashed back.
“Know the writing? How should I? With all my son’s correspondents . . . . What I do know is ——” Mrs. Ashby broke off and looked at her daughter-in-law entreatingly, almost timidly.
Charlotte caught her by the wrist. “Mother! What do you know? Tell me! You must!”
“That I don’t believe any good ever came of a woman’s opening her husband’s letters behind his back.”
The words sounded to Charlotte’s irritated ears as flat as a phrase culled from a book of moral axioms. She laughed impatiently and dropped her mother-in-law’s wrist. “Is that all? No good can come of this letter, opened or unopened. I know that well enough. But whatever ill comes, I mean to find out what’s in it.” Her hands had been trembling as they held the envelope, but now they grew firm, and her voice also. She still gazed intently at Mrs. Ashby. “This is the ninth letter addressed in the same hand that has come for Kenneth since we’ve been married. Always these same gray envelopes. I’ve kept count of them because after each one he has been like a man who has had some dreadful shock. It takes him hours to shake off their effect. I’ve told him so. I’ve told him I must know from whom they come, because I can see they’re killing him. He won’t answer my questions; he says he can’t tell me anything about the letters; but last night he promised to go away with me — to get away from them.”
Mrs. Ashby, with shaking steps, had gone to one of the armchairs and sat down in it, her head drooping forward on her breast. “Ah,” she murmured.
“So now you understand ——”
“Did he tell you it was to get away from them?”
“He said, to get away — to get away. He was sobbing so that he could hardly speak. But I told him I knew that was why.”
“And what did he say?”
“He took me in his arms and said he’d go wherever I wanted.”
“Ah, thank God!” said Mrs. Ashby. There was a silence, during which she continued to sit with bowed head, and eyes averted from her daughter-in-law. At last she looked up and spoke. “Are you sure there have been as many as nine?”
“Perfectly. This is the ninth. I’ve kept count.”
“And he has absolutely refused to explain?”
“Absolutely.”
Mrs. Ashby spoke through pale contracted lips. “When did they begin to come? Do you remember?”
Charlotte laughed again. “Remember? The first one came the night we got back from our honeymoon.”
“All that time?” Mrs. Ashby lifted her head and spoke with sudden energy. “Then — yes, open it.”
The words were so unexpected that Charlotte felt the blood in her temples, and her hands began to tremble again. She tried to slip her finger under the flap of the envelope, but it was so tightly stuck that she had to hunt on her husband’s writing table for his ivory letter opener. As she pushed about the familiar objects his own hands had so lately touched, they sent through her the icy chill emanating from the little personal effects of someone newly dead. In the deep silence of the room the tearing of the paper as she slit the envelope sounded like a human cry. She drew out the sheet and carried it to the lamp.
“Well?” Mrs. Ashby asked below her breath.
Charlotte did not move or answer. She was bending over the page with wrinkled brows, holding it nearer and nearer to the light. Her sight must be blurred, or else dazzled by the reflection of the lamplight on the smooth surface of the paper, for, strain her eyes as she would, she could discern only a few faint strokes, so faint and faltering as to be nearly undecipherable.
“I can’t make it out,” she said.
“What do you mean, dear?”
“The writing’s too indistinct . . . . Wait.”
She went back to the table and, sitting down close to Kenneth’s reading lamp, slipped the letter under a magnifying glass. All this time she was aware that her mother-in-law was watching her intently.
“Well?” Mrs. Ashby breathed.
“Well, it’s no clearer. I can’t read it.”
“You mean the paper is an absolute blank?”
“No, not quite. There is writing on it. I can make out something like ‘mine’ — oh, and ‘come.’ It might be ‘come.’”
Mrs. Ashby stood up abruptly. Her face was even paler than before. She advanced to the table and, resting her two hands on it, drew a deep breath. “Let me see,” she said, as if forcing herself to a hateful effort.
Charlotte felt the contagion of her whiteness. “She knows,” she thought. She pushed the letter across the table. Her mother-in-law lowered her head over it in silence, but without touching it with her pale wrinkled hands.
Charlotte stood watching her as she herself, when she had tried to read the letter, had been watched by Mrs. Ashby. The latter fumbled for her glasses, held them to her eyes, and bent still closer to the outspread page, in order, as it seemed, to avoid touching it. The light of the lamp fell directly on her old face, and Charlotte reflected what depths of the unknown may lurk under the clearest and most candid lineaments. She had never seen her mother-in-law’s features express any but simple and sound emotions — cordiality, amusement, a kindly sympathy; now and again a flash of wholesome anger. Now they seemed to wear a look of fear and hatred, of incredulous dismay and almost cringing defiance. It was as if the spirits warring within her had distorted her face to their own likeness. At length she raised her head. “I can’t — I can’t,” she said in a voice of childish distress.
“You can’t make it out either?”
She shook her head, and Charlotte saw two tears roll down her cheeks.
“Familiar as the writing is to you?” Charlotte insisted with twitching lips.
Mrs. Ashby did not take up the challenge. “I can make out nothing — nothing.”
“But you do know the writing?”
Mrs. Ashby lifted her head timidly; her anxious eyes stole with a glance of apprehension around the quiet familiar room. “How can I tell? I was startled at first . . . .”
“Startled by the resemblance?”
“Well, I thought ——”
“You’d better say it out, mother! You knew at once it was her writing?”
“Oh, wait, my dear — wait.”
“Wait for what?”
Mrs. Ashby looked up; her eyes, traveling slowly past Charlotte, were lifted to the blank wall behind her son’s writing table.
Charlotte, following the glance, burst into a shrill laugh of accusation. “I needn’t wait any longer! You’ve answered me now! You’re looking straight at the wall where her picture used to hang!”
Mrs. Ashby lifted her hand with a murmur of warning. “Sh-h.”
“Oh, you needn’t imagine that anything can ever frighten me again!” Charlotte cried.
Her mother-in-law still leaned against the table. Her lips moved plaintively. “But we’re going mad — we’re both going mad. We both know such things are impossible.”
Her daughter-in-law looked at her with a pitying stare. “I’ve known for a long time now that everything was possible.”
“Even this?”
“Yes, exactly this.”
“But this letter — after all, there’s nothing in this letter ——”
“Perhaps there would be to him. How can I tell? I remember his saying to me once that if you were used to a handwriting the faintest stroke of it became legible. Now I see what he meant. He was used to it.
“But the few strokes that I can make out are so pale. No one could possibly read that letter.”
Charlotte laughed again. “I suppose everything’s pale about a ghost,” she said stridently.
“Oh, my child — my child — don’t say it!”
“Why shouldn’t I say it, when even the bare walls cry it out? What difference does it make if her letters are illegible to you and me? If even you can see her face on that blank wall, why shouldn’t he read her writing on this blank paper? Don’t you see that she’s everywhere in this house, and the closer to him because to everyone else she’s become invisible?” Charlotte dropped into a chair and covered her face with her hands. A turmoil of sobbing shook her from head to foot. At length a touch on her shoulder made her look up, and she saw her mother-in-law bending over her. Mrs. Ashby’s face seemed to have grown still smaller and more wasted, but it had resumed its usual quiet look. Through all her tossing anguish, Charlotte felt the impact of that resolute spirit.
“Tomorrow — tomorrow. You’ll see. There’ll be some explanation tomorrow.”
Charlotte cut her short. “An explanation? Who’s going to give it, I wonder?”
Mrs. Ashby drew back and straightened herself heroically. “Kenneth himself will,” she cried out in a strong voice. Charlotte said nothing, and the old woman went on: “But meanwhile we must act; we must notify the police. Now, without a moment’s delay. We must do everything — everything.”
Charlotte stood up slowly and stiffly; her joints felt as cramped as an old woman’s. “Exactly as if we thought it could do any good to do anything?”
Resolutely Mrs. Ashby cried: “Yes!” and Charlotte went up to the telephone and unhooked the receiver.
(End.)
THE JOLLY CORNER
by Henry James
CHAPTER I

“Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense.  It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.”  He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America.  Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play.  He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence.  He had been twenty-three on leaving New York—he was fifty-six to-day; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man.  It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.

The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change.  He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined.  Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the “swagger” things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay.  They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring.  It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth saved the situation.  He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do.  He had come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his “property,” which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands.  He was the owner of another, not quite so “good”—the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been depressingly low.  He could live in “Europe,” as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them.  The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before, to overtures for this conversion—in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority.  He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction.  These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism—where it might be said of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just.  At present, in the splendid autumn weather—the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place—he loafed about his “work” undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least “minding” that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challenge explanations and really “go into” figures.

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less.  She wasn’t, however, going to be better-off for it, as he was—and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career.  If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures—if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden.  His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to “spirit,” the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order.  She made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference with her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort.  They had communities of knowledge, “their” knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by “Europe” in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.

She had come with him one day to see how his “apartment-house” was rising; he had helped her over gaps and explained to her plans, and while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the building firm that had undertaken his work.  He had found himself quite “standing up” to this personage over a failure on the latter’s part to observe some detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly argued his case that, besides ever so prettily flushing, at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift.  If he had but stayed at home he would have anticipated the inventor of the sky-scraper.  If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a gold mine.  He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring they had sounded over the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations.

It had begun to be present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton wonderment: it met him there—and this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least, not a little, thrilled and flushed with it—very much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house.  The quaint analogy quite hauntingly remained with him, when he didn’t indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk.  After that visit to the house in construction he walked with his companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which in the eastward direction formed one of the corners,—the “jolly” one precisely, of the street now so generally dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative Avenue.  The Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe restoration to shelter.

They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained, preferring, for his reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep.  Spencer Brydon had his reasons and was growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he didn’t name them all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often, he himself came.  He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon’s broomstick, in a corner, to tempt the burglar.  Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashes—all to show them, as she remarked, how little there was to see.  There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances, had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant’s, some lifelong retainer’s appeal for a character, or even for a retiring-pension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs. Muldoon’s that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he would never make of her.  If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell him, if he “plased,” that he must ask it of somebody else.

The fact that there was nothing to see didn’t militate for the worthy woman against what one might see, and she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? “craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours.”  The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a gruesome vision of her march through the great grey rooms—so many of them as there were too!—with her glimmering taper.  Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself certainly would recoil from such an adventure.  Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peace—for the moment; the question of the “evil” hours in his old home had already become too grave for him.  He had begun some time since to “crape,” and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by his own hand, three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard that occupied, as a “fixture,” the deep recess in the dining-room.  Just now he laughed at his companions—quickly however changing the subject; for the reason that, in the first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to qualify it) that sounds made while he was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination, if he ever so prowled.  There were divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left them, passing on to other parts.

There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly; so that a whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend’s having herself broken out, after a yearning look round: “But I hope you don’t mean they want you to pull this to pieces!”  His answer came, promptly, with his re-awakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were “at” him for, daily, with the iteration of people who couldn’t for their life understand a man’s liability to decent feelings.  He had found the place, just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy.  There were values other than the beastly rent-values, and in short, in short—!  But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up.  “In short you’re to make so good a thing of your sky-scraper that, living in luxury on those ill-gotten gains, you can afford for a while to be sentimental here!”  Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her having so much imagination—not, like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the world of “society,” bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody’s really having any.  It was agreeable to him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demur, “Well, yes; so, precisely, you may put it!” her imagination would still do him justice.  He explained that even if never a dollar were to come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he felt himself create.

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors, which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead the seventy years of the past in fine that these things represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather’s, the one that had ended there, and the impalpable ashes of his long-extinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes.  She listened to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn’t chatter.  She scattered abroad therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing that.  Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself.  “And then how do you know?  You may still, after all, want to live here.”  It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn’t what he had been thinking, at least in her sense of the words, “You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?”

“Well, with such a home—!”  But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an i, and it was precisely an illustration of the way she didn’t rattle.  How could any one—of any wit—insist on any one else’s “wanting” to live in New York?

“Oh,” he said, “I might have lived here (since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in here all these years.  Then everything would have been different enough—and, I dare say, ‘funny’ enough.  But that’s another matter.  And then the beauty of it—I mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a ‘deal’—is just in the total absence of a reason.  Don’t you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it would have to be the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars?  There are no reasons here but of dollars.  Let us therefore have none whatever—not the ghost of one.”

They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large, through an open door, into the great square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between windows.  Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment.  “Are you very sure the ‘ghost’ of one doesn’t, much rather, serve—?”

He had a positive sense of turning pale.  But it was as near as they were then to come.  For he made answer, he believed, between a glare and a grin: “Oh ghosts—of course the place must swarm with them!  I should be ashamed of it if it didn’t.  Poor Mrs. Muldoon’s right, and it’s why I haven’t asked her to do more than look in.”

Miss Staverton’s gaze again lost itself, and things she didn’t utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind.  She might even for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering.  Simplified like the death-mask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the stir of an expression in the “set” commemorative plaster.  Yet whatever her impression may have been she produced instead a vague platitude.  “Well, if it were only furnished and lived in—!”

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might have been a little less opposed to the idea of a return.  But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next moment he had opened the house-door and was standing with her on the steps.  He closed the door and, while he re-pocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue, which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb.  But he risked before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech.  “For me it is lived in.  For me it is furnished.”  At which it was easy for her to sigh “Ah yes!” all vaguely and discreetly; since his parents and his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their course and met their end there.  That represented, within the walls, ineffaceable life.

It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering curiosity—among the people he met—about his appreciation of New York.  He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his “thinking” (thinking the better or the worse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one subject of thought.  It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession.  He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and “turned out,” if he had not so, at the outset, given it up.  And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculation—which but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinking—he affirmed the impotence there of any other source of interest, any other native appeal.  “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me?  I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know!  I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made something of me as well.  Only I can’t make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened.  I’ve been sorry, I’ve hated it—I’ve never known what was in the letter.  You may, of course, say it’s a trifle—!”

“I don’t say it’s a trifle,” Miss Staverton gravely interrupted.

She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity of his idea and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eye-glass, of the dear little old objects on her chimney-piece.  Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder.  “I shouldn’t care if you did!” he laughed, however; “and it’s only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel.  Not to have followed my perverse young course—and almost in the teeth of my father’s curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, ‘over there,’ from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it, to have loved it, so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference; some variation from that, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my ‘form.’  I should have stuck here—if it had been possible; and I was too young, at twenty-three, to judge, pour deux sous, whether it were possible.  If I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions.  It isn’t that I admire them so much—the question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond that of the rank money-passion, exerted by their conditions for them, has nothing to do with the matter: it’s only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn’t have missed.  It comes over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud, and that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever.”

“And you wonder about the flower,” Miss Staverton said.  “So do I, if you want to know; and so I’ve been wondering these several weeks.  I believe in the flower,” she continued, “I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous.”

“Monstrous above all!” her visitor echoed; “and I imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive.”

“You don’t believe that,” she returned; “if you did you wouldn’t wonder.  You’d know, and that would be enough for you.  What you feel—and what I feel for you—is that you’d have had power.”

“You’d have liked me that way?” he asked.

She barely hung fire.  “How should I not have liked you?”

“I see.  You’d have liked me, have preferred me, a billionaire!”

“How should I not have liked you?” she simply again asked.

He stood before her still—her question kept him motionless.  He took it in, so much there was of it; and indeed his not otherwise meeting it testified to that.  “I know at least what I am,” he simply went on; “the other side of the medal’s clear enough.  I’ve not been edifying—I believe I’m thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent.  I’ve followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again—in fact you’ve admitted to me as much—that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life.  And you see what it has made of me.”

She just waited, smiling at him.  “You see what it has made of me.”

“Oh you’re a person whom nothing can have altered.  You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you’ve the perfection nothing else could have blighted.  And don’t you see how, without my exile, I shouldn’t have been waiting till now—?”  But he pulled up for the strange pang.

“The great thing to see,” she presently said, “seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing.  It hasn’t spoiled your being here at last.  It hasn’t spoiled this.  It hasn’t spoiled your speaking—”  She also however faltered.

He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean.  “Do you believe then—too dreadfully!—that I am as good as I might ever have been?”

“Oh no!  Far from it!”  With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him.  “But I don’t care,” she smiled.

“You mean I’m good enough?”

She considered a little.  “Will you believe it if I say so?  I mean will you let that settle your question for you?”  And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however absurd, he couldn’t yet bargain away: “Oh you don’t care either—but very differently: you don’t care for anything but yourself.”

Spencer Brydon recognised it—it was in fact what he had absolutely professed.  Yet he importantly qualified.  “He isn’t myself.  He’s the just so totally other person.  But I do want to see him,” he added.  “And I can.  And I shall.”

Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense.  But neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element that was like breatheable air.  What she said however was unexpected.  “Well, I’ve seen him.”

“You—?”

“I’ve seen him in a dream.”

“Oh a ‘dream’—!”  It let him down.

“But twice over,” she continued.  “I saw him as I see you now.”

“You’ve dreamed the same dream—?”

“Twice over,” she repeated.  “The very same.”

This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him.  “You dream about me at that rate?”

“Ah about him!” she smiled.

His eyes again sounded her.  “Then you know all about him.”  And as she said nothing more: “What’s the wretch like?”

She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that, resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away.  “I’ll tell you some other time!”
CHAPTER II

It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more believed to be his privilege.  It was what in these weeks he was living for—since he really felt life to begin but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go.  He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he found himself hoping most.  Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell.  Later—rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil—he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to invite.  It was a practice he found he could perfectly “work” without exciting remark; no one was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well of discretion, didn’t quite fully imagine.

He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue “officer” had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at two.  He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evening’s end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his hotel.  When he left his club, if he hadn’t been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club.  Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness.  He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relations—met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to edification, he was positively rather liked than not.  He was a dim secondary social success—and all with people who had truly not an idea of him.  It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their corks—just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game of ombres chinoises.  He projected himself all day, in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor’s wand.

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style.  This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it.  On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge.  The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities.  What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy.  They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto felt them—before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.

That was the essence of his vision—which was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted.  He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash.  His alter ego “walked”—that was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him.  He roamed, slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself did—Mrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her figure of their “craping”; and the presence he watched for would roam restlessly too.  But it would be as cautious and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had been comparable.  It had been the theory of many superficially-judging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable, than any beast of the forest.  The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman, stirred memories, from his younger time, of moor and mountain and desert, revived for him—and to the increase of his keenness—by the tremendous force of analogy.  He found himself at moments—once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf or in some recess—stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone.

He wasn’t afraid (though putting himself the question as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger-shoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this indeed—since here at least he might be frank!—because of the impression, so intimate and so strange, that he himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel.  They fell for him into categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man.  People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror?  He might have found this sublime had he quite dared to think of it; but he didn’t too much insist, truly, on that side of his privilege.  With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective; putting down his dim luminary he could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing it was there behind him in case of need, see his way about, visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness.  It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn’t verily be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego, to be confronted with such a type.

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn’t notice: he liked—oh this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms!—the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window-panes, and scarcely less the flare of the street-lamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out.  This was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him.  He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed him considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back.  But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey.  The place was there more subdivided; a large “extension” in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a time, to look far down—not deterred from his gravity even while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton playing at hide-and-seek.  Outside in fact he might himself make that ironic rapprochement; but within the walls, and in spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against the cynical light of New York.

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could “cultivate” his whole perception.  He had felt it as above all open to cultivation—which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time.  He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn’t have broken upon him at once.  This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition—absolutely unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights—of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should the less confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to pursue.  It worried, it finally quite broke him up, for it proved, of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his book.  He was kept in sight while remaining himself—as regards the essence of his position—sightless, and his only recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground.  He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution.  It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvres recalled to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, so that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his intenser gravity.  He had made, as I have said, to create on the premises the baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and the result of the third was to confirm the after-effect of the second.

On his return that night—the night succeeding his last intermission—he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known.  “He’s there, at the top, and waiting—not, as in general, falling back for disappearance.  He’s holding his ground, and it’s the first time—which is a proof, isn’t it? that something has happened for him.”  So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his foot on the lowest stair; in which position he felt as never before the air chilled by his logic.  He himself turned cold in it, for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved.  “Harder pressed?—yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I’ve come, as they say, ‘to stay.’  He finally doesn’t like and can’t bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread.  I’ve hunted him till he has ‘turned’; that, up there, is what has happened—he’s the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay.”  There came to him, as I say—but determined by an influence beyond my notation!—the acuteness of this certainty; under which however the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it for enterprise.  It marked none the less a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication of consciousness.

“He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to anger, he’ll fight!”—this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause.  But what was wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not unworthy of him.  It bristled there—somewhere near at hand, however unseen still—as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.  It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation.  Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it.

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious combat, the sense of a need to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge, somehow and upon something—to show himself, in a word, that he wasn’t afraid.  The state of “holding on” was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the nearest chair-back.  He had been surprised at any rate—of this he was aware—into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held them tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision.  When he opened them the room, the other contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed lighter—so light, almost, that at first he took the change for day.  He stood firm, however that might be, just where he had paused; his resistance had helped him—it was as if there were something he had tided over.  He knew after a little what this was—it had been in the imminent danger of flight.  He had stiffened his will against going; without this he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would have known how, straight and swiftly, to the bottom.

Well, as he had held out, here he was—still at the top, among the more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others, of all the rest of the house, still to run when it should be his time to go.  He would go at his time—only at his time: didn’t he go every night very much at the same hour?  He took out his watch—there was light for that: it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon.  He reached his lodgings for the most part at two—with his walk of a quarter of an hour.  He would wait for the last quarter—he wouldn’t stir till then; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting while he held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which he recognised, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to make.  It would prove his courage—unless indeed the latter might most be proved by his budging at last from his place.  What he mainly felt now was that, since he hadn’t originally scuttled, he had his dignities—which had never in his life seemed so many—all to preserve and to carry aloft.  This was before him in truth as a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance.  That remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant with a finer light; since what age of romance, after all, could have matched either the state of his mind or, “objectively,” as they said, the wonder of his situation?  The only difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchment scroll, he might then—that is in the heroic time—have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.

At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the course of a minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of.  The door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door opened to a third.  These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without issue save through the preceding.  To have moved, to have heard his step again, was appreciably a help; though even in recognising this he lingered once more a little by the chimney-piece on which his light had rested.  When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget.  He had come into sight of the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it.  Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction, been closed since his former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before.  He stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded his sense.  Surely it had been subsequently closed—that is it had been on his previous passage indubitably open!

He took it full in the face that something had happened between—that he couldn’t have noticed before (by which he meant on his original tour of all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally presented itself.  He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him.  The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear.  He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled “prey” (which had become by so sharp an irony so little the term now to apply!) was the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty.  He had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself.  “There!” under some fond brief hallucination.  The house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors—the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete proscription of them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically, as he might say, focused and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the elbow.

It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged—they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous.  He couldn’t, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn’t, if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been another agent?  Another agent?—he had been catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when had he been so close as in this simple, this logical, this completely personal act?  It was so logical, that is, that one might have taken it for personal; yet for what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets.  Ah this time at last they were, the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the question of danger loomed.  With it rose, as not before, the question of courage—for what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was “Show us how much you have!”  It stared, it glared back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not?  Oh to have this consciousness was to think—and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted!  Not to have acted—that was the misery and the pang—was even still not to act; was in fact all to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way.  How long did he pause and how long did he debate?  There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changed—as just by the effect of its intensity.  Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveably done, thus giving notice like some stark signboard—under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.

It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme hint, for him, of the value of Discretion!  This slowly dawned, no doubt—for it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold, had he been stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated.  It was the strangest of all things that now when, by his taking ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged—it was amazing, but it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from him.  Discretion—he jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much more valuably, it saved the situation.  When I say he “jumped” at it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that—at the end indeed of I know not how long—he did move again, he crossed straight to the door.  He wouldn’t touch it—it seemed now that he might if he would: he would only just wait there a little, to show, to prove, that he wouldn’t.  He had thus another station, close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him; but with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness.  He listened as if there had been something to hear, but this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication.  “If you won’t then—good: I spare you and I give up.  You affect me as by the appeal positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime—what do I know?—we both of us should have suffered.  I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as, I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce—never, on my honour, to try again.  So rest for ever—and let me!”

That, for Brydon, was the deep sense of this last demonstration—solemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to be.  He brought it to a close, he turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred.  He retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt, he observed, well-nigh to the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he would, the distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself at the other side of the house.  He did here what he had not yet done at these hours—he opened half a casement, one of those in the front, and let in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time previous for a sharp rupture of his spell.  His spell was broken now, and it didn’t matter—broken by his concession and his surrender, which made it idle henceforth that he should ever come back.  The empty street—its other life so marked even by great lamp-lit vacancy—was within call, within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again, high above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird however base.  He would have blessed that sign of life; he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn’t have felt the impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.

The pretext that wouldn’t have been too silly or too compromising, the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him: he was so occupied with the thought of recording his Discretion—as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate adversary—that the importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of proportion.  If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent.  If there had been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire-escape in the form of notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a proof—well, of his present delicacy.  He nursed that sentiment, as the question stood, a little in vain, and even—at the end of he scarce knew, once more, how long—found it, as by the action on his mind of the failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish.  It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spell—so unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted.  Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard-faced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit?  Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became conscious—all the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what a night he had made of it.

He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time-values (he had taken hours for minutes—not, as in other tense situations, minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the weak, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up.  His choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair.  Yet while so deeply demoralised he was capable again of an impulse denoting—at least by his present measure—extraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his own.  This required an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his reason, which over-mastered for the moment everything else.  There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw himself to that if the door he had seen closed were at present open?  He could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground and never again profane it.  This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered.  The image of the “presence” whatever it was, waiting there for him to go—this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him.  For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop short—he hung back from really seeing.  The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

He knew—yes, as he had never known anything—that, should he see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him.  It would mean that the agent of his shame—for his shame was the deep abjection—was once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would determine for him.  It would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street.  The hideous chance of this he at least could avert; but he could only avert it by recoiling in time from assurance.  He had the whole house to deal with, this fact was still there; only he now knew that uncertainty alone could start him.  He stole back from where he had checked himself—merely to do so was suddenly like safety—and, making blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind.  Here was the top of the stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious landings to mark off.  His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple of minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help.  He couldn’t have spoken, the tone of his voice would have scared him, and the common conceit or resource of “whistling in the dark” (whether literally or figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to hear himself go, and when he had reached his first landing—taking it all with no rush, but quite steadily—that stage of success drew from him a gasp of relief.

The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery under-world.  He tried to think of something noble, as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it.  They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers—they might come as soon as they would.  At the end of two flights he had dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more left, he recognised the influence of the lower windows, of half-drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of street-lamps, of the glazed spaces of the vestibule.  This was the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw paved—when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisters—with the marble squares of his childhood.  By that time indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a commoner cause, better; it had allowed him to stop and draw breath, and the case increased with the sight of the old black-and-white slabs.  But what he most felt was that now surely, with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands, the case was settled for what he might have seen above had he dared that last look.  The closed door, blessedly remote now, was still closed—and he had only in short to reach that of the house.

He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight and if here again he stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape.  It made him shut his eyes—which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs.  Here was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive; inasmuch as the side-lights and the high fantracery of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall; an appearance produced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back.  Out of that again the question sprang at him, making his eyes, as he felt, half-start from his head, as they had done, at the top of the house, before the sign of the other door.  If he had left that one open, hadn’t he left this one closed, and wasn’t he now in most immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity?  It was as sharp, the question, as a knife in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked—to shift and expand and contract.

It was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in his pocket.  The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the sense that here was at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know—something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat.  The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure.  Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent.  He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his curiosity had yearned.  It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.

Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay.  This only could it be—this only till he recognised, with his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried, as for dark deprecation.  So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher light, hard and acute—his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe.  No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been “treatment,” of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience.  The revulsion, for our friend, had become, before he knew it, immense—this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his adversary’s inscrutable manoeuvre.  That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn’t be faced in his triumph.  Wasn’t the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread?—so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.

“Saved,” though, would it be?—Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose.  The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented.  Horror, with the sight, had leaped into Brydon’s throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn’t utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as his, and his glare was the passion of his protest.  The face, that face, Spencer Brydon’s?—he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity.  It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility!—He had been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony.  Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous.  A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the face was the face of a stranger.  It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground.  Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way.  His head went round; he was going; he had gone.
CHAPTER III

What had next brought him back, clearly—though after how long?—was Mrs. Muldoon’s voice, coming to him from quite near, from so near that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground, but half-raised and upheld—conscious, yes, of tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance.  He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at his service; then another face intervened, bending more directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs.  They were cold, these marble squares of his youth; but he somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousness—the most wonderful hour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon.  He had come back, yes—come back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled; but it was strange how with this sense what he had come back to seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey had been all for the sake of it.  Slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself; he had been miraculously carried back—lifted and carefully borne as from where he had been picked up, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage.  Even with this he was suffered to rest, and what had now brought him to knowledge was the break in the long mild motion.

It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge—yes, this was the beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has only to lie and watch it grow.  This was the drift of his patience—that he had only to let it shine on him.  He must moreover, with intermissions, still have been lifted and borne; since why and how else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his stairs—situated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel—but on a deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread, couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth.  Mrs. Muldoon’s face had gone, but the other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that showed how he was still propped and pillowed.  He took it all in, and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink.  It was the two women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon’s having plied, at her usual hour, her latch-key—and on her having above all arrived while Miss Staverton still lingered near the house.  She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle—her calculation having been of the hour of the good woman’s visit; but the latter, blessedly, had come up while she was still there, and they had entered together.  He had then lain, beyond the vestibule, very much as he was lying now—quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously without bruise or gash; only in a depth of stupor.  What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.

“It must have been that I was.”  He made it out as she held him.  “Yes—I can only have died.  You brought me literally to life.  Only,” he wondered, his eyes rising to her, “only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?”

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this beatitude somehow answered everything.

“And now I keep you,” she said.

“Oh keep me, keep me!” he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again and stayed close, clingingly close.  It was the seal of their situation—of which he tasted the impress for a long blissful moment in silence.  But he came back.  “Yet how did you know—?”

“I was uneasy.  You were to have come, you remember—and you had sent no word.”

“Yes, I remember—I was to have gone to you at one to-day.”  It caught on to their “old” life and relation—which were so near and so far.  “I was still out there in my strange darkness—where was it, what was it?  I must have stayed there so long.”  He could but wonder at the depth and the duration of his swoon.

“Since last night?” she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.

“Since this morning—it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day.  Where have I been,” he vaguely wailed, “where have I been?”  He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan.  “What a long dark day!”

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment.  “In the cold dim dawn?” she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy.  “As I didn’t turn up you came straight—?”

She barely cast about.  “I went first to your hotel—where they told me of your absence.  You had dined out last evening and hadn’t been back since.  But they appeared to know you had been at your club.”

“So you had the idea of this—?”

“Of what?” she asked in a moment.

“Well—of what has happened.”

“I believed at least you’d have been here.  I’ve known, all along,” she said, “that you’ve been coming.”

“‘Known’ it—?”

“Well, I’ve believed it.  I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago—but I felt sure.  I knew you would,” she declared.

“That I’d persist, you mean?”

“That you’d see him.”

“Ah but I didn’t!” cried Brydon with his long wail.  “There’s somebody—an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay.  But it’s not me.”

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes.  “No—it’s not you.”  And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn’t it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile.  “No, thank heaven,” she repeated, “it’s not you!  Of course it wasn’t to have been.”

“Ah but it was,” he gently insisted.  And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks.  “I was to have known myself.”

“You couldn’t!” she returned consolingly.  And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, “But it wasn’t only that, that you hadn’t been at home,” she went on.  “I waited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I’ve told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps.  After a little, if she hadn’t come, by such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up.  But it wasn’t,” said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intentions—“it wasn’t only that.”

His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her.  “What more then?”

She met it, the wonder she had stirred.  “In the cold dim dawn, you say?  Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.”

“Saw me—?”

“Saw him,” said Alice Staverton.  “It must have been at the same moment.”

He lay an instant taking it in—as if he wished to be quite reasonable.  “At the same moment?”

“Yes—in my dream again, the same one I’ve named to you.  He came back to me.  Then I knew it for a sign.  He had come to you.”

At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better.  She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left.  “He didn’t come to me.”

“You came to yourself,” she beautifully smiled.

“Ah I’ve come to myself now—thanks to you, dearest.  But this brute, with his awful face—this brute’s a black stranger.  He’s none of me, even as I might have been,” Brydon sturdily declared.

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility.  “Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?”

He almost scowled for it.  “As different as that—?”

Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world.  “Haven’t you exactly wanted to know how different?  So this morning,” she said, “you appeared to me.”

“Like him?”

“A black stranger!”

“Then how did you know it was I?”

“Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been—to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you.  In the midst of that you came to me—that my wonder might be answered.  So I knew,” she went on; “and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself.  And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had—and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me.  He seemed to tell me of that.  So why,” she strangely smiled, “shouldn’t I like him?”

It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet.  “You ‘like’ that horror—?”

“I could have liked him.  And to me,” she said, “he was no horror.  I had accepted him.”

“‘Accepted’—?” Brydon oddly sounded.

“Before, for the interest of his difference—yes.  And as I didn’t disown him, as I knew him—which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t, my dear,—well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me.  And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.”

She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand—still with her arm supporting him.  But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, “You ‘pitied’ him?” he grudgingly, resentfully asked.

“He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,” she said.

“And haven’t I been unhappy?  Am not I—you’ve only to look at me!—ravaged?”

“Ah I don’t say I like him better,” she granted after a thought.  “But he’s grim, he’s worn—and things have happened to him.  He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.”

“No”—it struck Brydon; “I couldn’t have sported mine ‘down-town.’  They’d have guyed me there.”

“His great convex pince-nez—I saw it, I recognised the kind—is for his poor ruined sight.  And his poor right hand—!”

“Ah!” Brydon winced—whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers.  Then, “He has a million a year,” he lucidly added.  “But he hasn’t you.”

“And he isn’t—no, he isn’t—you!” she murmured, as he drew her to his breast.

(from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass)
Mannahatta

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,

Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,

I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,

Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,

Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,

Numberless crowded streets, high growths of iron, slender, strong, light, splendidly uprising toward clear

skies,

Tides swift and ample, well-loved by me, toward sundown,

The flowing sea-currents, the little islands, larger adjoining islands, the heights, the villas,

The countless masts, the white shore-steamers, the lighters, the ferry-boats, the black sea-steamers well-

model’d,

The down-town streets, the jobbers’ houses of business, the houses of business of the ship-merchants and

money-brokers, the river-streets,

Immigrants arriving, fifteen or twenty thousand in a week,

The carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses, the brown-faced sailors,

The summer air, the bright sun shining, and the sailing clouds aloft,

The winter snows, the sleigh-bells, the broken ice in the river, passing along up or down with the flood-tide or ebb-tide,

The mechanics of the city, the masters, well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes,

Trottoirs throng’d, vehicles, Broadway, the women, the shops and shows,

A million people—manners free and superb—open voices—hospitality—the most courageous and friendly young men,

City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!

City nested in bays! my city!

BOOK VIII

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

1

Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!

Clouds of the west—sun there half an hour high—I see you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than

you suppose,

And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations,

than you might suppose.

2

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day,

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the

scheme,

The similitudes of the past and those of the future,

The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and the passage

over the river,

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and

east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

3

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,

Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,

Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,

Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,

Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings,

oscillating their bodies,

Saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies and left the rest in strong shadow,

Saw the slow-wheeling circles and the gradual edging toward the south,

Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,

Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,

Look’d at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water,

Look’d on the haze on the hills southward and south-westward,

Look’d on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet,

Look’d toward the lower bay to notice the vessels arriving,

Saw their approach, saw aboard those that were near me,

Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor,

The sailors at work in the rigging or out astride the spars,

The round masts, the swinging motion of the hulls, the slender serpentine pennants,

The large and small steamers in motion, the pilots in their pilothouses,

The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels,

The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset,

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, the frolic-some crests and glistening,

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite storehouses by the docks,

On the river the shadowy group, the big steam-tug closely flank’d on each side by the barges, the hay-

boat, the belated lighter,

On the neighboring shore the fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night,

Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down

into the clefts of streets.

4

These and all else were to me the same as they are to you,

I loved well those cities, loved well the stately and rapid river,

The men and women I saw were all near to me,

Others the same—others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them,

(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

5

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,

I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it,

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,

In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,

I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,

I too had receiv’d identity by my body,

That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body.

6

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,

The dark threw its patches down upon me also,

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,

My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,

Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,

Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,

Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,

Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,

The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,

Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

7

Closer yet I approach you,

What thought you have of me now, I had as much of you—I laid in my stores in advance,

I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.

Who was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?

8

Ah, what can ever be more stately and admirable to me than mast-hemm’d Manhattan?

River and sunset and scallop-edg’d waves of flood-tide?

The sea-gulls oscillating their bodies, the hay-boat in the twilight, and the belated lighter?

What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly

by my nighest name as approach?

What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?

Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?

We understand then do we not?

What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?

What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?

9

Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!

Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!

Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after

me!

Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!

Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn!

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!

Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution!

Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly!

Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name!

Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress!

Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!

Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you;

Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current;

Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air;

Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from

you!

Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water!

Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, white-sail’d schooners, sloops, lighters!

Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset!

Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the

tops of the houses!

Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are,

You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul,

About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas,

Thrive, cities—bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers,

Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual,

Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting.

You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,

We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us,

We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,

We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,

You furnish your parts toward eternity,

Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.

Bibliography for E-Reserve and SECTION Breakdown available on E-Reserve Page