Tarnhelm: The Best Supernatural Stories

by Hugh Ealpole

  At his words the happiness that had filled her heart during the last fortnight suddenly left her, as water ebbs out of a pool. She felt guilty, wicked, ashamed. She had never before been so aware of his helplessness and also of some strange, reproaching voice that blamed her. Why should she be blamed? She looked at him and longed to take his head in her hands and kiss him, and keep him beside her and never let him go again.

  At last she told him that she would give him her answer the next day.

  When at last he left her she was miserable, weighted with a sense of some horrible crime. And yet why? What was there against such a marriage? She was pursued that evening, that night. Next day she would not see him, but sent down word that she was unwell and would he come tomorrow? All that day, keeping alone in her flat, feeling the waves of heat beat about her, tired, exhausted, driven, the whole of her life stole past her.

  ‘Why should I not marry him? Why must I not marry him?’

  The consciousness that she was fighting somebody or something grew with her through the day. Towards evening, when the heat faded and dusk swallowed the colours and patterns of her room, she seemed to hear a voice: ‘You are not the wife for him. He will have no freedom. He will lose his character. He will become a shadow.’

  And her answer was almost spoken to the still and empty room. ‘But he will be happy. I will give him everything. Why may I not think of myself at last after all these years? I’ve waited and waited, and worked and worked. . . .’

  And the answer came back: ‘You’re old. You’re old. You’re old.’ She was old. She felt that night eighty, a hundred.

  She went to bed at last; closed her eyes and slept.

  She woke suddenly; the room swam in moonlight. She had forgotten to draw her blinds. The high blue expanse of heaven flashing with fiery stars broke the grey spaces of her room with splendour.

  She lay in bed watching the stars. She was suddenly aware that a figure stood there between her bed and the thin shadowy pane. She gazed at it with no fear, but rather as though she had known it before.

  It was the figure of a young girl in a white dress. Her hair was black, her face very, very young, her eyes deep and innocent, full of light. Her hands were lovely, thin and pale, shell-coloured against the starry sky.

  The women looked at one another. A little unspoken dialogue fell between them.

  ‘You are Margaret?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have come to tell me to leave him alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, don’t you see? He won’t be happy. He won’t grow. His soul won’t grow with you. You are not the woman for him. Someone else—perhaps—later—but oh! let me have him a little longer just now. I love him so! Don’t take him from me!’

  Lizzie smiled.

  ‘You beautiful dear! . . . How young you are! How lovely!’

  ‘Leave him to me! Leave him to me!’

  The moon fell into fleecy clouds. The room was filled with shadow.

  With the morning nothing had been dimmed. Lizzie was happy with a strange sense of companionship and comfort.

  When Edmund came she saw at once that he was greatly troubled.

  ‘Well?’ he asked her.

  ‘You’ve seen Margaret!’ she cried. ‘Last night!’ He nodded his head.

  ‘It may have been a dream. . . .’

  ‘You don’t want to marry me. . . .’

  ‘Oh yes! Don’t think I would go back. . . .’

  She put her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘It’s all right, Edmund. I’m not going to marry you. I’m too old. We’re friends for always, but nothing more. Margaret was right.’

  ‘Margaret!’ He stared at her. ‘But you didn’t know her!’

  ‘I know her now,’ she answered. Then, laughing, ‘I’ve got two friends instead of one husband! Who knows that I’m not the richer?’

  As she spoke she seemed to feel on her cheek the soft, gentle kiss of a young girl.

  The Tarn

  I

  AS FOSTER moved unconsciously across the room, bent towards the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another with his eye, his host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat and the pleasure, the triumphant, lustful pleasure, that such an action would give him.

  The low white-walled, white-ceilinged room was flooded with the mellow, kindly Lakeland sun. October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches, in long web-like patterns of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey. The clouds pass in galleons across the mountains, now veiling, now revealing, now descending with ghost-like armies to the very breast of the plains, suddenly rising to the softest of blue skies and lying thin in lazy languorous colour.

  Fenwick’s cottage looked across to Low Fells; on his right, seen through side windows, sprawled the hills above Ullswater.

  Fenwick looked at Foster’s back and felt suddenly sick, so that he sat down, veiling his eyes for a moment with his hand. Foster had come up there, come all the way from London, to explain, to want to put things right. For how many years had he known Foster? Why, for twenty at least, and during all those years Foster had been for ever determined to put things right with everybody. He could not bear to be disliked; he hated that anyone should think ill of him; he wanted everyone to be his friend. That was one reason, perhaps, why Foster had got on so well, had prospered so in his career; one reason, too, why Fenwick had not.

  For Fenwick was the opposite of Foster in this. He did not want friends; he certainly did not care that people should like him—that is, people for whom, for one reason or another, he had contempt—and he had contempt for quite a number of people.

  Fenwick looked at that long, thin, bending back and felt his knees tremble. Soon Foster would turn round and that high reedy voice would pipe out something about the books. ‘What jolly books you have, Fenwick!’ How many, many times in the long watches of the night when Fenwick could not sleep had he heard that pipe sounding close there—yes, in the very shadows of his bed! And how many times had Fenwick replied to it: ‘I hate you! You are the cause of my failure in life! You have been in my way always. Always, always, always! Patronising and pretending, and in truth showing others what a poor thing you thought me, how great a failure, how conceited a fool! I know. You can hide nothing from me! I can hear you!’

  For twenty years now Foster had been persistently in Fenwick’s way. There had been that affair, so long ago now, when Robins had wanted a sub-editor for his wonderful review, the Parthenon, and Fenwick had gone to see him and they had had a splendid talk. How magnificently Fenwick had talked that day, with what enthusiasm he had shown Robins (who was blinded by his own conceit, anyway) the kind of paper the Parthenon might be, how Robins had caught his own enthusiasm, how he had pushed his fat body about the room, crying, ‘Yes, yes, Fenwick—that’s fine! That’s fine indeed!’—and then how, after all, Foster had got that job.

  The paper had only lived for a year or so, it is true, but the connection with it had brought Foster into prominence just as it might have brought Fenwick!

  Then five years later there was Fenwick’s novel, The Bitter Aloe—the novel upon which he had spent three years of blood-and-tears endeavour—and then, in the very same week of publication, Foster brings out The Circus, the novel that made his name, although, Heaven knows, the thing was poor sentimental trash. You may say that one novel cannot kill another—but can it not? Had not The Circus appeared would not that group of London know-alls—that conceited, limited, ignorant, self-satisfied crowd, who nevertheless can do, by their talk, so much to affect a book’s good or evil fortunes—have talked about The Bitter Aloe, and so forced it into prominence? As it was, the bo
ok was stillborn, and The Circus went on its prancing, triumphant way.

  After that there had been many occasions—some small, some big—and always in one way or another that thin, scraggy body of Foster’s was interfering with Fenwick’s happiness.

  The thing had become, of course, an obsession with Fenwick. Hiding up there in the heart of the Lakes, with no friends, almost no company, and very little money, he was given too much to brooding over his failure. He was a failure, and it was not his own fault. How could it be his own fault with his talents and his brilliance? It was the fault of modern life and its lack of culture, the fault of the stupid material mess that made up the intelligence of human beings—and the fault of Foster.

  Always Fenwick hoped that Foster would keep away from him. He did not know what he would not do did he see the man. And then one day to his amazement he received a telegram: ‘Passing through this way. May I stop with you Monday and Tuesday? Giles Foster.’

  Fenwick could scarcely believe his eyes, and then—from curiosity, from cynical contempt, from some deeper, more mysterious motive that he dared not analyse—he had telegraphed ‘Come.’

  And here the man was. And he had come—would you believe it?—to ‘put things right.’ He had heard from Hamlin Eddis that ‘Fenwick was hurt with him, had some kind of a grievance.’

  ‘I didn’t like to feel that, old man, and so I thought I’d just stop by and have it out with you, see what the matter was, and put it right.’

  Last night after supper Foster had tried to put it right. Eagerly, his eyes like a good dog’s who is asking for a bone that he knows that he thoroughly deserves, he had held out his hand and asked Fenwick to ‘say what was up.’

  Fenwick simply had said that nothing was up; Hamlin Eddis was a damned fool.

  ‘Oh, I’m glad to hear that!’ Foster had cried, springing up out of his chair and putting his hand on Fenwick’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad of that, old man. I couldn’t bear for us not to be friends. We’ve been friends so long.’

  Lord! how Fenwick hated him at that moment!

  II

  ‘What a jolly lot of books you have!’ Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. ‘Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them too, and those open bookshelves—it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind glass!’

  Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host’s knee. ‘Look here! I’m mentioning it for the last time—positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you assured me last night, but I just want—’

  Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man’s hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster’s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, bloody sockets, said:

  ‘Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?’

  The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.

  ‘I am so glad! That’s splendid! Splendid! I hope you won’t think me ridiculous, but I’ve always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I’ve always wanted to know you better. I’ve admired your talents so greatly. That novel of yours—the—the—the one about the Aloe—’

  ‘The Bitter Aloe?’

  ‘Ah, yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time.’

  ‘Yes, it ought to have done better.’

  ‘Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end.’

  ‘Yes, my time will come.’

  The thin, piping voice went on:

  ‘Now, I’ve had more success than I deserved. Oh, yes, I have. You can’t deny it. I’m not being falsely modest. I mean it. I’ve got some talent, of course, but not so much as people say. And you! Why, you’ve got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only—I do hope you’ll forgive my saying this—perhaps you haven’t advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate—always raining—why, you’re out of things! You don’t see people, don’t talk and discover what’s really going on. Why, look at me!’

  Fenwick turned round and looked at him.

  ‘Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays, and then I’m three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now that’s an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way.’

  Italy or Greece or somewhere!

  Something turned in Fenwick’s breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how passionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies—and now this fool, this fathead, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronising—

  He got up, looking out at the golden sun.

  ‘What do you say to a walk?’ he suggested. ‘The sun will last for a good hour yet.’

  III

  As soon as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half-round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster’s arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the long silver shield of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some recumbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said, ‘You have some further design in this.’

  They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water’s edge. Across the lake, tones of bright yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.

  The very way that Foster walked bespoke the man. He was always a little ahead of you, pushing his long, thin body along with little eager jerks as though did he not hurry he would miss something that would be immensely to his advantage. He talked, throwing words over his shoulder to Fenwick as you throw crumbs of bread to a robin.

  ‘Of course I was pleased. Who would not be? After all it’s a new prize. They’ve only been awarding it for a year or two, but it’s gratifying—really gratifying—to secure it. When I opened the envelope and found the cheque there—well, you could have knocked me down with a feather. You could, indeed. Of course, a hundred pounds isn’t much. But it’s the honour—’

  Whither were they going? Their destiny was as certain as though they had no free-will. Free-will? There is no free-will. All is Fate. Fenwick suddenly laughed aloud.

  Foster stopped.

  ‘Why, what is it?’

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘You laughed.’

  ‘Something amused me.’

  Foster slipped his arm through Fenwick’s.

  ‘It is jolly to be walking alone together like this, arm-in-arm, friends. I’m a sentimental man, I won’t deny it. What I say is that life is short and one must love one’s fellow-beings or where is one? You live too much alone, old man.’ He squeezed Fenwick’s arm. ‘That’s the truth of it.’

  It was torture, exquisite, heavenly torture. It was wonderful to feel that thin, bony arm pressing against his. Almost you could hear the beating of that other heart. Wonderful to feel that arm and the temptation to take it in your two hands and to bend it and twist it and then to hear the bones crack . . . crack . . . crack. . . .

  Wonderful to feel that temptation rise through one’s body like boiling water and yet not to yield to it. For a moment Fenwick’s hand touched Foster’s. Then he drew himself apart.

  ‘We’re at the village. This is the hotel wher
e they all come in the summer. We turn off at the right here. I’ll show you my tarn.’

  IV

  ‘Your tarn?’ asked Foster. ‘Forgive my ignorance, but what is a tarn exactly?’

  ‘A tarn is a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.’

  ‘I should like to see that.’

  ‘It is some little distance—up a rough road. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not a bit. I have long legs.’

  ‘Some of them are immensely deep—unfathomable—nobody touched the bottom—but quiet, like glass, with shadows only—’

  ‘Do you know, Fenwick, but I have always been afraid of water—I’ve never learnt to swim. I’m afraid to go out of my depth. Isn’t that ridiculous? But it is all because at my private school, years ago, when I was a small boy, some big fellows took me and held me with my head under the water and nearly drowned me. They did indeed. They went further than they meant to. I can see their faces.’

  Fenwick considered this. The picture leapt to his mind. He could see the boys—large, strong fellows, probably—and this little skinny thing like a frog, their thick hands about his throat, his legs like grey sticks kicking out of the water, their laughter, their sudden sense that something was wrong, the skinny body all flaccid and still—

  He drew a deep breath.

  Foster was walking beside him now, not ahead of him, as though he were a little afraid, and needed reassurance. Indeed the scene had changed. Before and behind them stretched the uphill path, loose with shale and stones. On their right, on a ridge at the foot of the hill, were some quarries, almost deserted, but the more melancholy in the fading afternoon because a little work still continued there, faint sounds came from the gaunt listening chimneys, a stream of water ran and tumbled angrily into a pool below, once and again a black silhouette, like a question mark, appeared against the darkening hill.