Not of father or mother was I produced, but of nine elementary forms: of the fruit of the trees; of the fruit of the primordial god; of primroses, the blossoms of the mount; of the flowers of trees and shrubs; of the earth in its terrene state was I modelled; of the flower of nettles and the water of the ninth wave.
— TALIESIN
In some way or other we are most of us peculiarly touched by one special attribute of nature: by the sea, by running water, by winds, mountains, trees; some more so, some less; others, again, so little that nothing, apart from their own appetites, appears to move them.
I judge these people by certain fixed insensibilities. They are neither depressed nor elated by the weather; they are unable to hear the bat’s sharp note, the singing sound of a pigeon’s wings in the air, or catch the scent of the bean-flower. They cannot tell the time of day without a watch, and sleep through that night-hour when the world turns, half rises, and shakes itself. Unless it be so suddenly warm as to force them to change their underwear, they are perfectly unaware of the coming of spring, that time when the blackbird’s song thrills like the passing of the Holy Spirit; when the adder slips its skin in the warm quarry, while the bark upon the beech is soft and supple as a lady’s glove.
And yet those who feel nothing whatever – though they seem to be standing for ever in their own light, blocking their own view – are an easier fit into the scheme of things than those who are ruled by one single element of nature, far more completely a part of it than the sailor and his ship are a part of the sea; living by it and with it: in some strange way – not physically, but spiritually – a part of it. How can I explain? Well, as the old gods were one with their fountains, woods, groves.
Of all these people the most elusive are those who have this – far and away, pre-natal – affinity with running water. Between these and the people of the marshes, leaden-eyed, straight-haired, heavy-footed, slow and deep as the turgid waters which rule them, there is so much difference that it seems impossible to believe that any single function of their lives can be the same.
You, my friend, to whom I write, may wonder at this long preamble; and yet without it how could I tell my story, gain the point I would impress, that point without which the whole thing – tragic enough in all conscience – would be nothing more than a confused medley of mishaps?
People of a single element and people of combined elements, however weighed with one or another, but more particularly if one sink ever so little to the mere animal, can never mix. Their consciences, their training may force them to compliance; but only for a while, however much they themselves may agonize over their own inadaptability. For it is ludicrous to imagine that cold people never feel their own coldness, inarticulate people fret at their own lack of expression; or that the dull and quiet are free from all desire for the lightness and gaiety of some more vivacious neighbour. The thing is that we may alter ourselves for a time, more particularly at the call of love, but forever must we spring back again like a bent bough to our own natural habit.
Sylvia Colquhoun belonged by nature to the people of the springs, with a nature so refined, so crystal clear, yet in a way so detached that there was nothing for her husband’s clumsy hands to grasp. She poured herself into them. Oh yes; she gave and gave, for she had been taught that everything, the whole body and soul of a woman, belongs to the man she marries; was as dismayed as he was – more so, for she was so much the more sensitive when she realized her failure – that they were sliding apart, that she could no more keep herself within his grasp than he, with his nature, could help letting her go.
One thing I know, and that is her heart was broken – as surely as the heart of ‘The Little Mermaid’ – between self-reproach and sorrow. For she believed that, from the very beginning, it was all her fault; realizing how she shrank from her husband’s obvious passions, drawn herself back within herself, conscious of a sense of pollution. What she failed to realize was how little Colquhoun realized anything of the sort: if he had possessed discrimination enough for that it might have been possible for him to cool his hot mouth at the fount of a love which was infinitely pure and unchanging, ‘forever fresh and still to be enjoyed’; to realize that there is more than one sort of happiness to be found with a woman.
She was fresh from a convent when he married her: friendship and kindred interests, the ordered shaping of thought and time, had surrounded her like a close-woven fence of wattles, sprouting green enough with innocent mirth. When first I knew her I thought I had never heard anything so delicious as her laugh, and there is no doubt about it that she felt stripped, alone in the open of life with this man and his boisterous moods, his noisy greed, his absorption in his appetites.
Of course, everything he said and did must be right, because he was her husband. But, then, what of the delicacies, the reservations which had been instilled into her from her cradle upward? Someone or something was wrong here.
The honeymoon was spent in Paris. I think she was too bewildered at that time to realize anything over-clearly; but she was very tired, drawn to a milk-like whiteness by the time she reached her new home. Her portrait is hanging on the wall opposite to me now, as I write. I painted it myself, and I kept it. Colquhoun had her – her, herself – as much as he was capable of grasping, and I had my picture, and have it still, while he … But that comes later.
She was very fair and delicately made, reminding me of a wood-anemone from the first day I saw her; her hair almost silver, her complexion pale and clear. Her head drooped a little on her slender neck, her shoulders sloped a trifle: her hands were long and slender and very white; she was the most graceful thing I ever saw. The portrait – as I word it, not the picture itself – carries something of an early Victorianism, a certain insipidity. But she could never have been insipid, for her eyes remained to be reckoned with – hazel-golden-brown – or grey with the warm lights of the willow catkin – it was difficult to say precisely which: they were so seldom the same for two minutes together, were like a stream for ever changing and reflecting; though I inclined to hazel in my picture, and I think that was the tint they most often showed when she was thoughtful and at rest.
The window of her own sitting-room fronted the long path which ends in the half-circle of ilex trees with the mountains beyond them; beneath the shadow of the ilex lay the pool in its blackness.
She went to her room almost immediately after her arrival home from her honeymoon, and passing through to the boudoir stood gazing out while her maid opened her trunks and lifted out the trays. Her husband found her there, and coming behind her put both hands over her shoulders, undid the wide blue ribbon of her little grey motor-bonnet, and taking it off, smoothed her silvery fair hair, already silky-smooth either side of the parting, breaking into curls above the ears; then tipped back her face and kissed her on the lips more quietly than was his wont.
‘Well, little wife, what do you think of it all?’
She pressed back against him, thankful for his nearness in the vaguely sad mood which had overcome her; for it was a still evening, an evening which showed that curious detachment and calm which comes with a colourless sunset and still air, which there was nothing in Colquhoun’s touch to disturb her.
‘It is sad; the dark trees and mountains and the dark water; still-water always hurts me – I don’t know why, but seems to hurt me here.’ She touched her breast as she spoke, with a little laugh at herself.
The man answered her laugh indulgently, for she was still a new and curious toy: ‘You women! All alike, all full of whimsies. But the pool is not so still as it looks; there’s a damnable underpull, as I know to my cost, for I was nearly drowned there as a boy. The water runs in and out, is fed continuously by seven springs which lie close together farther up the hill.’
‘Then if there are springs to feed it with there should be a fountain,’ she cried, laughing and clapping her hands, her pensiveness swept clear away by her childish pleasure at the thought. ‘How I would love to see it spraying up against those dark trees! All sparkling, rising and falling, full of light and shade – like life,’ she added more slowly, as if struck with some premonition, for there had been little enough of shade in her eighteen summers. But the mood was soon past, and she turned, clinging coaxingly to her husband’s arm, looking up at him, her eyes alight, her face delicately flushed. ‘Oh, Harry, do make me a fountain in the pool, so that I may see the moving water from my window; and let us grow a high hedge of pink and crimson roses either side of the path which leads to it – “The Way of Love” – that’s what we will call it – “The Way of Love”.’
Alas, she had another name for it not so many months later – ‘“Via Dolorosa” – that’s what I call it,’ she said; and then added, as though afraid that she had betrayed too much, ‘I’m sure there were never any roses with such thorns!’
For she got her flowers and her fountain, as I think she could have got anything at the time: a naked boy carved in stone, with head thrown back and a curved horn through which, night and day, he blew a feathery plume of water high into the air. But by the time it was completed Harry Colquhoun was already a trifle tired of his idyll, and all pastoral pleasures apart from sport.
Luckily there were neighbouring squires, and London friends who came to stay, sometimes for weeks at a time. His friends, not hers, for she hardly knew anyone apart from her school companions, who would scarcely have met the case, unless it were one, a dashing, bold-eyed brunette, named Judith, who had been the despair of the nuns, and who wrote more than once declaring that she meant to come and stay with her ‘darling sweet Sylvia’, for whom she had professed an almost overwhelming devotion; though it was not sufficient, during some two years, to prevent her finding the prospect of other visits more alluring.
It was during those months of early summer, just after her marriage, that I painted that portrait of my lady; and well I remember that Colquhoun was in a fury because she shivered ever so little in her white dress, rounding on me as though I were a servant for allowing her to stand in a draught. But I swallowed it as I would have swallowed anything for her sake, and kept him reminded of the careless invitation, which he gave me at parting, to look them up again some day soon; for I was certain, even then, that life was not going to prove too easy for the young wife.
Perhaps that first summer was not so bad; but then came the sad autumn with haunting winds, and a long dank winter – ‘an open season’, I believe they call it – during which Colquhoun spent most of his days with the hounds, and his evenings sleeping in a big chair before the fire, very red in the face and heavy in the jowl, save when there were visitors staying in the house: silent men with a passion for cards, noisy men with an equal passion for practical jokes; and loud-voiced, smartly-dressed women who brought their own special friends with them, and regarded their hostess no more than the flowers on the dinner-table.
The rose trees at either side of the long path grew apace, but they did not flower as they ought to have done. To make up for this, however, the fountain was like a perpetual, ever-fresh spray of blossom against the background of dark trees, and directly spring crept round again Sylvia Colquhoun, more and more alone, began to spend hours by its side, trailing her white fingers in the water, all dimpled and alive with showering drops.
Colquhoun laughed at her, jeered rather. ‘A pretty sort of wife, like a fish! For all the world like a fish!’
A friend sent him a live carp and he put it in the pool – ‘Just the sort of mate for that cold-blooded wife of mine,’ he declared.
He insisted more and more on her coldness; it served as an excuse for much, both to himself and others.
‘Poor dear Harry’ – that was what the women said. ‘What can anyone expect of a man tied to an insipid creature like that?’
‘She doesn’t care.’
‘No, she doesn’t care; a woman like that has milk and water instead of blood in her veins.’
‘And a damned good thing too,’ put in Lady Hardy, who looked and spoke like a fish-wife, but had more heart than the rest of them all put together. I heard her myself slap out at them, in response to the oft-repeated excuse for anything which might seem amiss in Colquhoun’s morals:
‘I’d be devilish sorry for any gal that cared two pins for that wine-laden, dog-eyed creature!’
There was a universal squeak at this. ‘Oh, Lady Hardy! How can you! We all love him; the dearest thing in the world, poor Harry!’
‘You, you! You love him with your skins; it goes no deeper than that. Stroke you and you purr; give you cream to lap and another woman to sharpen your claws upon and you’re happy.’
I suppose that by this time pretty well everyone knew of Colquhoun’s infidelities, all, that is, save Sylvia herself.
I went down once for a Saturday to Monday during the next autumn, but got little happiness out of my visit, for the house was full, and the mistress of it white and wistful-eyed, as elusive as a shadow.
‘She mopes,’ said Colquhoun. ‘That damned pool! – she’ll tumble in some day and drown herself, and that will be the end of it.’
He did not ask me to repeat my visit to Cattraeth again that time, perhaps because, going down to the smoking-room in search of a pet pipe, late one night when I thought the whole household was well asleep, I found him with ‘a damsel dark upon his knee’ – plump and dark, and after all no damsel, but another man’s wife.
I well remember his incongruous demand, as I stood hesitating, between awkwardness and disgust, as to ‘what in the name of God’ I wanted there. He was not in the least ashamed or frightened, I grant him that, only angry and impatient to get on with his amour.
Close on two years slipped by before I went down to North Wales again. It was the first week in August, and Harry Colquhoun was just back from Monte Carlo, very ill-tempered and restless and – or so I believe – short of money. There was no one else staying in the house, and perhaps he had been bored enough to suggest my being asked, for it was out of season for most sport and he had no patience for fishing. It is certain that he was more bored than any man I have ever seen, and scarcely stirred out, sat indoors, smoked, yawned, drank.
‘My Lady of the Fountain’, as I had grown to call her, was more elusive than ever; she did not avoid me, but she was no longer friendly and intimate as she had been; though it was evident that she liked having me there, for each time I spoke of leaving she was in a sort of panic, as though afraid of being more alone.
‘I shall slip quite away if you go,’ she cried one day, actually tugging at my sleeve with something of her old childish impulse, between laughter and tears, with that sort of friendliness which I had grown to miss.
I remember well how the phrase, ‘slip quite away’, haunted me, with a sense of some sub-conscious meaning: until several nights later, when I lay awake thinking of her, as always – listening to the owl’s dismal cry – it came to me that this, after all, was what she had been doing, all those months – slipping away.
And I remember thinking that there was really very little of her left to follow. To follow what? I can scarcely say – but that part of her which seemed to have already stolen away. To put it more plainly, I thought that if anything happened to her body now there would be no great uprooting, so impressed was I by her air as of a creature apart, and – I know the word must give a wrong impression of something heartless, but I cannot help it – inhuman.
It was like Daphne, and had Colquhoun been one whit less gross I might have felt some sympathy for him, ‘pursuing a maiden and clasping a tree’ – or even less warm, less lifelike in … well, in the sense in which we count life.
And yet though she seemed all spirit, she was not the sort of woman to whom one could apply the word ‘spiritually-minded’, with whom one could even connect the idea of a conventional heaven; for it was not the earth – the world of pure nature – for which she was unfitted. In her sadness and gladness, in her every mood, she was essentially of it, at its purest and best; it was the people in it whom she found so difficult. I often wonder what they had really made of her at the convent. There were so many things she could not grasp, things which are part of the faith of our country which must have seemed to her just stupid or cruel.
I remember Colquhoun, with the odd inconsequency of such people, actually complaining that she never went to church. ‘Damn it all!’ he said, ‘but a man likes to see his wife a bit religious; proper sort of thing, you know, particularly in the country.’
But she was not religious, or spiritually-minded; and she was not – as I have said before – in all ways quite human. There was that coldness and elusiveness; there was the fact of her not caring for children, shrinking from them, indeed, which was the one trait in her character that jarred me, until I caught sight of her face one day, as she stood watching a mother playing with a two-year-old on a cottage doorstep, and realized an expression in her eyes as piteously sad as any Peri at the gate of Paradise. I think – and I grew to realize her in a way that was almost uncanny, ‘felt’ her every mood – it was not so much that she desired a child (I remember her shrinking when someone offered to let her hold a baby in her arms), as that she wished, with a desperate craving of her heart, that she were able to feel as other women felt.
For a while Harry Colquhoun had held her to humanity. I verily believe it was his kisses which first woke her to life as we know it; for red-faced and blustering, he was yet the sun of her springtime. And, strange to say, he held her still, though she seemed to have given up her strained endeavour to satisfy him, standing apart with the puzzled pain of a child who cannot realize where it has failed.
Then there came a letter from Judith Farroll, actually fixing a date when she would be free to visit her ‘darling Sylvia’.
My lady broached the subject at luncheon – which was Harry Colquhoun’s breakfast out of the hunting season – nervously enough, for one never knew what tiny spark might set him off in a blaze.
‘More milk and water!’ he sneered; but still he took it well enough; there was a blank fortnight before his own friends were due to arrive, a houseful of them, and anything was better than nothing.
‘Anything better than nothing!’ – as if there could be anything negative about Judith. ‘Milk and water!’ – flesh and flame rather!
She was tall, small-waisted, deep-bosomed, with luscious dark eyes, the colour of carnations in her cheeks, and a full red underlip, pulled a little out of shape with biting and pouting. She was glancing sideways at Harry as she folded her friend in her arms that first evening, and he was fired in a moment. I saw that.
She permeated the house. She was like a flower with an over-heavy perfume; upon my soul, I believe there was something noxiously sweet in her very atmosphere; between that and her rich voice at the piano, when she sang to Colquhoun, looking up as he lounged across it, one knee on a stool at her side, her floating chiffon scarves, the tap of her high heels on the polished floors, the house was never free to draw breath. Only in the garden by the fountain was coolness and quiet, my lady sitting trailing her white fingers in the water, none the less lonely for the advent of her friend.
Even when the other visitors arrived Judith queened it over them. One night when the mistress of the house was unwell she sat at the head of the table, wearing a satin gown of the rich colour of the outer cup of a wine-tinted magnolia, and a diamond necklace, which she involuntarily fingered as though it were something new and she was not yet accustomed to the weight of it on her firm white neck; while Harry Colquhoun drank steadily and devoured her – there is no other word for it – with his moist, bloodshot eyes.
I stayed on and on. I don’t think Colquhoun troubled his head about me, and I would not have cared if he had, for the time had come when I believed that my lady might need me.
But she did not; I might have known that. She never really needed anyone save that coarse brute who owned her; and when the trouble came she took her own quiet way of dealing with it.
Perhaps she could not sleep; she had often complained of sleeplessness, and I believe she was as restless as the wind of dawn, that wind which the sailors learn to look for with dread. Anyhow, slipping silently downstairs one morning, with what restless longing for the open God only knows, she encountered her husband coming out of Judith Farroll’s room.
She might have sought the solace which had never failed her at the side of the pool with its fountain, grown faint and fallen in. Anyhow that is what Colquhoun declared must have happened.
‘She would not have been such a fool as to – to…’ Even his lips, looking all the grosser for their trembling pallor, refused to frame that word. It would put him ‘in such a damned awkward position’ if anyone suspected anything of the sort. Anyhow it was all part of his pestilential ill-luck that his wife, of all people, should have encountered him that morning. He was always perfectly indifferent to the servants, and would no more have thought of saving Judith’s character than his own.
It was her maid who found her, going to the usual place to warn her mistress that it was time to come in and make ready for breakfast; and it was I – thank Heaven that I was at least able to save her from more indifferent hands – who carried her indoors and upstairs to her own room, where I laid her on the bed: very sweet and wise-looking, and no whit disfigured, save that her hair hanging either side of her face in two long plaits was slightly darkened by the water.
I stayed on for the funeral, then I went back to town. I was deadened by grief, and yet in some way relieved. For no one could touch her now; something of her had merged with the element to which she rightly belonged, and as for the rest, the kindly earth would see to that. The main thing was that she was free.
As to Colquhoun, I was conscious of no particular resentment against him; it seemed scarcely his fault that he was sheer animal, warped out of all image of divinity by his hard-drinking progenitors; as little responsible as the swine for the pearls, infinitely preferring husks.
After a while I even grew to feel sorry for him. He told me, at parting that time, to use the place when I needed a breath of country air, wringing my hand, with tears in his eyes; for he seemed to have grown to count on me in his blundering way during that dreadful week of the inquest and funeral.
I went down for a few days that autumn, just before the beginning of the hunting season, while Colquhoun was still abroad, gambling wildly, from what I had heard, with a train of dissolute men and women for ever at his heels.
I do not know why I went; but the kind of impulse which one feels must be obeyed came to me, and I telegraphed to the housekeeper, asking her to expect me the very next day.
She was glad enough to see anyone, poor thing. The house was half empty; she would not keep the servants. That was what she told me at dinner the first night, supplementing the services of a raw young footman. She made the remark with an air of close-lipped secrecy; but as I forbore to question her she came out with the whole story when she looked in at the smoking-room the last thing that night, on the pretence of asking if I needed anything more, but really, I am sure, to unburden her soul.
There was something queer about the house. The fountain had ceased to play! I interrupted her there. Of course I remembered it had stopped working that – that day; but surely it had been put right since then.
The housekeeper drew down her underlip and smoothed out the front of her black silk gown with an ‘Um, um,’ which said as plainly as any more definite words, ‘Things are not so simple as they may seem to you, in your ignorance, if you’ll excuse me, sir.’
Her broad, colourless face was coruscated with numberless lines which seemed to come from nowhere and go nowhere, as though some mad surveyor had scratched out the track of innumerable roads across some wide, mud-caked flat; lines which marked the passage of no particular emotion or passion, though at the moment the whole was stamped with a look of almost defiant fear. And yet there was that sort of pride, as of a person who has something dreadful to divulge.
‘Well, sir, I’m sure I hope you won’t be disturbed or made uncomfortable in any way,’ she remarked with an air of one who cherished an almost pleasurable knowledge that such would be the case. From the mere words one might have imagined that she had dropped the subject of the fountain; but I was convinced to the contrary and drew her on by the simple expedient of saying nothing, looking at her with that air of grave inquiry which forces people of her stamp to words.
‘There’s no repairing the danged thing!’ she burst out suddenly, in vehement contradiction to my former words; ‘how is it possible to do anything with it? At the outside the springs seem to have run dry! There’s no water coming from the hillside – none to be seen, out there. Bone dry! All of them, every single one, the whole seven! up above the ground, as deep as they can dig. But there’s deeper places than that – the water’s somewhere for certain – certain sure. An’ if you don’t believe me –’ Suddenly she drew herself together. ‘I’m sure I beg your pardon, sir, to seem so excited – upset. But it’s lonely when the house is empty, an’ not be able to talk to the maids an’ all.’
‘You’d better sit down, Mrs Brice.’
She sat down at once, almost as if her knees were shaking under her; well into the chair, too, not on the edge as she would ordinarily have done.
‘It’s silly of me – but it gets on my nerves. An’ those girls, as won’t go upstairs in the dark, running with their ears back like hares, so to speak, and their eyes half out of their heads. And the water – well, where did it go?’ She leant a little forward, her hand pressed against the edge of the table at which I had been writing. ‘That’s what they – what we all want to know and are yet scared o’ knowing, for certain that is. Inside us’ – she went on with a sudden gesture, strangely dramatic in one so servile – ‘inside us we know – we all know; those of us that don’t run ourselves out in hysterics, and shriekings and gigglings: we know things we daren’t say – making them more real by exact words, as it were.’
‘About the fountain, you mean? Oh, well, I suppose it’s just that the springs have run dry; they do sometimes, you know.’
‘If I thought that was all – could think that – should I be sitting here now? Listen!’ She held up her finger, the further to attract my attention. ‘The maids are in bed, there’s no one to draw water, no one in the house save us two; where’s the water coming from now, where is it? Tell me that, sir?’ She was almost triumphant, forgetting her fear.
For I was conscious of it, and she knew it, had been ever since the quiet of the evening fell upon the house – that soft, continuous sound of running water.
‘Some defective pipe, with the air in it.’
‘Not it!’ All the woman’s obsequiousness was lost in the sense of having got me there. ‘I’ve had man after man in to see about it, an’ there’s nothing to be done, nothing! Of course there’s nothing. I’ve never told the maids, I’ve told no one.’ She spoke proudly there, and indeed there was something like heroism in what, by her next words, she proved to have kept to herself. ‘But when they turned it off at the main it was the same – running, running, just the same; forever running, till it near drives me mad with its trickle. Though only at evening, mind you. Night after night it goes up and down the stairs, filling the house with damp – reeking it is, reeking.’
‘Nonsense, nonsense!’
The housekeeper pushed back her chair and rose. There was a fire in the room in which I was sitting, and an immense pile of logs burnt in the hall. When I arrived about tea-time the atmosphere had felt stifling after the frosty air outside; but now, as she led me to the foot of the stairs, I was struck by a dank moisture, which chilled me to the bone, set me shivering with a sense of cold water down my back.
‘We were obliged to take the carpet off the stairs; I dare say you noticed that, sir,’ she remarked, in a monotonous, droning voice, as though determined to put everything in as matter-of-fact a light as possible. ‘I would have put it down when I heard that you were coming, but it wasn’t fit. Besides – I’ll trouble you to look what would it have been like in one night? – There, now! See there!’ She stooped, lowering the candle to the level of the third step, and drew with her finger upon the dark oak, all greyed with moisture.
Straightening herself, she ran her fingers along the top of the wide, flat banisters, then made me touch my own hand to the underside, where the drops hung.
‘The house is damp.’
‘Yes, sir, you’re right there. It is damp.’ She stood for a moment with the candle in one hand, the other over her mouth as though she felt her lips tremble. ‘But it was never damp before, when the water in the springs ran the way God made it to run. Why wasn’t it never damp before? – if you’ll excuse my asking you that question, sir. I’ve been here close on thirty years, an’ a drier house I never came across. But now! It’s wringing, fair wringing! If it was all over the house there’d be no grappling with it. But it’s only across the hall and up the stairs, and in two rooms – as yet – as yet. But the damp and the mould of it! It’s beyond all belief! I keep the rooms aired as best I can, kindle the fires myself, have them going pretty well night and day. I’m fond of the place, fond of Mr Harry … Well, I held him on my knee when he was a baby – though he has his faults, as we all have.’ She dropped to silence for a moment, glaring at me. ‘There never used to be anything wrong with the house, an’ I won’t give it up unless I’m driven; it’s my duty to stand by it. But – but – well, it curdles my blood. Nothing to be seen, as far as I’m concerned, only the sound of running water and the dampness. Though the maids do say –’
‘What do they say?’
‘Some say that it’s – it’s – against the light there’s nothing, but against anything dark, as it were, a picture on the stairway – well, they say as how it’s the shadow of the –’ she hesitated, drawing her shoulders together and turning her head furtively, as though the mere words were enough to bring the thing to her elbow – ‘the ghost of – of –’
‘The ghost of what?’ I was in terror as to what her next words might be, and gave vent to a boisterous laugh of pure relief when she replied that it was ‘the ghost of the fountain’ which the maids swore to seeing.
‘That’s good! That’s a joke! I never heard of anything like that! The ghost of a fountain! As though it had actually lived, possessed a soul. Really, Mrs Brice, really!’
Still laughing, I took the candle from her hand and went upstairs.
But as I lay awake that night I remembered how she had tried to tell me something else, which I had half heard as I moved away: confused words to the effect that, while to some it seemed like a shadowy plume of water, to others it bore the aspect of a woman, ethereal as mist. ‘Both!’ cried one hussy, brazen with fear, asserting what must have seemed, to her own limited intelligence, an impossibility. ‘Both at once! Not altogether a woman, nor altogether water.’
This elaboration of what I endeavoured, against my own convictions, to regard as a senseless joke, came out later, for I lingered on for several weeks, restless and miserable, yet unable to tear myself away.
There was a blank air of repression about the place. The weather was warm for the time of year and very dry, so that it seemed strange to look up into the hard, brilliant blue sky and see it crossed by nothing more than bare boughs. The few early spring flowers were warped and stunted, the parched ground cracked; at the bottom of the fountain basin was a layer of crusted grey mud; even the Cupid with his horn appeared shrunken and grey with drought.
I haunted the empty pool at all hours of the day and night, gazing into it as one might gaze into the face of a deaf-mute who holds some secret upon which one’s whole life depends, with a will so intense that it seemed as though it were bound to force speech.
And yet I had no idea what I expected to see or hear there; I only knew that I could not keep away; that the moment I awoke some formless necessity seemed to drag me out of bed, to sit on the crumbling stonework at the edge of that featureless expanse of stinking soil, my whole heart and mind drawn to a fine point by my desire to get at the secret of something I could not fathom; to understand, to help, to comfort: striving against nothing and for nothing, with a soul as thirsty and arid as the parched earth itself.
Sometimes when I was alone at night the soft sound of running water through the house grew to something so like a desolate weeping that I would actually cry aloud, asking what was amiss, what could be done; and yet out there by the side of that empty basin it was even worse.
At last I could endure my impotency no longer and went away, off to Norway for the summer months and then back to London.
It was mid-December when I received a curiously urgent telegram from Colquhoun asking me to stay with him, and to come as soon as possible – ‘for God’s sake.’
The autumn had been one of furious winds and heavy rain. As I drove from the station I saw that some of the finest elms in Cattraeth Park had been torn up by the roots; one monster, indeed, lay right across the road, so that Colquhoun was obliged to turn the restive, thin-skinned chestnut which he was driving on to the grass to avoid it. He had formerly been very gentle with animals, was noted for his light hands; but I could not help noticing how he mismanaged the nervous beast, and wondering if I should ever reach the house alive between the two of them; whether we should both be overturned, and pitched out, or killed by a falling tree. For even then there was half a gale blowing, the sky was whipped into tangled hanks of grey and white, while the dead leaves were driven to heaps in every hollow, the short grass flattened to a curious whiteness.
Colquhoun had almost entreated me to come, but he did not appear over-glad to see me. Indeed, excepting to curse the trembling mare, he never opened his mouth during the whole of the six-mile drive.
We had tea in the smoking-room. At least, I had tea; Colquhoun himself took whisky. I noticed how his hand shook as he poured it out, how he was changed, bloated and yet haggard, standing by the fire with his glass on the mantelpiece, his head drooping between his shrunken shoulders, save when he jerked it backwards, staring round defiantly as though asking what right anyone had to be up to – God only knows what, right at his elbow there; until at last, breaking off in the midst of an attempt at conversation, he turned and left the room, while a moment later I heard him cross the hall, open the door that led into the garden, and slam it behind him.
After a while the housekeeper came to ask if I would not like to see my room, for there seemed to be no proper servants about the place, an uncouth boy with frightfully creaking boots and not over-clean hands having brought in the tea.
As I followed her through the hall and up the stairs, I was struck by the same overwhelming odour of damp as on my last visit. But Mrs Brice volunteered no remark, contented herself with merely answering mine; while I noticed something taut and rigid about the woman – who had grown thinner, and even more leaden-coloured and lined – as though she were determined not to say a word.
There was a good fire burning in my room and I sat before it, smoking; then, while I was upstairs, dressed for dinner in leisurely comfort.
As I crossed the hall, rather after seven, the outer door opened and a boisterous, wet wind eddied in, setting every other door in the place slamming; while it must have whirled right up the stairs, for there was a sound like the report of guns along the two corridors above me, and the whole house echoed in its emptiness.
A little Aberdeen bitch, which had left the smoking-room at Colquhoun’s heels, ran past me yelping, and down the long passage towards the kitchen quarters, where she threw herself against the baize door and disappeared.
As I turned I saw that my host had entered the hall, and wondered if he had kicked the poor beast, or what had happened to upset it so.
But the next moment I was undeceived on this point, for he began whistling and calling to her, almost tenderly.
‘She’s gone through the baize door to the kitchen,’ said I.
‘Ah, well, she’s chosen the best part of the house, it’s warm and dry there. Poor bitch, she can’t stand it, and no wonder.’
‘Can’t stand what?’
‘What – what! why, what’s with me, to be sure,’ he answered morosely, and brushed past, too much absorbed in his own misery to realize his rudeness or trouble himself as to whether or no I understood his words.
He had been out for at least two hours, and all that time I had heard the rain beating against the windows.
‘You must be wringing wet; you’ll catch your death,’ I said, for I saw he had no overcoat, that his clothes clung round him, while the water poured from him in pools.
At this he laughed wildly, pausing half-way up the stairs and looking down at me, with a sort of fierce raillery in his glance.
‘Catch my death! Not I, not that way, anyhow! I’m used to it, or ought to be,’ he said, and then I thought I heard him add, as he turned and stumped upwards – as heavily as though his limbs were leaden-weighted – ‘Catch my death! No such luck; I only wish I could!’
That evening, dinner over, we sat in the smoking-room, silent, for my brain had already exhausted itself in the search for some topic of conversation which would not drop dead the moment it was launched, killed by a dark, uncomprehending stare from my host, or, worse still, an utterly misplaced comment.
We were both smoking, Colquhoun sitting with his chair almost into the fire, bending forward with his elbows on his knees – save when he jerked round with that defiant stare – shivering as though he were in an ague; while Wasp, the Aberdeen, sitting pressed against her master’s knee, shivered as he shivered, with her eyes fixed on his face as though awaiting some word of command.
The ripple of running water was very distinct through the house, and there was a desperate sadness in the sound which can be so pleasant and cheerful.
I think I must have said something to start Colquhoun off; I don’t know. If I did it was wiped out of my mind by the torrent of words into which he suddenly launched forth.
‘I can’t stand it any longer, Herries; that’s why I sent for you. No one else will come, no one else will stay in the house, and no wonder! That infernal din of running water. I tell you it is driving me mad. Water on the brain, I suppose that’s what it is, eh, eh? A funny thing for me to have!’ He gave an ugly laugh, which terminated suddenly, as though it were broken off. ‘That damned tricklin’ an’ gurglin’! Hear it now? … Or perhaps you can’t hear it, eh? It’s not there; I was only humbugging.’ A furtive look came into his face, turned over his shoulder towards me, as he rose, took a tobacco pouch from the mantelshelf and filled his pipe afresh. ‘Only a joke – a man must have his joke, you know. It’s dull enough here, in all conscience; somehow I’m clean off hunting this season.’
‘Well, there is the sound, clear enough,’ I said, and at that he gave a sort of gasp, as though of relief.
‘That’s right, now! You hear it too. Then we know where we are. Sometimes I think I’ve “got ‘em”. Only other people do hear it, though they pretend not to … Hear it, feel it, smell it, rot with it! Why, it’s everywhere – at least everywhere I go. I changed my room, went and slept in the other wing, but it was there too, damn it all, driving old Brice nearly mad. “I can deal with it when it keeps to its own place, Master Harry,” she said, with her mouth like a rat-trap, “but if it once starts stavanging all over the house we’re done for.” Its own place! That shows how people can get used to things. Its own place! – as though its own place was across my front hall, up my stairs and into my bedroom. Good God! I sometimes wonder if I shall sleep in a dry bed again, or get free of the sound of that damned trickle; and … hang it all, Herries, it isn’t as though it were like the sound of ordinary water; it weeps, that’s what it does – weeps, there’s no other word for it.’
‘What do you make of it?’
‘I don’t know.’ He leant back with his two elbows pushed out behind him on to the mantelshelf, glowering at me so desperately that I was as sorry for him as I had once been for her. ‘People can’t be things; there’s animate and inanimate nature. Oh, hang it all, running water is animate enough, but … Well, I learnt it all at school, but I can’t put it into words; you know what I mean – water’s not like – well, human beings.’
‘You mean it’s not life.’
‘No, it’s not life,’ he answered very slowly; then in a burst: ‘But what is life? Tell me that. It used to seem easy enough – animal, vegetable, mineral, that’s what they taught us – but there’s nothing clear or separate these days. Look here, I don’t believe She was ever quite true to life, as we count it – you know, warm blood an’ passion, an’ making goats of ourselves, an’ all that. There’s something one could never quite get hold of – it used to drive me mad at first.’
‘Yes, I know.’ There was no need for me to ask whom he meant, though he had not mentioned his wife’s name since I came to the house.
‘Though in her own way she was chock full of life,’ he went on sadly; ‘a sort of life: gay as a bird, until I started playing the fool, breaking her up. For that’s what I did, you know that; you always knew it. You womanish sort o’ artist chaps know a damned sight too much of both sides; but you were right there. And yet – look here, Herries, I believe, ‘pon my soul, I believe she loved me, in her own way. She wouldn’t give me all this devilish uneasiness if she could help it; I take my oath on that! She’s uncommon sorry. Sorry! Well, listen, doesn’t it sound for all the world as though she were crying over it? Wandering, don’t you know, sort of wandering up and down like a lost child: driven – well, damn it all, driven as I’m driven.’
‘She … What do you mean?’ I asked, curious to hear what he really did make of it all.
‘She – why, she —’ He paused, his face flushed to a heavy crimson, and he stared at me hardly, as though he were putting me to the test, wondering how much he might dare to tell me, without the risk of a burst of asinine laughter. I think he was reassured by what he saw on my face, but anyhow the thing was beyond his power of expression and he could only murmur something about its being ‘all the same thing’.
‘You mean she’ – for the life of me I couldn’t use the words ‘your wife’ – ‘or the soul of her, and the running water are one?’ He nodded, and I went on: ‘That she was so fond of the fountain, so one with it?’ I paused. I too was helpless; it would have needed one of the ancient Greeks, with whom such strange interminglings were an integral part of nature, to put the thing into words. But he realized what I meant and nodded again, with a quick glance of relief at my ready comprehension.
Presently we sat down and lit another pipe, while we tried to talk it out in our English tongue-tied fashion.
One conclusion to which he was drawn and from which he was by no means to be separated, surprised me. Sylvia was not responsible, though she was the instrument. She was being revenged for the slights which had been put upon her. But she was not responsible: was rather the tool of some power infinitely old, pagan and fearful, which demanded a certain sacrifice in payment of all that she had endured; some power which had said, ‘She is mine, of my kingdom, and you must pay the price, even if it is through her, the sufferer.’
It was strange how Colquhoun had reached such a conclusion, following out, perhaps for the first time in his life, a definite train of thought. Maybe he had, also for the first time, known what it was to endure sleepless nights, those forcing hours of fancy.
‘That she should suffer too? That’s nothing! The old God of the Bible was the same: it did not matter who was hurt as long as it was not His pride. And now “They’re” just the same – “They” or “He” – I don’t know what; maybe you know, you’ve studied those sort of things – but those old Druidical beliefs, I have heard of them, as who hasn’t, living down here? – and all my people before me. Well, it seems to me that it’s something like that – something left over. There’s the blood sacrifice, now. The old chaps ‘ud do nothing without it – build a house, launch a ship, raise an altar. And if any damned silly thing went wrong it was the same old cry, “A blood offering”. Well, that’s what They want of me – an’ that’s what she knows They want.’
‘Sylvia! Sylvia, the gentlest creature on God’s earth.’
He looked at me with a sudden unexpected shrewdness. ‘And yet not quite of God’s earth – you know that. I remember when first we married I felt – well, you wouldn’t believe it, the sort I am – but I felt that I’d jolly well try to be different, she was so sweet and white, so apart from anything I had ever come across. And I remembered how my old mother used to say her prayers, thought no end of ‘em, taught them to me when I was a kid. I suggested to her that we should – should’ – he coloured shamefacedly – ‘you know what a man feels like when he first marries a girl of that sort; it doesn’t last, I grant it doesn’t last: but somehow, as if he was in church … Well, I half suggested that we should pray together, that she should help to make me somehow decenter. It wasn’t that I was drunk or anything,’ he added rather pitifully. ‘I suppose even the worst of us get queer notions of that sort into our heads at times. I’ve known men – well, it would surprise you. She was ready enough, eager as a child, she would have done anything in the world for me; you know that, Herries – anything. Oh, but it wasn’t there, simply wasn’t there. I can’t explain. Sweet through and through she was, but certain things which used to count with my womenkind – it was no good, she couldn’t grasp them. She had been through everything, they had drilled her in the convent, but you could tell that it didn’t touch her, the real her. It’s like inoculating a man – you can’t make it take. Beauty she understood, and the trees and the flowers, and – well, you know the water, Herries, running water. I once heard an awfully clever chap say that you created your own God, or became part of Him. I couldn’t make head or tail of it at the time, but somehow I remembered and it came back to me. It seemed to be like that with Sylvia; she – she’ – he hesitated, then out of a sheer lack of words he blundered into the most convincing sentence imaginable: ‘She worshipped, and she was.’
He drank a good deal of whisky after that and began to wander, embarking on a long tale of some dream which he could never get away from, a dream of a white woman and seven white hounds with crimson ears, which I counted as balderdash, until after I had helped him up the reeking stairs and into his bed; when, sitting smoking by the fire in my own room, the sudden memory came to me of how the sacred hounds of the Druidical gods were white with scarlet ears, and how the springs which had fed the fountain were seven in number.
Next morning I tackled Colquhoun in real earnest, begging him to go away, abroad, big-game hunting in South Africa or heiress-hunting in America – anywhere. But he would not even hear of it; he had not been away for more than a night or two since early that spring when he was at Monte Carlo, and somehow he seemed to be bitten with the idea that he could not go. ‘It was worse when I was away last time, an’ far worse when I came back.’ That was what he said. ‘No, by God, I’ll stick it out somehow. Who knows, perhaps They’ll get what they want, then there’ll be peace for the old place and the whole bally lot of us. Six foot by two of dry sod – it wouldn’t be so bad, anyhow.’
I told him not to be an ass; I was frankly alarmed at his manner, and I talked it over with Mrs Brice next day while I watched Colquhoun from the window of her room, sitting on the stone margin of the pool, poking holes in the dry mud with his stick. It was then that she told me something of what had happened, that last summer after he came back from abroad. Things had been queer before – well, I knew; when was it I had been there? – March, was it not?
Colquhoun came home at the end of June and had a party of friends to stay in the house. It had been terribly hot in London and they were glad to get away; besides, they weren’t the sort of people who would ever stay anywhere for a regular season. The housekeeper stiffened visibly as she spoke, and I gathered from that what sort they were. There had been many a wild crew there before; still, people with a more or less assured position. Gradually it all came out; the ‘ladies’ – the word was uttered with a sniff which discounted it – drank whisky and water and smoked in their bedrooms – and not alone either. They ruined the best carpets by powdering from head to foot, to judge by the mess they made. Mrs Brice opined that it was to save themselves the trouble of bathing, but I know better; the sort she described are impeccable in that direction, anyhow. They larked up and down the passages in their nightdresses, transparent crêpe-de-chine – at least, at the very beginning. Later on they flew through them, wrapping their filmy draperies as close as though they were afraid of some clutching hand, for they were more scared than the maids; showed it too, as real ladies would never have done; while – cause for the crowning condemnation – they called the housekeeper ‘Bricey’ – she who knew her place and kept it – one of them actually throwing an arm round her waist one evening and laying her head on her shoulder, declaring that she was ‘a dear old dug-up’, and made her ‘sick with laughing’ – ‘In front of the gentlemen and all’ – she, Brice, having been sent for with a needle and thread to mend a torn flounce.
Colquhoun, as it seemed, favoured no one in particular, though the women hung round him, fought over him. ‘You could tell how he saw clean through them,’ remarked the housekeeper with pride, as though this freed her master from all blame.
At first the women quarrelled, abused each other like fishwives. Mrs Brice gave a graphic account of how she saw a little one fly at a big one and actually stamp on her insteps with sharp Louis Quinze heels.
Then suddenly they drew together. ‘There’s something damned funny about the bloomin’ house!’ That was what they said.
No single one of the women would go up to bed alone: they would gather together in the hall, with the men laughing at them uproariously, and then fly upstairs. And there was something to be frightened at, too – their satin slippers were all blotched with damp in the morning – the housemaid used to put them to dry on the window-sills; the tails of their delicate gowns ‘such a sight as never was!’ They shuddered as they touched their fingers to the banisters.
Then one evening they all came down again, pouring into the hall, and across to the dining-room, where such of the men as were not playing cards still sat over their wine, clinging together, shrieking like nothing so much as a flock of brightly-plumaged parrots.
They had gone up the stairs together, kept together, but all the same they had felt ‘as chirpy as anything’ till they reached the top, when on a sudden they realized that there was Something – or Somebody – before them.
It touched Rosie Vallenge. Rosie was sitting on a man’s knee with her arms round his neck, sobbing and gasping. ‘Good Lord!’ he cried suddenly, and made a movement as though to fling her aside. ‘Look at the front of your frock – all wet, girl!’
Then it had touched her … It was like a woman against the dark panelling; they were all agreed as to that: and yet transparent, silvery as water. Like water – well, only look at Rosie’s dress, a delicate mauve satin all splashed and stained.
Mrs Brice had run out into the hall, hearing the clamour even behind her baize door; the other men had come in from the smoking-room and were laughing boisterously enough at the women, yet with an edge on their laugh, for they had only just been talking over it all – ‘the confounded queerness of the place.’
Harry Colquhoun had risen from the table and stood leaning against the mantelpiece in his favourite attitude, with his shoulders raised, his elbows stuck out behind him, resting upon it.
His head was bent, his face grey; at least, that is what Mrs Brice said.
Suddenly he looked up and shouted at her for the keys of his wife’s rooms, which had not been used since her death, mentioning her name there in front of them all, which he would never have done had he been in his right mind.
When Mrs Brice pretended that she had not got them – she had never cared for her late mistress, but she did not like the idea of her rooms being invaded by ‘that muck’ – Colquhoun yelled at her with a curse: ‘Well, get ‘em, woman!’ and she was obliged to obey.
When she came back with the keys he was upstairs, outside Mrs Colquhoun’s door, and his face had turned from white to a heavy crimson. The women were at the other side of the landing, which ran round the top of the hall like a balcony – clinging together, staring across at the group of men who were gathered about him – more than one propping himself against the wall, scarcely able to stand upright – laughing, giving advice, making suggestions.
Colquhoun was the only one who seemed quite sober, sure of himself; though so queer and ‘stony like’ that it might be he had passed the convivial stage.
He took the key from the housekeeper with a steady hand and opened the door into his wife’s bedroom, passed through it into a little dividing dressing-room, and so on into the boudoir.
It had been a breathlessly hot day, there had been no rain for close on a month, and yet the damp of it, the awful dank chilliness struck to the bone. Some of the men, so Mrs Brice said, actually turned up their collars as though not thinking what they were doing.
The room had been done in pale blue and white, very fresh and delicate. But now the blue hangings at the windows were stained with damp; great blotches stood out against the walls; the muslin draperies of the dressing-table clung round it like the clothes round a drowned man. In the boudoir someone pulled a book from the shelves and found the sides of it grey with mould.
‘For the Lord’s sake why don’t you open the window and let in a little fresh air!’ cried one man; then, pulling aside the curtain, found that the windows were all pushed up as far as they would go, while the breath of the outer air was hot and dry as an oven.
Some of the women had crept in; one put her hand on the bed and shuddered: there was a damp patch on the pillow, the dark blue carpet was all paddled over with it.
Suddenly she gave a shriek, crying out, ‘A toad! Toad – ugh, the nasty thing!’ and gathering together, they fled.
But it was not a toad, only a dead leaf lying on the carpet which Mrs Brice herself had brushed over, that very morning, locking the door after her when she had finished: a dark, water-rotted leaf, almost a skeleton, such as one might find at the bottom of a well.
The house-party broke up after that. One or two of the men lingered on, but not for long; they declared that the place affected their livers.
Now and then a chance visitor turned up, but never stayed for long. The most persistent was what Mrs Brice called ‘a poor frayed piece’ who seemed to have nowhere else to go. One of the men had left her behind, as though forgotten, and Colquhoun took no notice of her; perhaps that was why the housekeeper, in whose comfortable room she took occasional refuge, declared her to have been ‘more sinned against than sinning’. But even she left at last, saying that she would rather be in the morgue.
Several times Colquhoun went away, but he always came back sooner than he was expected, ‘dropping in upon me all of a sudden’, as Mrs Brice put it, ‘with a look in his eyes – God forgive me for comparing any Christian, above all my own master, to a heathen beast with no soul – but for all the world the same as that there dog of his.’
I knew that look in Wasp’s eyes, puzzled, anxious, in a way licentious; and I remembered now that Lady Hardy had spoken of Colquhoun – though whether she quoted consciously I cannot tell – as ‘dog-eyed, wine-laden’.
Poor devil! I was sorry enough for him now in all conscience, his whole life turned upside down by some power which was past his understanding. Indeed, he was like a dog in more ways than one, for he had all a dog’s hatred of what was beyond his comprehension, with none of that prying, tiptoeing delight and curiosity regarding the supernatural which possesses the feline race and all that are kindred with it.
After a great deal of persuasion I got him to go abroad with me, and we started off to the Austrian Tyrol; but we had not been there a week when I awoke one morning to find that he was gone, leaving an explanatory note – in the calligraphy and spelling of a boy of twelve – to say that he felt he had to go, or rather, ‘must be there’.
I followed him as quickly as possible, very much frightened, for he still held to that belief as to what was expected of him. It is strange how the pure Welsh strain of his mother’s race – through whom he had inherited Cattraeth – came out in this, as it already had done in his mobile mouth, the straight, densely-black hair. Some old nurse might have told him stories of atonement by blood; but those white hounds with the red ears, surely they hunted him down through the dreams of untold ancestors.
It was Mrs Brice who opened the door to me; and I do not believe that I was ever so welcome a sight to any woman’s eyes, for her flat, rubber-like face awoke to a sort of humanity as she realized who it was.
‘He’s come,’ she said.
‘He says nothing – to me, at any rate,’ she answered. Then, to my surprise, she led me through the hall and down the passage to the servants’ quarters, without so much as a word of apology or explanation.
Upon the window-seat of her own sanctum, the only one of the lower rooms from which there was a clear view of the fountain pool, sat Wasp staring out, shivering. She had gone to skin and bone, her coat was dry and colourless. When I spoke to her she glanced round hastily and then back again out of the window, making no movement to come to me.
‘There she sits,’ remarked the housekeeper. ‘It seems that she won’t go out with Master Harry.’ The old name slipped out in her perturbation; she spoke with that sort of flat blankness which comes to us when we feel there is nothing more to be done. ‘She seems to know where he is going, poor bitch!’
‘Where?’ I asked; and she answered dully enough that I could see for myself; as I could by leaning over the dog – who growled as though in fear that I should oust her from her vigil – for there was Colquhoun on the edge of the pool, digging holes in the mud. The whole aspect of him, the attitude, had something eternal about it to my mind; I felt I must have seen him thus thousands of times, could remember no other position, with no more reasonable occupation.
‘He slept on the floor last night,’ said Mrs Brice; then added bitterly, ‘An’ no wonder – no wonder, I say. For his bed was wringing, though I’ve moved him to the far wing – and now everything’s spoilt there, for it’s everywhere, everywhere where he goes. Well, it’s past me!’ She drew her hand over her mouth with an odd grimace as though her muscles had grown stiff with keeping her teeth clenched over the thing. ‘I say to myself, “‘God only knows”,’ but does He – does He? An’ counting Him out there’s no one.’
I went into the garden and managed to coax Colquhoun indoors. It was a warm spring day, but we had an enormous fire and sat over it, both before dinner and then again later on, Colquhoun leaning forward with his forearms along his knees, his hands hanging, while little Wasp sat and stared up at him.
I noticed that he had lost that habit of sudden turning and staring; but it was not because he was more at ease, rather that everything had come to such a pass it was beyond troubling about. Only once did I see him roused.
Something came into the room. I do not know what it was; I could see nothing, but I could feel it. Colquhoun did not look round. He knew it was there, I saw that by the twitch of his mouth; but his despair seemed to have bred in him a sort of sullen indifference which said, ‘Oh, let it come!’ He was like Sir Roland at his Dark Tower.
The something, whatever it might have been, passed behind me where I sat in a low chair to the right of the fire, I knew that by the breath of moist air, so different from the mustiness which hung about the house – sweet as spring flowers – and moved on until it stood in front of Colquhoun.
Oh, it was so distinct, the feeling of it – a slender column of water: so distinct that I actually knew when it stooped. And it was then that Wasp leapt up with a howl of terror and ran to the furthest corner of the room, where she sat with her muzzle pressed against the wall, shivering.
I could hear my host rap out a fierce oath at that, but I could hear something else, as he got up to follow his dog – a soft cry, bitter and heart-broken, such a cry as might come from one who, stopping to caress, is cruelly repulsed, driven back for some reason it cannot comprehend.
‘Look here, Herries,’ Colquhoun called to me, his white face flushed. Then: ‘Damn it all! They might as well leave my bitch alone!’ he burst out, and lifting the trembling creature in his arms, pointed out a dark patch upon the dry, starting hair, as though a wet hand had been laid there.
I can never forget the atmosphere of the room at that moment. It seemed as though it must become articulate, so over-charged was it with misery and fear and pain, and the desperate striving to understand and explain of at least one of the Four of us – counting Wasp as one.
Then that other one slid away, with a sort of sob, as I thought; passed across the hall and up the stairs, the sound of its weeping mingling with the sound of the running water.
‘It’s everywhere,’ said Colquhoun. ‘Look here, Herries, it lies on the pillow beside me at night, ‘pon my oath it does! It’s already in the chair that I go to sit in; it mists over the glass so that I can scarcely see to shave. An’ the damnable part of it is that it’s being driven just as I’m driven. Cruel! Oh, rank cruelty, I call it. It’s got to be done with, given a chance to rest. It’s no good haggling over the price – I know that, have known it all along. I cursed when my dog was touched! somehow a fellow can stand things for himself that he can’t stand for his dog – poor Wasp, poor little bitch! But the reason for it was that she, an’ I, were both scared – dead scared. An’ you too, though you loved her … Oh yes, I know that, always knew it: it amused me – once. But scared! Of her, of her! That’s the desperate part of it, Herries … Confoundedly lonely … Oh yes, I know, the same way as I’m lonely; an’ driven the way I’m driven: an’ comin’ in here to us to the light and the warmth, and us scared of her! Poor little thing, poor kid, so soft and sweet and white.
‘She had on a little grey motor-bonnet the first day we came home here, with blue ribbons under her dinky round chin; an’ now I’m dead scared of her – or what’s at the back of her drivin’ her on. Some horrible thing – tremendous somehow – I don’t know how to put it – but it seems something like what you call the forces of nature, not our God or Christ, but that old bloody thing –’
‘The pagan belief …’
‘That’s it, the pagan belief! It strikes me that it made something. Can a lot of people believing in a thing make, create it? –O God, I don’t know, I can’t get it into words. But if they did make it – that way – they mightn’t be able to drop it when they wanted to – by simply ceasing to believe. Damn it all – but it seems like this: that a chap might make a god of clay and break it in a paddy, and there’d still be something left – something he used to count on.’
He sat down in his chair cuddling the little dog up against his face, looking at me with eyes which seemed somewhat cleared of their desperation, as though by some definite decision. Mrs Brice brought in the tray with decanter and glasses, but he did not touch anything, and saw me to my room himself that night, playing the host, careful that I had everything I needed.
I think I knew what was going to happen: certainly I was not surprised when the housekeeper came to my room soon after dawn next day to say that she had been awakened by the sound of a shot, and running to her master’s room, found him dead, lying upon the floor. I had done all that I felt I had any right to do, and I could not grieve.
I think Mrs Brice felt that too.
‘Anyhow, his troubles are over now,’ she said, and I hope and believe that she was right.
I still go to the house. It is there, indeed, that I have written the greater part of these memories – and speculations.
At the moment I have just returned from a visit to the housekeeper’s room, where she spends most of her time – for she is growing old now – in a great winged chair by the window.
On this particular morning it was wide open, for it is midsummer, and old Wasp, very feeble and almost blind, was lying asleep on the cushioned seat. The roses have grown tall, and flourished exceedingly, so that it was only above their long flower-laden sprays that I caught a glimpse of the fountain’s sparkling plume, which we found sprung to life again on the morning of poor Harry Colquhoun’s death.
A four of schoolboys, two of them Colquhoun’s nephews – for the place went to his sister at his death – were playing tennis on the lawn, with a vast amount of noise and very little science. Out from the door of the housekeeper’s room I could look straight along the passage, as down the dark barrel of a gun – for the baize door is permanently fastened back in these days – right into the hall.
A light silk curtain billowed out in the draught from some unseen window, and a woman in a white gown pranced across the upright panel of light, a four-year-old hanging on to her sash ribbons with shouts of ‘Gee-up, there’; while from a distant piano came a whole-souled clash of notes, and a girl’s clear voice singing ‘The Low-backed Car.’
‘I suppose there’s no damp here now,’ I ventured, half-turned to leave the room. For conversation is difficult with Mrs Brice these days. I have seen her soul stripped bare, unashamed and very much afraid, and she can never forget that against me.
Sitting there immovable in her great chair, with its curving back giving her something of the air of a tortoise turned up sideways encircled by its shell – she treated me to a cold stare out of her dull grey eyes.
‘Damp!’ she said. ‘There’s no damp here, never has been. It’s the driest house I was ever in; that’s what I always have said, always will say, no matter what folks, that have got the habit of novel-writing, demean themselves by making out.’