A westering sun was sharply gilding its windows when he once more made his way into Mr. Elliott’s parlour. It was empty. And almost at the same instant he realized how anxious he had been that this should be so, and how insipid a bait as such the little room now proved to be. He hadn’t expected that. And yet—not exactly insipid; its flavour had definitely soured. He wished he had never come; he tried to make up his mind to go. Ill at ease, angry with himself, and as if in open defiance of some inward mentor, he took down at random a fusty old quarto from its shelf and, seating himself on a chair by the table, he began, or rather attempted, to read.
Instead, with downcast eyes shelled in by the palm of his hand, and leaning gently on his elbow in an attitude not unlike that of the slippered and pensive Keats in the portrait, he found himself listening again. He did more than listen. Every nerve in his body was stretched taut. And time ebbed away. At this tension his mind began to wander off again into a dreamlike vacuum of its own, when, “What was that?” a voice within whispered at him. A curious thrill ebbed through his body. It was as though unseen fingers had tugged at a wire—with no bell at the end of it. For this was no sound he had heard—no stir of the air. And yet in effect it so nearly resembled one that it might have been only the sigh of the blast of the east wind at the window. He waited a minute, then, with a slight shiver, glanced up covertly but steadily through his fingers.
He was shocked—by what he saw—yet not astonished. It seemed as if his whole body had become empty and yet remained as inert and heavy as lead. He was no longer alone. The figure that stood before him in the darker corner there, and only a few paces away, was no less sharply visible and even more actual in effect than the objects around her. One hand, from a loose sleeve, resting on the edge of the door to the staircase, she stood looking at him, her right foot with its high-heeled shoe poised delicately on the lowest of the three steps. With head twisted back sidelong over her narrow shoulder, her eyes were fixed on this earthly visitor to her haunts—as he sat, hand to forehead, drawn up stiff and chill at the table. She was watching Alan. And the face, though with even fewer claims to be beautiful, and none to be better than knowing and wide-awake, was without any question the face he had shared with Herrick’s Hesperides.
A peculiar vacancy—like a cold mist up from the sea—seemed to have spread over his mind, and yet he was alert to his very finger-tips. Had she seen he had seen her? He couldn’t tell. It was as cold in the tiny room as if the windows were wide open and the garden beyond them full of snow. The late afternoon light, though bleakly clear, was already thinning away, and, victim of this silly decoy, he was a prisoner who in order to regain his freedom must pass her way out. He stirred in his chair, his eyes now fixed again on the book beneath them.
And then at last, as if with confidence restored, he withdrew his hand from his face, lifted his head, and affecting a boldness he far from felt, deliberately confronted his visitor. At this the expression on her features—her whole attitude—changed too. She had only at this moment seen that he had seen her, then? The arm dropped languidly to her side. Her listless body turned a little, her shoulders slightly lifted themselves, and a faint provocative smile came into her face, while the dark jaded eyes resting on his own remained half mocking, half deprecatory—almost as if the two of them, he and she, were old cronies who had met again after a long absence from one another, with ancient secrets awaiting discreet discussion. With a desperate effort Alan managed to refrain from making any answering signal of recognition. He stared back with a face as blank as a turnip. How he knew with such complete assurance that his visitor was not of this world he never attempted to explain to himself. Real! She was at least as real as a clearly lit reflection of anything seen in a looking-glass, and in effect on his mind was more positive than the very chair on which he was sitting and the table beneath his elbow to which that chair was drawn up. For this was a reality of the soul, and not of the senses. Indeed, he himself might be the ghost and she the dominating pervasive actuality.
But even if he had been able to speak he had no words with which to express himself. He was shuddering with cold and had suddenly become horribly fatigued and exhausted. He wanted to “get out” of all this and yet knew not only that this phantasm must have been lying in wait for him, but that sooner or later she would compel him to find out what she wanted of him, that she meant to be satisfied. Her face continued to change in expression even while he watched her. Its assurance seemed to intensify. The head stooped forward a little; the narrow pallid slanting eyelids momentarily closed; and then, with a gesture not merely of arm or shoulder but of her whole body, she once more fixed him with a gaze more intense, more challenging, more crammed with meaning than he had supposed possible in any human eye. It was as if some small wicket gate into the glooms of Purgatory had suddenly become thronged with bright-lit faces.
Until this moment they had been merely eyeing one another while time’s sluggish moments ebbed away. They had been merely “looking at” one another. Now there had entered those glazed dark fixed blue eyes the very self within. It stayed there gazing out at him transfixed—the pleading, tormented, dangerous spirit within that intangible husk. And then the crisis was over. With a slow dragging movement of his head, Alan had at last succeeded in breaking the spell— he had turned away. A miserable disquietude and self-repulsion possessed him. He felt sick, body and soul. He had but one thought—to free himself once and for all from this unwarranted ordeal. Why should he have been singled out? What hint of any kind of “encouragement” had he been responsible for? Or was this ghostly encounter an experience that had been shared by other visitors to the old bookseller’s sanctum—maybe less squeamish than himself? His chilled bloodless fingers clenched on the open page of the book beneath them. He strove in vain to master himself, to fight the thing out. It was as if an icy hand had him in its grip, daring him to stir.
The evening wind had died with the fading day. The three poplars, every budded double-curved twig outlined against the glassy grey of the west, stood motionless. Daylight, even dusk was all very well, but supposing this presence, as the dark drew on, ventured a little nearer? And suddenly his alarms—as much now of the body as of the mind—were over. She had been interrupted.
A footstep had sounded in the corridor. Alan started to his feet. The handle of the door had turned in the old brass lock; he watched it. With a jerk he twisted his head on his shoulders. He was alone. Yet again the interrupter had rattled impatiently with the door handle. Alan at last managed to respond to the summons. But even as he grasped the handle on his own side of it, the door was pushed open against him and a long bearded face peered through.
“Pardon,” said this stranger, “I didn’t realize you had locked yourself in.”
In the thin evening twilight that was now their only illumination Alan found himself blushing like a schoolgirl.
“But I hadn’t,” he stammered. “Of course not. The catch must have jammed. I came in here myself only a few minutes ago.”
The long face with its rather watery blue-grey eyes placidly continued to survey him in the dusk. “And yet, you know,” its owner drawled, with a soupçon of incredulity, “I should have guessed myself that I have been poking about in our patron’s shop out there for at least the best part of half an hour. But that, of course, is one of the charms of lit-er-a-ture. You haven’t chanced, I suppose, on a copy of the Vulgar Errors—Sir Thomas Browne?”
Alan shook his head. “The Bs I think are in that corner,” he replied, “—alphabetical. But I didn’t notice the Errors.”
Nor did he stay to help his fellow-customer find the volume. He hurried out, and this time he had no spoil to present to the old bookseller in recognition of the rent due for his occupation of the parlour.
A whole week went by, its last few days the battleground of a continuous conflict of mind. He hadn’t, he assured himself with the utmost conviction, the faintest desire in the
world to set eyes again on—on what he had set eyes on. That was certain. It had been the oddest of shocks to what he had thought about things, to what had gone before, and, yes, to his vanity. Besides, the more he occupied himself with and pondered over his peculiar little experience the more probable it seemed that it and she and everything connected with her had been nothing but a cheat of the senses, a triumph of self-deception—a pure illusion, induced by the quiet, the solitude, the stirrings of springtime at the window, the feeling of age in the room, the romantic associations—and last, to the Herrick!
All this served very well in the middle of the morning or at two o’clock in the afternoon. But a chance waft of the year’s first waxen hyacinths, the onset of evening, a glimpse of the waning moon—at any such oblique reminder of what had happened, these pretty arguments fell flat as a house of cards. Illusion! Then why had everything else in his life become by comparison so empty of interest and himself at a loose end? The thought of Mr. Elliott’s bookshop at such moments was like an hypnotic lure. Cheat himself as he might, he knew it was only cheating. Distrust the fowler as he might, he knew what nets he was in. How gross a folly to be at the mercy of one vehement coupling of glances. If only it had been that other face! And yet, supposing he were wrong about all this; supposing this phantasm really was in need of help, couldn’t rest, had come back for something—there were things one might want to come back for—and even for something which he alone could give?
What wonder this restless conflict of mind reacted on his body and broke his sleep? Naturally a little invalidish in his appetite, Alan now suffered the pangs of a violent attack of indigestion. And at last he could endure himself no longer. On the following Tuesday he once more pushed open the outer door of Mr. Elliott’s bookshop, with its jangling bell, and entered, hot and breathless, from out of the pouring rain.
“There was a book I caught sight of,” he panted out to the old gentleman as he came in, “when I was here last, you know. In the other room. I won’t keep you a minute.”
At this, the bookseller’s bland eye fixed itself an instant on the fair flushed face, almost as if he too could a tale unfold.
“Let me take your umbrella, sir,” he entreated. “Sopping! A real downpour. But very welcome to the farmers, I’ll be bound—if for once in a while they’d only say so. No hurry whatever, sir.”
Downpour indeed it was. As Alan entered the parlour the cold sullen gush of rain on the young lilac buds and cobble-stones of the little yard in the dreary leaden light at the window resounded steadily on. He had set out in the belief that his one desire was to prove that his “ghost” was no ghost at all, that he had been a victim of a pure hallucination. Yet throughout his journey, with only his umbrella for company, he had been conscious of a thrill of excitement and expectation. And now that he had closed the door behind him, and had shut himself in, the faded little room in this obscurity at once began to influence his mind in much the same fashion as the livid gloom of an approaching thunderstorm affects the scenery of the hills and valleys over which it broods.
And this, it soon seemed, was to be his sole reward! His excitement fizzled out. With every passing moment his heart fell lower. He had gone away filled with a stark irrational hatred of the poor restless phantasmal creature who had intruded on his solitude. He had come back only to realize not only that she herself had been his lodestone, but that, even though any particular spot may undoubtedly be “haunted,” it by no means follows that its ghost is always at home. Everything about him seemed to have changed a little. Or was the change only in himself? In this damp air the room smelt of dry-rot and mouldering leather. Even the pretty grate looked thicklier scurfed with rust. And the books on the shelves had now taken to themselves the leaden livery of the weather. “Look not too closely on us,” they seemed to cry. “What are we all but memorials of the dead? And we too are swiftly journeying towards the dust.”
The prospect from the window was even more desolating. None the less Alan continued to stare stupidly out of it. By the time he had turned away again he had become certain—though how he couldn’t tell—that he need have no apprehension whatever of intangible company today. Mr. Elliott’s “parlour” was emptier than he supposed a room could be. It seemed as if by sheer aversion for its late inmate he had exorcized it, and, irrational creature that he was, a stab of regret followed.
He turned to go. He gave a last look round—and paused. Was it that the skies had lightened a little or had he really failed to notice at his entry that the door at which his visitor had appeared was a few inches open? He stepped across softly and glanced up the staircase. Only vacancy there too. But that door was also ajar. The two faint daylights from above and below mingled midway. For a moment or two be hesitated. The next he had stolen swiftly and furtively up the staircase and had looked in.
This room was not only empty but abandoned. It was naked of any stick of furniture and almost of any trace of human occupation. Yet with its shallow bow window, low ceiling, and morning sun it must once in its heyday have blossomed like the rose. The flowered paper on its walls was dingy now: a few darker squares and oblongs alone showed where pictures had once hung. The brass gas bracket was green with verdigris, and a jutting rod was the only evidence of the canopy where once a bed had been.
But even vacancy may convey a sense of age and tell its tale. Alan was looking into the past. Indeed, the stale remnant of some once pervasive perfume still hung in the musty atmosphere of the room, though its sole refuse consisted of a few dust-grimed books in a corner and—on a curved white narrow shelf that winged the minute fireplace—a rusty hairpin.
Alan stooped, and very gingerly, with gloved finger and thumb, turned the books over—a blistered green-bound Enoch Arden, a small thick copy of The Mysteries of Paris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s House of Life, a Nightingale Valley, a few damp fly-blown shockers, some of them in French and paper-bound; and last, a square black American cloth-bound exercise book with E.F. cut out with a clumsy penknife at one of the top comers. The cockled cloth was slightly greened.
He raised the cover with the extreme tips of his fingers, stooped forward a little, and found himself in the window-light scanning with peculiar intensity the vanishing lineaments of a faded photograph—the photograph of a young woman in clothes somehow made the more old-fashioned in appearance by the ravages of time and light on the discoloured cardboard. He knew this face; and yet not this face. For days past it had not been out of his mind for more than a few hours together. But while his first impression had been that of the vivid likeness of the one to the other, what next showed clearest were the differences between them. Differences that stirred his heart into a sudden tumult.
The hair in the photograph was dressed in pretty much the same fashion—drawn up and back from the narrow temples across the widening head. The lips were, possibly, not so full; certainly not so dark. And though the cheek oven of this much younger face was a little sunken, these faded eyes—a fading only of the paper depicting them and not of age—looked out at him without the faintest trace of boldness or effrontery. They were, it is true, fixed profoundly on his own. But they showed no interest in him, little awareness, no speculation—only a remote settled melancholy. What strange surmises, the young man reflected, must the professional photographer at times indulge in when from beneath his ink-black inquisitorial velvet cowl he peers into his camera at a face as careless of human curiosity as this had been. The young woman in the photograph had made, if any, a more feeble attempt to conceal her secret sorrows than a pall to conceal its bier or a broken sepulchre its bones.
At a breath the young man’s aversion had died away. A shame-stricken compassion of which he had never dreamed himself capable had swept over him in its stead. He gazed on for a minute or two at the photograph—this withering memento which not even the removing men seemed to have considered worth flinging into a dustbin; then he opened the book at random—towards the middle of it—
and leaning into the light at the window read these lines:
My midnight lamp burns dim with shame,
In Heaven the moon is low;
Sweet sharer of its secret flame,
Arise, and go!
Haste, for dawn’s envious gaping grave
Bids thee not linger here;
Though gone is all I am, and have—
Thy ghost once absent, dear.
He read them over again, then glanced stealthily up and out. They were a voice from the dead. It was as if he had trespassed into the echoing cold of a vault. And as he looked about him he suddenly realized that at any moment he might be interrupted, caught—prying. With a swift glance over his shoulder he pushed the photograph back into the old exercise book, and tucking this under his arm beneath his coat, tiptoed down the unlighted stairs into the parlour.
It had been a bold venture—at least for Alan. For, of all things in this world he disliked, he disliked by far the most being caught out in any little breach of the conventions. Suppose that old cod-like Mrs. Elliott had caught him exploring this abandoned bedroom? After listening yet again for any rumour either of herself or of her husband, he drew out from the lowest shelf nearby two old sheepskin folios, seated himself in full view of the door that led into the shop, and having hidden the exercise book well within cover of these antiquated tomes he began to turn over its pages. The trick took him back to his early school days—the sun, the heat, the drone of bees at the window, a settling wayward fly, the tick of the clock on the wall, and the penny “blood” half concealed in his arithmetic book. He smiled to himself. Wasn’t he being kept in now? And how very odd he should be minding so little what, only an hour before, he had foreseen he would be minding so much. How do ghosts show that you needn’t expect them? Not even in their chosen haunts?
The Green Room Page 2
