He took her up to the dance himself, and he knew that he had won her, not because of the collar but because of the new pride and power he felt inside him. She stood opposite him in the eight-handed reel they call the “Waves of Torey,” and she would not look at him, her eyelashes lay on her brown cheeks like two dark half-moons, and her mouth was shut and smiling in a thin red half-moon, but now that secure and private smile of hers was private to them both; the secret that must never be told had still not been told, and yet they shared it without any word spoken, and it would be theirs for ever.
Between the dances the girls crowded round and asked Bridget about her collar—had she made it herself out of gold paper or got it folded out of a cracker, and what were those tiny fine lines on it and the big buckles in front? And then as they felt how hard and heavy it was they cried out at her for wearing a sheet of painted tin or brass, but they all envied her, that was easy seen, and they were all staring and so were all the boys when she stood up to dance the solo jig with Micky the Music playing the fiddle for her instead of Mary’s old melodion.
It was past eleven o’clock by then, and the tiny room hot as a furnace from the turf fire and the lamp and the crowd that sat two on each of the three chairs, and ten on the bed boxed into the wall, and five on the table, and stood jammed together round the open door and lifted cups from the dresser to dip into the butt of fresh-drawn water by the door. The smoke-blackened rafters rose over Bridget’s head like the dim roof of a church; she had kicked off her shoes to dance the better, and her bare feet darted in and out of each other on the stone flags like two brown dragonflies chasing each other, while all the time her arms hung straight and still at her side, and her body in the dull-gleaming dress was straight as a soldier on parade, and the little dark head above that shining plate of gold never turned to right nor left nor looked at anyone in the room, not even when the crowd round the door parted with murmurs of greeting to Sir Miles and one or two of his friends who had come over in his car from the Big House to look in at the dancing.
“That was a grand jig, Bridget,” said Sir Miles when she had done, “and what, by all that’s holy, is that collar you’re wearing?”
“It was given me, your honour,” said Bridget, and “I found it, your honour,” said Dan, all in the same breath. Bridget was trembling under the weight of it after her dance, and he helped her off with it and together they handed it to Sir Miles to see, and he stood staring at it between his hands as though his eyes would fall out of his head.
“Where did you find it, Dan?” says he at last.
“In the field at home when I was after cutting the corn, and my father said it was a bit of an old coffin and threw it out, but I took it away and washed the black off it.”
“And what made you think of doing that?”
“I wanted a collar for Bridget that wasn’t old-fashioned.”
“Well, you were out there,” said Sir Miles, “for this collar was made and worn in this country before ever Saint Patrick came to it, and that’s more than fifteen hundred years ago.”
“Who wore it, sir?” asked Bridget.
“Some great prince,” said Sir Miles, and Dan did not tell him he had known that.
He has never told it. The collar was taken to Dublin and put in the museum there, and if anyone doesn’t believe this story, they have only to go and look at the collar in its glass case and read how it was dug out of a field and thrown into a thorn bush. And Dan was given a big reward for finding it, and has married Bridget and brought her to the House of the Prince on the Hill; but he has never told even Bridget the secret that must never be told, and that is that for the three nights of the full moon one August he remembered that he himself had been that Prince.
Uncanny Stories
The Book
On a foggy night in November, Mr. Corbett, having guessed the murderer by the third chapter of his detective story, arose in disappointment from his bed and went downstairs in search of something more satisfactory to send him to sleep.
The fog had crept through the closed and curtained windows of the dining-room and hung thick on the air in a silence that seemed as heavy and breathless as the fog. The atmosphere was more choking than in his room, and very chill, although the remains of a large fire still burned in the grate.
The dining-room bookcase was the only considerable one in the house and held a careless unselected collection to suit all the tastes of the household, together with a few dull and obscure old theological books that had been left over from the sale of a learned uncle’s library. Cheap red novels, bought on railway stalls by Mrs. Corbett, who thought a journey the only time to read, were thrust in like pert, undersized intruders among the respectable nineteenth-century works of culture, chastely bound in dark blue or green, which Mr. Corbett had considered the right thing to buy during his Oxford days; beside these there swaggered the children’s large gaily bound story-books and collections of Fairy Tales in every colour.
From among this neat new cloth-bound crowd there towered here and there a musty sepulchre of learning, brown with the colour of dust rather than leather, with no trace of gilded letters, however faded, on its crumbling back to tell what lay inside. A few of these moribund survivors from the Dean’s library were inhospitably fastened with rusty clasps; all remained closed, and appeared impenetrable, their blank, forbidding backs up-lifted above their frivolous surroundings with the air of scorn that belongs to a private and concealed knowledge. For only the worm of corruption now bored his way through their evil-smelling pages.
It was an unusual flight of fancy for Mr. Corbett to imagine that the vaporous and fog-ridden air that seemed to hang more thickly about the bookcase was like a dank and poisonous breath exhaled by one or other of these slowly rotting volumes. Discomfort in this pervasive and impalpable presence came on him more acutely than at any time that day; in an attempt to clear his throat of it he choked most unpleasantly.
He hurriedly chose a Dickens from the second shelf as appropriate to a London fog, and had returned to the foot of the stairs when he decided that his reading tonight should by contrast be of blue Italian skies and white statues, in beautiful rhythmic sentences. He went back for a Walter Pater.
He found Marius the Epicurean tipped sideways across the gap left by his withdrawal of The Old Curiosity Shop. It was a very wide gap to have been left by a single volume, for the books on that shelf had been closely wedged together. He put the Dickens back into it and saw that there was still space for a large book. He said to himself in careful and precise words: “This is nonsense. No one can possibly have gone into the dining-room and removed a book while I was crossing the hall. There must have been a gap before in the second shelf.” But another part of his mind kept saying in a hurried, tumbled torrent: “There was no gap in the second shelf. There was no gap in the second shelf.”
He snatched at both the Marius and The Old Curiosity Shop, and went to his room in a haste that was unnecessary and absurd, since even if he believed in ghosts, which he did not, no one had the smallest reason for suspecting any in the modern Kensington house wherein he and his family had lived for the last fifteen years. Reading was the best thing to calm the nerves, and Dickens a pleasant, wholesome and robust author.
Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author’s sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank’s illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit.
But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. “I have often thought,” he said to himself, “that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.” He had never thought so before, but he liked to
think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep.
He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works. Sprightly devils in whiskers and peg-top trousers tortured a lovely maiden and leered in delight at her anguish; the gods and heroes of classic fable acted deeds whose naked crime and shame Mr. Corbett had never appreciated in Latin and Greek Unseens. When he had woken in a cold sweat from the spectacle of the ravished Philomel’s torn and bleeding tongue, he decided there was nothing for it but to go down and get another book that would turn his thoughts in some more pleasant direction. But his increasing reluctance to do this found a hundred excuses. The recollection of the gap in the shelf now occurred to him with a sense of unnatural importance; in the troubled dozes that followed, this gap between two books seemed the most hideous deformity, like a gap between the front teeth of some grinning monster.
But in the clear daylight of the morning Mr. Corbett came down to the pleasant dining-room, its sunny windows and smell of coffee and toast, and ate an undiminished breakfast with a mind chiefly occupied in self-congratulation that the wind had blown the fog away in time for his Saturday game of golf. Whistling happily, he was pouring out his final cup of coffee when his hand remained arrested in the act as his glance, roving across the book-case, noticed that there was now no gap at all in the second shelf. He asked who had been at the bookcase already, but neither of the girls had, nor Dicky, and Mrs. Corbett was not yet down. The maid never touched the books. They wanted to know what book he missed in it, which made him look foolish, as he could not say. The things that disturb us at midnight are negligible at 9 a.m.
“I thought there was a gap in the second shelf,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter.”
“There never is a gap in the second shelf,” said little Jean brightly. “You can take out lots of books from it and when you go back the gap’s always filled up. Haven’t you noticed that? I have.”
Nora, the middle one in age, said Jean was always being silly; she had been found crying over the funny pictures in The Rose and the Ring because she said all the people in them had such wicked faces, and the picture of a black cat had upset her because she thought it was a witch. Mr. Corbett did not like to think of such fancies for his Jeannie. She retaliated briskly by saying Dicky was just as bad, and he was a big boy. He had kicked a book across the room and said, “Filthy stuff,” just like that. Jean was a good mimic; her tone expressed a venom of disgust, and she made the gesture of dropping a book as though the very touch of it were loathsome. Dicky, who had been making violent signs at her, now told her she was a beastly little sneak and he would never again take her for rides on the step of his bicycle. Mr. Corbett was disturbed. Unpleasant housemaids and bad schoolfriends passed through his head, as he gravely asked his son how he had got hold of this book.
“Took it out of that bookcase of course,” said Dicky furiously.
It turned out to be the Boy’s Gulliver’s Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a wash-out. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift’s delightful fable, and that moreover in the bright and carefully expurgated edition they bring out nowadays. Mr. Corbett could not say he had ever noticed the cynicism himself, though he knew from the critical books it must be there, and with some annoyance he advised his son to take out a nice bright modern boy’s adventure story that could not depress anybody. It appeared, however, that Dicky was “off reading just now,” and the girls echoed this.
Mr. Corbett soon found that he too was “off reading.” Every new book seemed to him weak, tasteless and insipid; while his old and familiar books were depressing or even, in some obscure way, disgusting. Authors must all be filthy-minded; they probably wrote what they dared not express in their lives. Stevenson had said that literature was a morbid secretion; he read Stevenson again to discover his peculiar morbidity, and detected in his essays a self-pity masquerading as courage, and in Treasure Island an invalid’s sickly attraction to brutality.
This gave him a zest to find out what he disliked so much, and his taste for reading revived as he explored with relish the hidden infirmities of minds that had been valued by fools as great and noble. He saw Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontëas two unpleasant examples of spinsterhood; the one as a prying, sub-acid busybody in everyone else’s flirtations, the other as a raving, craving maenad seeking self-immolation on the altar of her frustrated passions. He compared Wordsworth’s love of nature to the monstrous egoism of an ancient bell-wether, isolated from the flock.
These powers of penetration astonished him. With a mind so acute and original he should have achieved greatness, yet he was a mere solicitor and not prosperous at that. If he had but the money, he might do something with those ivory shares, but it would be a pure gamble, and he had no luck. His natural envy of his wealthier acquaintances now mingled with a contempt for their stupidity that approached loathing. The digestion of his lunch in the City was ruined by meeting sentimental yet successful dotards whom he had once regarded as pleasant fellows. The very sight of them spoiled his game of golf, so that he came to prefer reading alone in the dining-room even on sunny afternoons.
He discovered also and with a slight shock that Mrs. Corbett had always bored him. Dicky he began actively to dislike as an impudent blockhead, and the two girls were as insipidly alike as white mice; it was a relief when he abolished their tiresome habit of coming in to say good night.
In the now unbroken silence and seclusion of the dining-room, he read with feverish haste as though he were seeking for some clue to knowledge, some secret key to existence which would quicken and inflame it, transform it from its present dull torpor to a life worthy of him and his powers.
He even explored the few decaying remains of his uncle’s theological library. Bored and baffled, he yet persisted, and had the occasional relief of an ugly woodcut of Adam and Eve with figures like bolsters and hair like dahlias, or a map of the Cosmos with Hell-mouth in the corner, belching forth demons. One of these books had diagrams and symbols in the margin which he took to be mathematical formulæ of a kind he did not know. He presently discovered that they were drawn, not printed, and that the book was in manuscript, in a very neat, crabbed black writing that resembled black-letter printing. It was moreover in Latin, a fact that gave Mr. Corbett a shock of unreasoning disappointment. For while examining the signs in the margin, he had been filled with an extraordinary exultation as though he knew himself to be on the edge of a discovery that should alter his whole life. But he had forgotten his Latin.
With a secret and guilty air which would have looked absurd to anyone who knew his harmless purpose, he stole to the schoolroom for Dicky’s Latin dictionary and grammar and hurried back to the dining-room, where he tried to discover what the book was about with an anxious industry that surprised himself. There was no name to it, nor of the author. Several blank pages had been left at the end, and the writing ended at the bottom of a page, with no flourish or superscription, as though the book had been left unfinished. From what sentences he could translate, it seemed to be a work on theology rather than mathematics. There were constant references to the Master, to his wishes and injunctions, which appeared to be of a complicated kind. Mr. Corbett began by skipping these as mere accounts of ceremonial, but a word caught his eye as one unlikely to occur in such an account. He read this passage attentively, looking up each word in the dictionary, and could hardly believe the result of his translation. “Clearly,” he decided, “this book must be by some early missionary, and the passage I have just read the account of some horrible rite practised by a savage tribe of devil-worshippers.” Though he called it “horrible,” he reflected on it, committing each d
etail to memory. He then amused himself by copying the signs in the margin near it and trying to discover their significance. But a sensation of sickly cold came over him, his head swam, and he could hardly see the figures before his eyes. He suspected a sudden attack of influenza, and went to ask his wife for medicine.
They were all in the drawing-room, Mrs. Corbett helping Nora and Jean with a new game, Dicky playing the pianola, and Mike, the Irish terrier, who had lately deserted his accustomed place on the dining-room hearthrug, stretched by the fire. Mr. Corbett had an instant’s impression of this peaceful and cheerful scene, before his family turned towards him and asked in scared tones what was the matter. He thought how like sheep they looked and sounded; nothing in his appearance in the mirror struck him as odd; it was their gaping faces that were unfamiliar. He then noticed the extraordinary behaviour of Mike, who had sprung from the hearthrug and was crouched in the furthest corner, uttering no sound, but with his eyes distended and foam round his bared teeth. Under Mr. Corbett’s glance, he slunk towards the door, whimpering in a faint and abject manner, and then as his master called him, he snarled horribly, and the hair bristled on the scruff of his neck. Dicky let him out, and they heard him scuffling at a frantic rate down the stairs to the kitchen, and then, again and again, a long-drawn howl.
“What can be the matter with Mike?” asked Mrs. Corbett.
Her question broke a silence that seemed to have lasted a long time. Jean began to cry. Mr. Corbett said irritably that he did not know what was the matter with any of them.
Then Nora asked, “What is that red mark on your face?”
He looked again in the glass and could see nothing.
“It’s quite clear from here,” said Dicky; “I can see the lines in the finger-print.”
“Yes, that’s what it is,” said Mrs. Corbett in her brisk staccato voice; “the print of a finger on your forehead. Have you been writing in red ink?”
Bloodstock and Other Stories Page 10
