by Dion Fortune
It was the first concession he had ever made to any human weakness in himself in all his hard-driven life, and once made, he found himself revelling in it. He was in no mood to contend with the Underground at the end of his day's work, and made them phone for a taxi.
The traffic hold-ups in the narrow streets of the City area did not exasperate him, for she was beside him, occupying the other seat in the darkness of the cab's unlit interior. He could feel the warmth of her atmosphere enwrapping him in a kind of glow. He thought he could smell some aromatic kind of scent.
He turned to her.
“I am very happy to be with you here,” he said. “I think it a great privilege. I appreciate it.”
The sound of his own voice broke the spell, and he knew that the seat next to him was unoccupied. There was no one there—even to the eyes of his imagination; yet, despite the disillusion the sense of happiness remained with him. He waited quite contentedly in the darkness, with the sound of car-engines in the traffic block all round him, and the fumes of exhausts coming in at the window, and as he waited, he felt his dreamwoman gradually building up at his side again.
He knew better this time than to break the magic, and made no attempt to turn his head and see her, for he knew she wasn't there. Yet all the same she was there, but in another dimension. She was there to the eyes of the imagination, and he could feel an emotional response. He was happy with her—that was all that mattered. She was real to him.
During the boring remarks of the chairman before he read his paper he called her up before him, and she came. She did not come with the same vividness that she possessed when she appeared spontaneously, but nevertheless she came. On his way back in the taxi through the empty streets she came again, spontaneously, and he found her beside him before he realised her presence. She was tremendously real. He could almost hear the sound of her breathing in the dark. He could definitely smell the aromatic scent she used, and it went to his head like alcohol and set all his pulses throbbing. He hesitated for a moment—after all, lots of fellows carried on like anything in taxis, and he did not propose to do anything desperate—he leant over and put his head where the shoulder of the imaginary woman should have been—and in doing so broke the spell. He sat up and cursed savagely, feeling as if he had been thoroughly well snubbed, and stared fiercely out of the window for the rest of the journey.
As he turned away after paying the taxi-driver he glanced back into the cab, with sudden compunction, at his abandoned companion, feeling that he had been a brute and possibly hurt her feelings, and as he did so, a face rose before him like moonlight in the darkness, and he saw an oval contour, dark, steady eyes, and a crimson-lipped, close-held mouth. It was so clear that for a moment he almost thought he saw it with his physical eyes, and only the knowledge that such a sight was impossible in the darkness prevented him from looking for the actual woman.
Up in his sitting-room, he stood with his elbow on the
mantelpiece beside the dying fire and called her again—and she came again. He saw nothing, but he felt her presence and knew the particular spot in the room where she stood.
As he turned over in bed after putting out the light he punched up the pillow into the configuration it had had the night before, and lay tense and still, waiting—would she let him—or would she not? But nothing happened and he felt himself gradually sliding off into sleep along the normal channels. And then, as he began to pass over the threshold, he felt the softness of a woman's breast beneath his cheek and the rise and fall of her breathing. His first instinct was to put out his hand and touch her, but he had learnt his lesson and knew better than to break the illusion by trying to reduce it to actuality. He could only enjoy so long as he never tried to possess.
He lay still, tense, hardly daring to breathe, so sweet and real was the illusion. He wondered whether in his imagination he dared turn and kiss her, but decided not to risk it, the experience was too precious as it was. Then deep sleep took him, and he slept without stirring till morning and awoke alert and alive and happy as a lad.
He had a sudden twinge of conscience concerning his responsibilities at the seaside villa, but dismissed it as quixotic. What he was doing was harming no one, and the blessing and peace of it all was so great a boon. He had tried cutting it off drastically once, and the result had been an explosion of emotion he had no mind to precipitate again. What earthly need was there to give up his dream-woman who harmed nobody and helped him so tremendously?
He stood for a moment looking out of the window in the direction of the church across the water, veiled from his eyes at that hour by the morning mists; and suddenly, beyond all control, a cry burst from him:
“My God! you can't want to take that from me—even that from me?”
The reaction of this sudden uprush of emotion was so great that he found himself clutching the window-sash, holding on by it, setting it shaking and rattling as if in a gale.
Lurching across the room, he dropped into his chair and buried his face in the frowzy cushion.
“No”, he muttered, “that is too much. I won't agree to it!”
He had thought that he had long since outgrown the superstition of religion, but the hybrid form of jealous-Jehovah-gentle-Jesus that had been impressed upon him in his childhood rose before his eyes, half idol, half angel. He hated the idol, but the angel aspect pulled at him painfully. He found himself on the verge of tears, horribly childish.
That broke the spell. Raging at himself as he had never raged at the most stupid student, he wrenched off his collar and tie; plunged his face in a basin of cold water; towelled his head till it looked like a quickset hedge; then forced the collar back on to its studs, swearing like a trooper; tied his tie as if garotting the object of a life-long vendetta; tore at his hair with a comb; caught up his despatch case without examining its contents, and arrived, for the first time in hospital history, late for his lecture. His lecture, and the following clinic, were just plain hell for all concerned.
He got through his private cases that afternoon in his Wimpole Street rooms in much the same manner as his clinic, but as patients were always warned what to expect by the doctors sending them, nothing very untoward occurred; one lady collapsed in hysterics, and two children howled dismally, but except for these minor contretemps, to all outward appearance business was as usual. Dr. Malcolm had one of those faces that could be hit with an axe without making much impression on it, and his receptionist, a superannuated hospital Sister, certainly suspected nothing beyond an unusually irritable temper.
Finally, towards seven o'clock, the last patient on his list having been dispatched into outer darkness looking rather like a lost soul fleeing from the wrath of the Lord, Dr. Malcolm tied his stethoscope in a knot, flung it into his despatch case, and pitched his delicate ophthalmoscope in after it. But before he could get the lid shut, the door opened, revealing the shrivelled face of Sister.
“Well, what is it?” he snarled looking as if about to hurl the entire case at her head.
“There is another patient in the waiting-room, sir. A lady who rang up during the afternoon and made an appointment.”
“My God!” exclaimed the disgusted man, seeing his release deferred, and already bone-weary and sick at heart. “All right, send her in.”
He released the lid of his despatch case, but before he could get out his instruments again, the stethoscope uncurled itself and came writhing out like a snake and escaped to the floor. He stooped to grope for it, the effort seeming to add the last straw to his weariness and irritability, and as he straightened himself, he saw coming in through the door the woman in the cape.
He stood and looked at her.
“This is an hallucination!” was his first thought.
There she was, just as he had pictured her, wearing her flowing black cloak and wide black hat, like Sandeman's port. There was her pale oval face, her aquiline nose, her scarlet lips, and above all, her velvety brown eyes with the kindness in them; for one second,
as he saw the kindness in the eyes, a lump came in Malcolm's throat as it had come that morning, and immediately, as before, his mood turned to fury—a livid, concentrated fury which he would not have believed himself capable of towards a woman. She must have identified his face, seen in the light of her electric torch, from some photo or other in the papers, and had hunted him out, intending to blackmail him! Or was she seeking adventure? He had never thought of such a thing before in connection with himself, and to his horror he felt the unregenerate man within him thrill with faint furtive triumph, and his temper, if that were possible, worsened accordingly.
“Good afternoon,” he snapped in his harsh, strident voice. “I have not the pleasure of knowing your name, nor who sent you to me.”
“My name is Morgan, Miss Le Fay Morgan. My dentist told me of you, but he did not send me to you. I came of my own accord because I thought you might be able to explain to me certain things I want to know.”
“That is a very unusual method of approaching a consultant,” said Dr. Malcolm, glaring at her hostilely, and yet with a dreadful kind of numb aching inside him, as if she resembled some one dead who was dear to him.
“Mine is a very unusual case,” replied his visitor, quite unperturbed by his unconcealed resentment of her presence. “May I tell you about it?—and then perhaps you will know whether you can help me or not.”
“Er—yes, certainly. Won't you sit down?” said the man, pulling himself together; his ingrained rough chivalry refused to allow him to do anything worse than snarl at a woman. She seated herself in the patient's chair with a swirl of her flowing cloak and he, feeling more dead than alive, dropped into his own seat and tried to concentrate on the consultation.
“What is it you complain of.” he asked.
The brown eyes calm and veiled, gazed back into his own grey-green ones; there was no kindness in them now; they were like a duellist's in the motionless moment preceding the commencement of a bout. He liked her better for that, and relaxed slightly in relief. It was the kindness in her eyes he could not stand because it made him feel his own weakness.
“I have—” she paused, picking her words carefully, “sensations—impressions—that cannot be accounted for by any ordinary explanation. I am anxious to know whether they are hallucinations, or whether they have a genuine cause.”
“What is it you experience? Tactile, visual, auditory sensations?”
“Visual—frequently, but that is nothing new to me, for I have a vivid imagination. But several times recently I have had tactile sensations, and finally, this morning, an auditory one, which was what caused me to come to you. The others I should have ignored, putting them down as subconscious fantasies, but this—this morning—went beyond what I am prepared to ignore.”
“It sounds to me as if your case were one for a psychologist, madam, not for me, who am a neurologist.”
“I want to know whether there is any physical basis for my sensations,” said the woman, never taking her eyes from his.
“No, I should say there isn't.”
“Can you tell that for certain without examining me?”
He winced at this home-thrust.
“Do you want me to examine you now?”
“I should like your considered opinion, Dr. Malcolm.”
“Very well. We will take the tactile sensations first.
What is it you actually feel?”
“I have, on several occasions, been wakened from sleep by a sense of pressure on my shoulder or chest, and on two occasions by a sensation like a pair of powerful hands gripping my upper arms.”
“You ought to—have your heart examined,” Malcolm managed to say, clinging to his medical science like a drowning man to a straw and refusing to allow his mind to swerve from its concentration on the central nervous system of the patient before him, though his own heart was pounding like a trip-hammer and threatening to suffocate him.
“Do you think it is necessary?” asked the woman in front of him, watching him with her unfaltering gaze.
Malcolm could not speak: he could only sit and look at her.
“Have you ever made any investigations in psychic research?”
He shook his head.
“You ought to read this book,” she said, and taking a substantial volume from under her cloak, she pushed it towards him across the desk. For the first time since the interview had started her eyes released his, and he bent his head and read the title: “Phantasms of the Living,” by Gurney and Podmore.
The man sat with his head bowed over the book so long that his visitor began to think that, little as she wished to, she would have to break the silence. Suddenly he lifted his head and gazed straight at her.
“I can only say—I am sorry. I had never dreamt—such a thing was possible.”
He bowed his head over the book again, bending so low that she could no longer see his face at all, but only his thick greying red hair.
“It shall never happen again—you have my word for that,” he said in a voice she could hardly hear.
Then suddenly he sat bolt upright and looked at her, and if ever murder looked out of man's eyes, it looked out of his, for it seemed to him that the mangled body of his dream lady lay dead between this woman's hands. Then, as he saw her likeness to his beloved, he weakened; it was as if she reminded him of the dead—he could not hate this woman who was so like the one he loved. He wavered for a moment, fighting for his self control, and then put his elbows on the desk and covered his face with his hands.
“I'd be glad if you go,” he said, almost inaudibly.
“He heard her rise, and her footsteps on the parquet, and thought she was quitting the room, but instead he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He shuddered, and drove his finger-nails into the skin of his forehead, but except for that he gave no sign.
She stood quietly beside him for a few moments, and the blood began to pound in his temples till he thought his eye-balls would burst as he pressed his hands savagely against them, trying to shut out thought as well as sight. He was numb, as men become numb in a heavy bombardment, and at the same time he was one bare nerve of agony. He could not move; he knew his self-control would break down if he tried to speak; he could only sit still, and endure, and wait for her to go.
He heard her voice speaking to him—a rich, low contralto, velvety, like her eyes, and it moved him as great music had never moved him. It was like bells tolling, tolling for the dead. He could feel his self-control beginning to slip; if she played on his emotions any more he would cry out as men cried out on the examination couch when they came to the end of their fortitude.
“You said that—it should never happen again,” he heard her say. He nodded his head slightly.
“I am going to ask you to do something harder than that,” came the low quiet voice. “I am going to ask you deliberately to experiment with me along these lines.”
He shook his head.
“Yes, you can do it if I help you,” the voice went on. She paused for a moment; then her hand pressed his shoulder. “My friend, what will you do if you don't go on? There will be nothing left of you.”
He knew she spoke the truth, and his head sank yet lower over his desk as he felt the resistance ebbing out of him.
“Yes, we will see this thing through together, for good and not for evil. Do not be afraid of it. Believe me, it is not evil. Will you work with me, Rupert Malcolm?”
For a long minute he sat motionless, then he nodded.
“I felt you would,” she said. Her hand shifted from his left shoulder to his right, and she drew him to her. Suddenly relaxing, he let his whole body go limp as he leant against her, feeling her brace herself to take his weight. But he didn't care, he let his full weight go onto her—the dead weight of the upper part of his body, limp and inert; only a strong woman could have held him, and he liked that strength. More than anything else about her—more even than her kindness—he liked that strength. And in him, shaken as he was, rose a strange joy like th
e morning stars singing together, for she had penetrated his day-dream to its very core; she had martyred him—flaying him alive, and then she had been tender to him; yet she was still an unconquerable fortress, he could never possess her. He did not want to possess her—not in that way—it would spoil everything; yet he was not unfulfilled, for he was possessed by her. He might not possess her yet he was absorbed into her. His being was lost in hers and he was utterly satisfied.
He turned his head slightly, and his face was in the folds of her cloak. She stood patiently supporting his heavy bulk, waiting for him to pass through his crisis and come back to his self-control.
The clock in the hall struck eight, and he raised his head. She looked down at the face in the crook of her arm. All the lines had gone out of it, and he had the faintly bewildered look of a small child awakening from sleep in a strange place. All the tensions were gone, and in their place was an utter serenity and trust like a child's. The tears suddenly pricked behind her own eyes as she looked down into that face from which twenty years of over-strain had suddenly been wiped away.
Dr. Malcolm rose unsteadily to his feet.
“I—I suppose I ought to apologise,” he said.
The woman smiled.
“I don't believe you have any intention of apologising,” she replied.
“No,” he said, “I haven't,” and looked up with a quick smile and down again, shy as a school-girl with her, but intensely happy.
“I am going to drive you home,” she said. “I have got my car here. Where do you live?”
“Oh no, don't bother. I'll get a taxi.” He started to cram his instruments ruthlessly back into the already over-crowded dispatch case, and forced the lid down on them. Something went crack inside, but he snapped the locks home regardless. Then, forgetful of his refusal of her invitation, he followed her meekly into a smart black coupé standing outside the door, oblivious of the indignant glances of Sister, who had been kept an hour over her time, and being of unsullied virginity herself, did not approve of his driving home with pretty ladies.
