The Dead of Night

by Oliver Onions

  I put up my hand to calm her. It was not necessary to tell me; the statuette had done that. I thought of that lonely hut far up the Huldhorn. Terrible houses of men, of which we see the outside only! A mansion in a London square, a crowded Paris tenement, a cabin on a vineyard’s slope, a log-hut high and lonely in a world of snows – just once in a while a chink opens, a curtain is left a little aside. One learns the reasons why a will was made, why a divorce-action was entered, why a crime was committed. Then the chink closes again and the curtain slips back into its place. But one has seen. I saw in Walther Blum a man scourged by life and his station in it, dwelling in solitude of soul up there, saturating his eyes with anguishing and untranslatable beauty, and with curses casting his wretched images into the stove. I saw a young girl, shy with the shyness of young girls, modest with a peasant’s flinching modesty, shrivelling Semele-like under the fierce heat of a passion elemental and beyond her com­prehension, forced to yield up her very superficies as her sole remaining value. Comprehend it? Because she did not comprehend it, it was the last violation. The little he had left her of her own, to do as she pleased with, he used up in order that the eyes of strangers might know as much of her as he. I had seen. Anybody might see. And she no longer cared.

  ‘But all this, Karen – it might explain why you weep. It does not explain why you smile,’ I said, after a long silence.

  ‘Does it not?’ she taunted me. ‘To you, no, perhaps; but he knows! Listen! It is not all. I now give way to him in everything. From here to here’ – she put out one foot and, with a gesture terrible in its very slightness, lightly touched her chin – ‘that is his. He may look at it, embrace it, burn it, cut it with knives. I now run to let him do as he wishes with it. “Yes, Walther; assuredly, Walther,” I say – for we speak now. But he pays. There is still something in me he cannot touch.’ And the smile, with all its hideous meanings for him, stole over the young rose of a mouth. ‘Is it not so, gnädiger Herr? And when he groans and weeps and prays for that something – for the gnädiger Herr is right when he says it has no name, but it is that he wants – is not that alone enough to make the smile come? For I cannot give that something now if I would. It is me, but it is not mine. He has all the rest instead. And so it is even wifely to smile.’

  ‘If it drives him mad, Karen?’ I asked gravely. For I had remem­bered Nicolo’s absence from the American bar. ‘If it drives him – or you – to something desperate?’

  She now spoke quite lightly with a little stretch of herself. ‘At least it would be an end . . . Please would the gnädiger Herr like me to send the valet as I go down?’

  ‘No, Karen.’

  ‘Or any service – ?’

  ‘There is nothing, thank you. But I should like to see you again.’

  With the smile still about her mouth, the steady, scornful look in her clear eyes, and her hands upon her hips again, she said a mocking and a bitter thing: ‘The gnädiger Herr has only to ring.’

  ‘Karen! . . . Why do you not go to your home over the Huldhorn for a short time?’

  ‘I come here instead,’ she answered; and the next moment she was gone, leaving me gazing at the ‘Flight into Egypt’ carved in high relief in brown wood on the wall opposite my bed.

  5

  How much better for Walther Blum, I thought, could he have con­tented himself with work of that kind, carving what every peasant in the district carved, the edelweiss paper-knives, the clock faces, and the other objects of the stationers’ shops! But what was the good of thoughts like that? He was what he was, and who shall justify the ways of man to woman, of woman to man? It was much more to the point that apparently his wife was carrying on this intrigue with the Neapolitan. Or was it not an intrigue at all? Was it, so to speak, part of the smile? Was it designed to show him that all that he had destroyed in her might still revive at the beck of somebody else?

  Our conversation, which I have abbreviated, had taken some time. If she had had an assignation with Nicolo at half past eight she had certainly not kept it. She might or might not be with him now. It was truly no affair of mine. And yet I felt restless and anxious.

  My indisposition was a short one. After two days I was up and about again. I received the congratulations of such of the guests as had any interest in me, and was told that I had missed little during my lying-up. The weather had broken. A strong thaw had set in. The eisbahn was a deserted waste, and there were trunks at the door of the hotel – for those who were not departing immediately were prepar­ing to do so, and within a few days the clientèle would probably be diminished by half. The signs of the winter’s end were not confined to the guests. There was a stir in the natural life of the district too. Down the lower slopes one saw more cattle, and multitudinous sounds of deliquescence and break-up were everywhere. Upstairs in the hotel they were already closing unneeded rooms, and down­stairs Nicolo, checking his stock and poring over his book in four languages, had the American bar to himself.

  The incident to which I am coming happened at five o’clock one afternoon upstairs in the already half-empty hotel. They were strip­ping beds and rolling up the bolsters and mattresses, and as a portion of the staff had already been discharged the rest of the remaining personnel was bearing a hand. Among them was Nicolo, in his shirt-sleeves, a plump cock among the print-skirted hens, smiling, showing his white teeth, and within an hour of his second daily shave. His jests, as he dragged out the mattresses and carried the stacks of sheets, caused an incessant tittering among the maids, and I suppose it is because I have no such success with women as he that I liked him less than ever.

  Something had taken me to my room, which was, of course, un­touched, and I had seen all this in passing. I did whatever it was that had brought me up, and came out again. A few yards along the corridor stood an addition to the group. Walther Blum had joined it.

  He was standing by the half-open door of a linen-room, watching his wife and Nicolo as they folded a blanket between them. For two reasons I did not pass on: I was interested in the situation, and I had a fancy to pass the time of day with Blum. Thus, as I lingered, I heard what passed between Nicolo and Karen Blum, in French.

  ‘When one folds blankets you know what happens?’ the Nea­pol­itan was saying.

  Karen shook the plaited head.

  ‘It cannot happen this time, for a reason. The reason stands there watching us. But one folds, so – and so’ – the blanket was halved and quartered as the two holders of it approached – ‘and the one who takes the blanket takes something else also.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ah, so little when one thinks of the rest! (Comme il fait les yeux féroces!)’

  ‘Il fait toujours les yeux féroces.’

  ‘Mais les tiens . . . ’ His own black bull’s-eyes rolled to her clear rounds, and the look itself was the kiss of which he spoke. She made way for me to pass, and I sought Blum.

  The man from Naples was certainly taking risks. I myself should hesitate before I provoked on a man’s face the sort of look that was on Blum’s. When I greeted him he did not at first speak. When he did speak it was not in answer to my greeting.

  ‘The Herr Doktor speaks languages. What was that he was saying?’ he said under his breath.

  ‘I heard nothing. What brings you here, Blum?’

  ‘Those things that the Herr Doktor does not hear bring me here,’ he replied grimly. ‘There is no longer any reason why she should remain. Half of them have left already. It is time she left.’

  ‘It is only a matter of a few days.’

  ‘I have come to fetch her today,’ he answered curtly.

  At that moment there was a further interesting passage between the pair who folded the blankets. She had loaded him with a pile of them for carrying away, and the pile bulged and tottered. He looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘Give a hand or they will be down an
d all to fold again,’ he panted, for he was of a sedentary habit, and the blankets had lodged stiffly against some small projection of the wall. She tripped after him.

  But she did not reach him. Blum’s voice was raised.

  ‘Karen!’

  She turned. One would have thought she had not known of his presence.

  ‘Yes, Walther?’

  ‘You are to come home. You are to come now. Go and make yourself ready.’

  It was peremptory, perhaps a little unreasonable; but she ignored that. The look she turned on him was not mere yielding; it was the deliberate strangling of a will of any kind set against his. Already she was close on him, hastening to whatever room she occupied. At me she did not glance. The look was all for him – as also was the smile that accompanied it.

  ‘Yes, Walther.’

  ‘Go and pack your box. I will carry it up the mountain.’

  ‘Yes, Walther.’

  ‘At once. Get your wages and wait for me.’

  ‘Yes, Walther.’ The next moment she was gone.

  I thought for a moment that Walther Blum was going to seek out Nicolo there and then, for he stood irresolute, watching him with wrathful, smouldering eyes. But all at once he turned away. I thought he was going to take some domestics’ staircase or other, but he didn’t. In his black jacket and spacious corduroys, though carrying his broad hat in his hand, he marched down the main staircase, as if he had been staying in the hotel. I followed him, and on the broad outer verandah called his name. He turned.

  ‘Herr Doktor?’

  ‘Could I have a word with you?’

  He bowed, for he had the peasant’s courtesy.

  ‘Properly speaking, what I want to say is none of my business, unless I can be of use. But you yourself spoke of it one night, and since then an accident has brought about a talk with your wife also.’

  ‘She shall come away today,’ he muttered.

  ‘But you speak as if she had left your roof. She has returned late perhaps, but she has worked late. There has been much to do. You will remember that you asked me the question.’

  He made no reply, and again I wondered what had passed be­tween them on the night when he had overheard her words to Nicolo and been a witness to their kiss. The next moment he had told me.

  ‘I have warned her!’ he cried. ‘That man, anybody can see what he is! Would I had the shaving of him; I would make the blade keen for that! . . . What was he saying in that language?’ he demanded once more.

  ‘I scarcely heard. It was harmless.’

  ‘It was not harmless! Those eyes do not go with harmless things!’

  I was much of the same opinion, but, ‘He is going away in a week,’ I said. ‘Do not think of him.’

  But the empty verandah boomed with Walther Blum’s outbreak.

  ‘In a week! And what does that mean? He has not possessed her. I made her tell me that night, and it would have given her pleasure to say yes, but she does not lie. He has not possessed her. But there is still time! All these months he has planned it, and he has one week left! I do not wish to kill. It is better to take her away. But if, within a week, I find him one yard above that plantation’s edge . . . ’ He stopped.

  This was a dangerous turn for things to take. Not only was he capable of doing it; he was capable of finding, out of that chaotic, tormented mind of his, overwhelming reason why it should be done. If the lore of the Herr Pastor over the mountain was ignorance and confusion to him, he would make as little of a Commandment. Neither was it safe that he should boom out menaces of this kind under the verandah of the Haarheim Palast Hotel.

  ‘Your wife will not come out this way,’ I said. ‘Will you take a little walk?’ And to make sure of his doing so I took his arm. We turned by the path that led round the hotel, under the plantation beyond which, if Nicolo went a single yard, it would be at his own risk. A little way up the plantation was an old wooden cattle-trough, with the bent and rusty remains of the pipe that had fed it. It was half full of snow, but we should see from there when Karen came out, and its thick, worn edge made a seat. We sat down side by side.

  We might have been waiting for Karen and nothing else, for we were as silent as if our minds had been unoccupied. It would have been like him not to speak at all. It was therefore I who took the word.

  ‘Walther,’ I said, using the name for the first time, ‘to what kind of a life do you take Karen when she goes up there?’

  ‘To mine,’ he said. ‘To the only one I have. But she gets the whole of it. I want no light-o’-love!’ he added contemptuously.

  ‘But is it necessary to give her the whole of it? May not the whole be too much? She is very young.’

  His eyes were past the hotel, over the valley furrowed with white, thinned and mottled into dark, unsightly patches. Soon the gentian and anemone would smile there and the sweet, cold freshets thread themselves downward under the grass, and the tonk of the bells be borne on the wind. And he seemed to be thinking of gentler things than murder, too, for he began to speak in a voice from which the anger had died away.

  ‘It may be so, Herr Doktor,’ he said. ‘It should not be so, for what is to love if it is not to give? But sometimes I ask myself whether only I am right, and I cannot answer. It is here’ – he placed a clenched hand on his breast – ‘and if I feel it there, how can I lie to myself and say I do not feel it? We cannot all be right, I and they. Then come times when I tell myself that it is easy for them to say “I give all”, when their all perhaps is so little. And yet again there are times when I rage, and say they are wrong, were they as countless as the pines, and only I understand. Is that too much, Herr Doktor?’

  ‘Much too much.’

  ‘When I love her?’

  ‘Love her a little less, Walther.’

  The brown hand gripped the remains of the rusty trough-pipe, and I could see its fierce tension. Then his head sank suddenly to his breast. He spoke in a shaky voice.

  ‘Herr Doktor, I have no words of my own. The words I have are carved and filed smooth by others. They are a great number, the others, and I am only one, and ignorant at that. Therefore I do not say I loved her, Herr Doktor. She happened to me. I say she happened to me. She happened to me as rain happens, or sun, or the fall of the tree, or the avalanche. She happened as sickness happens, or healing, or thirst, or hunger. Sometimes, when she looked beautiful, I could even love myself a little, that I should be the cause of her looking beautiful. She lived in the valley over the Huldhorn. What was the Huldhorn? I have crossed it in all weathers. They do not love, these young men who will not take the trouble if the one they love lives a couple of pastures away! Herr Doktor, if I have no words to speak of these things, was it not word enough to cross the Huldhorn for her? I could have carried her, too, as I shall carry her box today. So she happened to me in that valley.

  ‘And I said to myself, “Have a care, Walther Blum! You are rude and unlettered. They have been to school with the Herr Pastor! Therefore contradict nobody. If they seem to you to talk foolish and vain things, things that will not bear examination, say nothing. Look at Karen instead. Look at her as she takes down the platters, as she serves the cheese, as she kisses her father before going to bed. Look at her as if she were the mountain air you breathed, the mountain pool in which you swam.” All the way back over the Huldhorn it remained with me. Beauty is agony to me, Herr Doktor. She cannot move a hand but I feel that no woman’s hand has ever moved so before. And even these are words, that other people use. Let them pass. They are nothing . . . ah!’

  What else he would have said I cannot tell, for at that moment there was a little bustle at the back of the hotel. Nicolo appeared, bearing in front of him a small trunk of metal, corded. Karen followed, in a queer, stiff, little round hat. Nicolo set the trunk on the ground, with a gesture that seemed to say, Ach, but that was heav
y! Blum had risen. I continued to sit where I was. He dropped down through the plantation and joined the pair at the door. As far as I could see he did not look at Nicolo. He threw the box up to his shoulder and made a gesture of his head to his wife. A few minutes later they had passed me, she a few paces in front, he with the corded box on his shoulder, on their way to their home among the melting snows.

  6

  It chanced that I had an acquaintance at the hotel who was among the last to leave, and I might well have left with him; but for reasons I need not go into it was not to be so, and I went to see him off instead. The station is twelve miles away, and whereas we had come in sleighs, we went back in Swiss carts. I said goodbye to my friend, and the heads of the horses were turned homeward again. Halfway back I saw Walther Blum. He was sitting on a timber-cart. The vehicles passed without incident. I think he saw me, but was not sure. He gave no sign of recognition.

  ‘Has Josef Speck fallen ill again?’ I asked of the driver. Josef Speck was the man whose leg Blum had set, driving his cart for him until his recovery.

  ‘No, gnädiger Herr. Josef Speck is well and on his journey.’

  ‘Then what does Walther Blum going to the town?’

  The man laughed. ‘Oh, Walther Blum is unaccountable, gnädiger Herr. Nobody asks himself why Walther Blum does anything.’

  We drove on.

  As I look back oh this incident I find it difficult to justify the apprehension I felt. Walther Blum was on a timber-cart, going to the town; why should he not be on a timber-cart, going to the town? He was not even driving, but sitting by the driver’s side; why, if he had business that way, should he not take the chance of a lift? For all I knew he was going to dispose of his paper-knives and blotters and fretwork clock-faces. If he were away for a couple of days it would be lonely for his wife, but they do not mind loneliness up there, and possibly he had sent her to her people. It was as natural that Walther Blum should be taking a journey on a cart as that I myself should be saying goodbye to my friend.