The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Elia W. Peattie

by Elia W. Peattie

  “So that night a web of cloth, woven by one of the best weavers in all Iceland, was in the house; and on the beds of the children were blankets of lamb’s wool, soft to the touch and fair to the eye. After that the children slept warm and were at peace; for now, when they told the sagas their mother had taught them, or tried their part songs as they sat together on their bench, the stepmother was silent. For she feared to chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing why, and see the mother’s wraith.”

  On the Northern Ice

  The winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as the Milky Way. The silence which rests upon the solitude appears to be white also. Even sound has been included in Nature’s arrestment, for, indeed, save the still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated. The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and not to earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls the ebon ether in vast, liquid billows.

  In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actually peopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day after Cain killed Abel, and as if all of humanity’s remainder was huddled in affright away from the awful spaciousness of Creation.

  The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay—bent on a pleasant duty—he laughed to himself, and said that he did not at all object to being the only man in the world, so long as the world remained as unspeakably beautiful as it was when he buckled on his skates and shot away into the solitude. He was bent on reaching his best friend in time to act as groomsman, and business had delayed him till time was at its briefest. So he journeyed by night and journeyed alone, and when the tang of the frost got at his blood, he felt as a spirited horse feels when it gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as glass, his skates were keen, his frame fit, and his venture to his taste! So he laughed, and cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could hear the whistling of the air as he cleft it.

  As he went on and on in the black stillness, he began to have fancies. He imagined himself enormously tall—a great Viking of the Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love. And that reminded him that he had a love—though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as a background for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her that she was his love, for he had seen her only a few times, and the auspicious occasion had not yet presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay also, and was to be the maid of honour to his friend’s bride—which was one more reason why he skated almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now and then, he let out a shout of exultation.

  The one cloud that crossed Hagadorn’s sun of expectancy was the knowledge that Marie Beaujeu’s father had money, and that Marie lived in a house with two stories to it, and wore otter skin about her throat and little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went sledding. Moreover, in the locket in which she treasured a bit of her dead mother’s hair, there was a black pearl as big as a pea. These things made it difficult—perhaps impossible—for Ralph Hagadorn to say more than, “I love you.” But that much he meant to say though he were scourged with chagrin for his temerity.

  This determination grew upon him as he swept along the ice under the starlight. Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed eager to reassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of light which flowed from the love-star, but he was forced to turn his back upon it and face the black northeast.

  It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first he thought it might be an illusion. But when he had rubbed his eyes hard, he made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater in fluttering garments who sped over the ice as fast as ever werewolf went.

  He called aloud, but there was no answer. He shaped his hands and trumpeted through them, but the silence was as before—it was complete. So then he gave chase, setting his teeth hard and putting a tension on his firm young muscles. But go however he would, the white skater went faster. After a time, as he glanced at the cold gleam of the north star, he perceived that he was being led from his direct path. For a moment he hesitated, wondering if he would not better keep to his road, but his weird companion seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and finding it sweet to follow, he followed.

  Of course it came to him more than once in that strange pursuit, that the white skater was no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men see curious things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn’s own father—to hark no further than that for an instance!—who lived up there with the Lake Superior Indians, and worked in the copper mines, had welcomed a woman at his hut one bitter night, who was gone by morning, leaving wolf tracks on the snow! Yes, it was so, and John Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any day—if he were alive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were, is melted now!)

  Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the ice flushed pink at dawn, and arrows of lovely light shot up into the cold heavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn was at his destination. The sun climbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things, and as Hagadorn took off his skates and glanced carelessly lakeward, he beheld a great wind-rift in the ice, and the waves showing blue and hungry between white fields. Had he rushed along his intended path, watching the stars to guide him, his glance turned upward, all his body at magnificent momentum, he must certainly have gone into that cold grave.

  How wonderful that it had been sweet to follow the white skater, and that he followed!

  His heart beat hard as he hurried to his friend’s house. But he encountered no wedding furore. His friend met him as men meet in houses of mourning.

  “Is this your wedding face?” cried Hagadorn. “Why, man, starved as I am, I look more like a bridegroom than you!”

  “There’s no wedding today!”

  “No wedding! Why, you’re not—”

  “Marie Beaujeu died last night—”

  “Marie—”

  “Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it somehow. She grew worse and worse, and all the time she talked of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “We wondered what it meant. No one knew you were lovers.”

  “I didn’t know it myself; more’s the pity. At least, I didn’t know—”

  “She said you were on the ice, and that you didn’t know about the big breaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and the rift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in by the old French creek if you only knew—”

  “I came in that way.”

  “But how did you come to do that? It’s out of the path. We thought perhaps—”

  But Hagadorn broke in with his story and told him all as it had come to pass.

  That day they watched beside the maiden, who lay with tapers at her head and at her feet, and in the little church the bride who might have been at her wedding said prayers for her friend. They buried Marie Beaujeu in her bridesmaid white, and Hagadorn was before the altar with her, as he had intended from the first! Then at midnight the lovers who were to wed whispered their vows in the gloom of the cold church, and walked together through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths upon a grave.

  Three nights later, Hagadorn skated back again to his home. They wanted him to go by sunlight, but he had his way, and went when Venus made her bright path on the ice.

  The truth was, he had hoped for the companionship of the white skater. But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The only voice he heard was the baying of a wolf on the north shore. The world was as empty and as white as if God had just created it, and the sun had not yet coloured nor man defiled it.

  Story of an Obstinate Corpse

  Virgil Hoyt is a photographer’s assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoys his work without being consumed by it. He has been in search of the picturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the n
orth, in Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoe through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and no dreamer. He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up a winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all day and not worry about it tomorrow.

  Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.

  “The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him when he smokes his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed. Man—and particularly woman—was made for the same purpose. Clouds are not made to give moisture nor trees to cast shade. They have been created in order to give the camera obscura something to do.”

  In short, Virgil Hoyt’s view of the world is whimsical, and he likes to be bothered neither with the disagreeable nor the mysterious. That is the reason he loathes and detests going to a house of mourning to photograph a corpse. The bad taste of it offends him, but above all, he doesn’t like the necessity of shouldering, even for a few moments, a part of the burden of sorrow which belongs to some one else. He dislikes sorrow, and would willingly canoe five hundred miles up the cold Canadian rivers to get rid of it. Nevertheless, as assistant photographer, it is often his duty to do this very kind of thing. Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jewish family to photograph the remains of the mother, who had just died. He was put out, but he was only an assistant, and he went. He was taken to the front parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin. It was evident to him that there was some excitement in the household, and that a discussion was going on. But Hoyt said to himself that it didn’t concern him, and he therefore paid no attention to it.

  The daughter wanted the coffin turned on end in order that the corpse might face the camera properly, but Hoyt said he could overcome the recumbent attitude and make it appear that the face was taken in the position it would naturally hold in life, and so they went out and left him alone with the dead.

  The face of the deceased was a strong and positive one, such as may often be seen among Jewish matrons. Hoyt regarded it with some admiration, thinking to himself that she was a woman who had known what she wanted, and who, once having made up her mind, would prove immovable. Such a character appealed to Hoyt. He reflected that he might have married if only he could have found a woman with strength of character sufficient to disagree with him. There was a strand of hair out of place on the dead woman’s brow, and he gently pushed it back. A bud lifted its head too high from among the roses on her breast and spoiled the contour of the chin, so he broke it off. He remembered these things later with keen distinctness, and that his hand touched her chill face two or three times in the making of his arrangements.

  Then he took the impression, and left the house.

  He was busy at the time with some railroad work, and several days passed before he found opportunity to develop the plates. He took them from the bath in which they had lain with a number of others, and went energetically to work upon them, whistling some very saucy songs he had learned of the guide in the Red River country, and trying to forget that the face which was presently to appear was that of a dead woman. He had used three plates as a precaution against accident, and they came up well. But as they developed, he became aware of the existence of something in the photograph which had not been apparent to his eye in the subject. He was irritated, and without attempting to face the mystery, he made a few prints and laid them aside, ardently hoping that by some chance they would never be called for.

  However, as luck would have it,—and Hoyt’s luck never had been good,—his employer asked one day what had become of those photographs. Hoyt tried to evade making an answer, but the effort was futile, and he had to get out the finished prints and exhibit them. The older man sat staring at them a long time.

  “Hoyt,” he said, “you’re a young man, and very likely you have never seen anything like this before. But I have. Not exactly the same thing, perhaps, but similar phenomena have come my way a number of times since I went in the business, and I want to tell you there are things in heaven and earth not dreamt of—”

  “Oh, I know all that tommy-rot,” cried Hoyt, angrily, “but when anything happens I want to know the reason why and how it is done.”

  “All right,” answered his employer, “then you might explain why and how the sun rises.”

  But he humoured the young man sufficiently to examine with him the baths in which the plates were submerged, and the plates themselves. All was as it should be; but the mystery was there, and could not be done away with.

  Hoyt hoped against hope that the friends of the dead woman would somehow forget about the photographs; but the idea was unreasonable, and one day, as a matter of course, the daughter appeared and asked to see the pictures of her mother.

  “Well, to tell the truth,” stammered Hoyt, “they didn’t come out quite—quite as well as we could wish.”

  “But let me see them,” persisted the lady. “I’d like to look at them anyhow.”

  “Well, now,” said Hoyt, trying to be soothing, as he believed it was always best to be with women,—to tell the truth he was an ignoramus where women were concerned,—“I think it would be better if you didn’t look at them. There are reasons why—” he ambled on like this, stupid man that he was, till the lady naturally insisted upon seeing the pictures without a moment’s delay.

  So poor Hoyt brought them out and placed them in her hand, and then ran for the water pitcher, and had to be at the bother of bathing her forehead to keep her from fainting.

  For what the lady saw was this: Over face and flowers and the head of the coffin fell a thick veil, the edges of which touched the floor in some places. It covered the features so well that not a hint of them was visible.

  “There was nothing over mother’s face!” cried the lady at length.

  “Not a thing,” acquiesced Hoyt.“I know, because I had occasion to touch her face just before I took the picture. I put some of her hair back from her brow.”

  “What does it mean, then?” asked the lady.

  “You know better than I. There is no explanation in science. Perhaps there is some in—in psychology.”

  “Well,” said the young woman, stammering a little and colouring, “mother was a good woman, but she always wanted her own way, and she always had it, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she never would have her picture taken. She didn’t admire her own appearance. She said no one should ever see a picture of her.”

  “So?” said Hoyt, meditatively. “Well, she’s kept her word, hasn’t she?”

  The two stood looking at the photographs for a time. Then Hoyt pointed to the open blaze in the grate.

  “Throw them in,” he commanded.“Don’t let your father see them—don’t keep them yourself. They wouldn’t be agreeable things to keep.”

  “That’s true enough,” admitted the lady. And she threw them in the fire. Then Virgil Hoyt brought out the plates and broke them before her eyes.

  And that was the end of it—except that Hoyt sometimes tells the story to those who sit beside him when his pipe is lighted.

  Story of the Vanishing Patient

  There had always been strange stories about the house, but it was a sensible, comfortable sort of a neighbourhood, and people took pains to say to one another that there was nothing in these tales—of course not! Absolutely nothing! How could there be? It was a matter of common remark, however, that considering the amount of money the Nethertons had spent on the place, it was curious they lived there so little. They were nearly always away,—up North in the summer and down South in the winter, and over to Paris or London now and then,—and when they did come home it was only to entertain a number of guests from the city. The place was either plunged in gloom or gayety. The old gardener who kept house by himself in the cottage at the back of the yard had things much his own way by far the greater part of the time.

  Dr. Block and his wife lived next door to the Nethertons, and he and his wife, who were so absurd as t
o be very happy in each other’s company, had the benefit of the beautiful yard. They walked there mornings when the leaves were silvered with dew, and evenings they sat beside the lily pond and listened for the whip-poor-will. The doctor’s wife moved her room over to that side of the house which commanded a view of the yard, and thus made the honeysuckles and laurel and clematis and all the masses of tossing greenery her own. Sitting there day after day with her sewing, she speculated about the mystery which hung impalpably yet undeniably over the house.

  It happened one night when she and her husband had gone to their room, and were congratulating themselves on the fact that he had no very sick patients and was likely to enjoy a good night’s rest, that a ring came at the door.

  “If it’s anyone wanting you to leave home,” warned his wife, “you must tell them you are all worn out. You’ve been disturbed every night this week, and it’s too much!”

  The young physician went downstairs. At the door stood a man whom he had never seen before.

  “My wife is lying very ill next door,” said the stranger, “so ill that I fear she will not live till morning. Will you please come to her at once?”

  “Next door?” cried the physician. “I didn’t know the Nethertons were home!”

  “Please hasten,” begged the man.“I must go back to her. Follow as quickly as you can.”

  The doctor went back upstairs to complete his toilet.

  “How absurd,” protested his wife when she heard the story. “There is no one at the Nethertons’. I sit where I can see the front door, and no one can enter without my knowing it, and I have been sewing by the window all day. If there were any one in the house, the gardener would have the porch lantern lighted. It is some plot. Someone has designs on you. You must not go.”