I waited, breathless, and as he did not go on, I prompted him with ‘Was he … “wrong” too?’
Copley nodded. ‘Weak, poor devil. His eyes were all right, but they were fighting his mouth, if you know what I mean. There would have been an awful scandal at the school there, four years after I left, if they hadn’t hushed it up and got Denison out of the country.
‘Then, if you want any more instances, there was the oculist – big, fine chap, he was. Of course, he made me look at him over my shoulder, to test me. He asked me what I saw, and I told, more or less. He was simply livid for a moment. He was a sensualist, you see; and when I saw him that way he looked like some filthy old hog.
‘The thing that really finished me,’ he went on, after a long interval, ‘was the breaking off of my engagement to Helen. We were frightfully in love with one another, and I told her about my trouble. She was very sympathetic, and I suppose rather sentimentally romantic, too. She believed it was some sort of spell that had been put on me. I think, anyway, she had a theory that if I once saw anybody truly and ordinarily over my shoulder, I should never have any more trouble – the spell-would-be-broken sort of thing. And, of course, she wanted to be the person. I didn’t resist her much. I was infatuated, I suppose. Anyway, I thought she was perfection and that it was simply impossible that I could find any defect in her. So I agreed, and looked – that way.…’
His voice had fallen to an even note of despondency, as though the telling of this final tragedy in his life had brought him to the indifference of despair. ‘I looked,’ he continued, ‘and saw a creature with no chin and watery, doting eyes; a faithful, slobbery thing – eugh! I can’t.… I never spoke to her again.…
‘That broke me, you know,’ he said presently. ‘After that I didn’t care. I used to look at everyone that way, until I had to get away from humanity. I was living in a world of beasts. Most of them looked like some beast or bird or other. The strong were vicious and criminal; and the weak were loathsome. I couldn’t stick it. In the end – I had to come here away from them all.’
A thought occurred to me. ‘Have you ever looked at yourself in the glass?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘I’m no better than the rest of them,’ he said. ‘That’s why I grew this rotten beard. I hadn’t got a looking-glass here.’
‘And you can’t keep a stiff neck, as it were,’ I asked, ‘going about looking humanity straight in the face?’
‘The temptation is too strong,’ Copley said. ‘And it gets stronger. Curiosity, partly, I suppose; but partly it’s the momentary sense of superiority it gives you. You see them like that, you know, and forget how you look yourself. And then after a bit it sickens you.’
‘You haven’t …’ I said, and hesitated. I wanted to know, and yet I was horribly afraid. ‘You haven’t,’ I began again, ‘er – you haven’t – er – looked at me yet … that way?’
‘Not yet,’ he said.
‘Do you suppose …?’
‘Probably. You look all right, of course. But then so did heaps of the others.’
‘You’ve no idea how I should look to you, that way?’ ‘Absolutely none. I’ve been trying to guess, but I can’t.’ ‘You wouldn’t care …?’
‘Not now,’ he said sharply. ‘Perhaps, just before you go.’
‘You feel fairly certain, then …?’
He nodded with disgusting conviction.
I went to bed, wondering whether Helen’s theory wasn’t a true one; and if I might not break the spell for poor Copley.
III
The boatmen came for me soon after eleven next morning.
I had shaken off some of the feeling of superstitious horror that had held me overnight, and I had not repeated my request to Copley; nor had he offered to look into the dark places of my soul.
He came down after me to the landing-place and we shook hands warmly, but he said nothing about my revisiting him.
And then, just as we were putting off, he turned back towards the hut and looked at me over his shoulder – just one quick glance.
‘Wait,’ I commanded the boatmen, and I stood up and called to him.
‘I say, Copley,’ I shouted.
He turned and looked at me, and I saw that his face was transfigured. He wore an expression of foolish disgust and loathing, I had seen something like it on the face of an idiot child who was just going to be sick.
I dropped down into the boat and turned my back on him.
I wondered then if that was how he had seen himself in the glass.
But since I have only wondered what it was he saw in me.…
And I can never go back to ask him.
Music When Soft Voices Die
John Keir Cross
I heard of the death of Sir Simon Erskine some five years ago, when I was taking a long holiday in my beloved Scotland. I had known him quite well – a terrible man, moody, powerful, irascible. They said he was only forty-eight when he died. Yet, when I had last seen him, about two years before, at the time of the tragic death of his young wife, he had seemed at least eighty. I remember him then, standing in the porch of that huge, bleak house of his, a brooding and lonely figure, holding tight about him the black cloak he favoured, his already white hair blowing round his temples in the eternal winds of that wild corner of Perthshire. He was the last survivor of the Pitvrackie Erskines – the Black Erskines, as they had been called in the old Covenanting days: stern, merciless, religious men, who believed (if truth be faced) in hellfire and damnation and not much else. It was one of the Black Erskines who, with one mad stroke, had swept the head from the shoulder of a young officer who, in his cups, had questioned some religious truths. And another of the clan, on discovering his wife in adultery, had hanged the woman with his own hands, after immolating her lover most dreadfully before her eyes. A terrible, half-beastly family they were, with a long history of bloodshed and cruelty behind them.
About a month after the death of Sir Simon, the factors announced an auction of his properties and effects at Vrackie Hall. I was sufficiently interested to travel in the creaking old bus from Perth to Pitvrackie that day: not only was I keen to see the curious old house again on its storm-swept promontory among the hills, but there was the chance of picking up a treasure or two. Sir Simon had been a man of many accomplishments. He had been interested in a thousand things – in 17th Century Dutch painting, in Romantic English literature of the late 18th and 19th centuries, and above all, in unusual musical instruments. He had, too, done much big game hunting in Africa. It was in Africa, in fact, that he met Bridgid Cannell, whom he later married, and whose strange death affected him so terribly. Indeed, let me be honest and say that it affected him almost to the point of madness. There were wild tales of his behaviour during the last two lonely years of his life – tales of how he shut himself up for days on end in the big library of Vrackie Hall, of how the scared servants heard him sometimes weeping aloud, sometimes laughing, and sometimes, as it were in a disconsolate frenzy, beating on a collection of native drums he had brought back from one of his African expeditions. The wild, primitive rhythms, going on through the hours and throbbing into the farthest corners of the dark house, hypnotized him, perhaps, into forgetting his bitterness and the terrible sense of his loss. He was a man whose mind was delicately enough poised as it was, God knows – a man who feared loneliness for what it might do to him, yet who nursed his passions jealously and secretly. Neither Bridgid nor his first wife had near-succeeded in fathoming him – it was as if he needed them, he needed their company and the comfort of their bodies, yet was unwilling to let them have access to the innermost parts of him – a Bluebeard who kept one chamber eternally secret. His first wife, a young Scotswoman of good family, had, after five years of him, run off incontinently with a middle-aged American doctor. The fact that she had no child by him but had been delivered of a son within a year of meeting the American, weighed bitterly with Sir Simon. And when Bridgid died childless, so that he saw the line of the Black E
rskines ending with him, he raged vilely against the destinies: and so shut himself up in the decaying house, seeing no one, brooding jealously among those priceless possessions of his, weeping like a spoilt child over his failures, beating insanely on those damnable drums and sending the throbbing, restless voices of them across the valley and against the forbidding harsh face of old Ben Vrackie itself …
I reached the house that day of the sale in a battered, irritable condition. Gusts of wet, mist-laden wind had worried at me as I mounted the mud-raddled roads to the Hall from Pitvrackie. Dull clouds sagged over the peaks of the hills that surrounded the house, the pine forest that flanked my path was silent and evil seeming, heavily adrip with moisture. I saw no one, save, at one point, an old cross-eyed tinker who carried, over his shoulder, a long pole slung with dead rabbits, all matted and patchy from the damp. A fawn-coloured, evil-eyed ferret stared at me out of his pocket. I had a fleeting remembrance of an old childhood fear – that ferrets were capable of springing at human throats and sucking the blood therefrom: but the beast, I saw, was chained to the tinker’s wrist. I gave the man a greeting but he did not reply – passed on his silent way, his squinting eyes fixed on the roadway before him as he walked.
Vrackie Hall stood back from the road in a large park full of trees and gardens that at one time had been carefully laid out. There was a drive of red gravel. The entrance gates were made of elaborate wrought-iron and there were, above the pillars of them, two eagles, staring at each other with their heads turned sideways. They were made of soft stone that had been eaten away by the weathers, so that they seemed to have a frightful and painful disease. The big house itself, built three-quarters of a century ago on the site of the old Erskine Castle, was a mixture of many styles and periods. There was, first, a large porchway flanked with smooth Grecian pillars, the arch of it embellished by a florid frieze consisting of festoons of fruits and flowers with, occasionally in the midst of them, pot-bellied nymphs in modest attitudes. There were festoons above some of the windows too, and many tiles, glazed in yellow and green, with small fat cupids on them and long formal garlands of flowers. The windows themselves were large, and some of them had inset panes of stained glass at each corner. Those on the front of the house had narrow barred shutters in the French style folded back from them, some a dingy cream colour, others painted in flaky green with white underneath. On the south wall there was an exuberant creeper of a rich glossy brown that merged into fresh green at the top and sides: on the back wall there were espalier fruit trees, pegged symmetrically to the lime-eaten bricks. The roof was tiled with slates of varying shapes, some square, others pointed like diamonds and others curved and scalloped – the layers of these last ones looking like enormous fish scales. And on top of all, overtowering the chimneys, was a domed belfry decorated with still more stone festoons and with, inside it, a small rusted bell that had come from an old monastery of St Fechan, the ruins of which could be seen among the trees in a corner of the park. That old bell had been rung three days after the death of Bridgid Erskine – not as a sign of mourning: as a last forlorn hope that its clamour, borne out over the hills, would guide her back through the thick mountain mist that was her death-pall to the house where her distracted husband awaited her.
It was a hideous house, this home of the Erskines. I had often speculated, in the old days, on how it was possible for a man of Sir Simon’s fastidiousness to live among its rococo carvings. But he seemed singularly attached to it – it was, he once sardonically said, an embodiment, a projection of his over-elaborate and tortured mind.
When I arrived that day at Vrackie Hall for the auction sale it was to find a small silent company already gathered in the big lobby. The auctioneer had not yet appeared – he was, I understood, a Glasgow man, one Gregory, famed for his dry wit. But it appeared to me, as I looked round the group in the dark hall, that he would have little opportunity that day for the exercise of it. There were about a dozen serious-faced men and two women, and they talked quietly together in twos and threes. I recognized some acquaintances – one of the women was a dealer in Perth, a Miss Logan: I had been introduced to her the year before in my mother’s house. Standing alone in a corner was an old man I had seen at several sales in Scotland before (I was, you must understand, profoundly interested in such things, with an eye for old tapestries). This man, I had the fancy, came from Dundee, where he had a business of some strange sort – we, none of us, had ever discovered quite what it was, though we knew it to be lucrative and had the impression that it had something to do with drawing or designing. His name was Menasseh, and he was a small, wizened fellow with a large head covered with an obvious toupee.
I roamed about the tables for some ten minutes. There were, I could perceive, even at a cursory glance, some exquisite things. Among the paintings were two miniatures by Koninck that I coveted instantly, and a small landscape by Samuel van Hoogstraaten that I would fain have seen in my rooms in London as a companion to the de Hooch Study of a Hillside Town I had acquired at Christie’s a year before. There were some beautiful vases from the Delft potteries and a Mortlake tapestry – a copy, unless I was heavily mistaken, of one of Le Brun’s Gobelin cartoons. In a corner I saw a most masterly carved lime-wood cravat, attributed, according to the notice on it, to Grinling Gibbons. Among the books was a first edition of Lewis’s The Monk and a copy, signed by Maturin himself, of that strangest of works, Melmoth the Wanderer. There were some Blake drawings too, and some of the Master’s hand-coloured prints for the Songs of Innocence. And among all these beautiful things, curiously out of place even in that strange house, was Erskine’s collection of African drums. I shuddered as I looked at them, recalling the man’s mad, grief-wracked thumping of them during the last two years of his life. They were, in their way, I suppose, beautiful enough. The largest ones were made of parchment stretched on hollow hardwood trunks, with primitive designs carved round them. There were two enchanting but repulsive small drums, however, that had for sounding boards polished human skulls. I could see, from a close examination of the larger one, the low brow and a long cranium of the primitive. The parchments of these (as were also the parchments of some of the large drums) were held tight by means of small carved ivory pegs, driven in at an angle. The stretched surfaces of them bore a design in coloured dyes – a serpent coiled in a curious way: three coils at the tail end, an erratic figure eight in the centre of the body, and two coils again at the head, with the long fangs pointing downwards. It was the mounting of these skull-drums that particularly attracted me. A small hole had been bored in the forehead of each and the end of a long bar of chased silver inserted therein, so that the drums inclined at a convenient angle for the player. The drumsticks – long, polished bones – rested in hollows in the bases of the silver bars. Yes, beautiful things in their way, they were, as they stood there on the table beneath Erskine’s trophy of heads of buffalo and lions and his crossed game rifles. It was impossible not to be fascinated by them, though they contrasted so strangely with the more delicate products of the less barbaric civilization.
I wandered upstairs, since there still seemed little chance of the arrival of Gregory, the auctioneer. One or two of the buyers were looking at their watches and I heard one of them say something about the ‘Glasga’ ’ express being late as usual, he supposed. I looked into some of the rooms on the first floor, but most of the portable things had been carried downstairs and the bigger pieces were covered with dust-sheets – they were being sold with the house.
I was standing at the long stained glass window at the end of the corridor looking at the mist-cloaked hills, first through the clear panes and then, to give more interest, through the red and blue ones, when I heard a step behind me and a cheerful deep voice.
‘Hullo, Mr Ferguson. I didn’t know you were coming to the auction or I’d have suggested we travelled up from Perth together.’
I looked round and found myself confronting Miss Logan, the dealer I had met the year before at my moth
er’s house. I greeted her civilly and we stood together chatting – talking of my mother first and of what we had both done since our last meeting, and then going on naturally to the things downstairs and Sir Simon.
‘You knew him, didn’t you?’ the big woman asked, and I nodded.
‘Oh yes – quite well. A curious man. Impossible to understand.’
‘I met him once,’ said Miss Logan thoughtfully. ‘He made me very uncomfortable – so bleak and cruel, somehow. I was at school with his first wife, you know.’
I expressed myself as interested – as indeed I was.
‘Was she – well, as volatile in those days? I mean – you know how she went off with the American doctor –’
‘Oh yes, I know about that,’ said Miss Logan quickly. ‘No – it was really a most curious thing. She wasn’t at all like that at school – rather serious and unenterprising, in fact. I could never quite understand it all …’
She fell silent, staring out at the hills. Then she added ruminatively:
‘A tragic man – tragic. And the last one of that terrible family. What exactly was the story about his second wife? – do you know it? I’ve heard odd rumours, of course, but I was in France at the time. I never heard the real truth of what happened to her.’
‘Nor did anyone,’ I said shortly. ‘You’re looking now at the only one who does know the truth of it all.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Miss Logan, turning for a moment from the window, at which she had been standing firmly implanted in her expensive brogues.
‘Ben Vrackie. That old mountain is her graveyard – and her only father confessor. There were two of them, you know,’ I went on, ‘Bridgid and an old friend of Sir Simon’s – a well-educated South African Negro called David Strange, a lawyer, I think. Simon met him in Cape Town about the same time that he met Bridgid. He was holidaying here with the Erskines and one Sunday afternoon he went out for a walk in the hills with Bridgid. Simon would have gone too, but he had a headache and went to lie down instead …’
Cries of Terror Page 14
