by Hugh Ealpole
His mother watched him with maternal pride. ‘He’s that contented!’ she would say. ‘Any other child would plague your life away, but ’Enery—’
It was part of Henry’s unusual mind that he wondered at nothing. He remained in constant expectation, but whatever were to come to him it would not bring surprise with it. He was in a world where anything might happen. In all the house his favourite room was the high, thin drawing-room with an old gold mirror at one end of it and a piano muffled in brown holland. The mirror caught the piano with its peaked inquiring shape, that, in its reflection, looked so much more tremendous and ominous than it did in plain reality. Through the mirror the piano looked as though it might do anything, and to Henry, who knew nothing about pianos, it was responsible for almost everything that occurred in the house.
The windows of the room gave a fine display of the garden, the children, the carriages, and the distant houses, but it was when the Square was empty that Henry liked best to gaze down into it, because then the empty house and the empty Square prepared themselves together for some tremendous occurrence. Whenever such an interval of silence struck across the noise and traffic of the day, it seemed that all the world screwed itself up for the next event. ‘One—two—three.’ But the crisis never came. The noise returned again, people laughed and shouted, bells rang and motors screamed. Nevertheless, one day something would surely happen.
The house was full of company, and the boy would, sometimes, have yielded to the Fear that was never far away, had it not been for someone whom he had known from the very beginning of everything, someone who was as real as his mother, someone who was more powerful than anything or anyone in the house, and kinder, far, far kinder.
Often when Mrs Slater would wonder of what her son was thinking as he sat twisting string round and round in front of the fire, he would be aware of his Friend in the shadow of the light, watching gravely, in the cheerful room, having beneath His hands all the powers, good and evil, of the house. Just as Henry pictured quite clearly to himself other occupants of the house—someone with taloned claws behind the piano, another with black-hooded eyes and a peaked cap in the shadows of an upstairs passage, another brown, shrivelled and naked, who dwelt in a cupboard in one of the empty bedrooms, so, too, he could see his Friend, vast and shadowy, with a flowing beard and eyes that were kind and shining.
Often he had felt the pressure of His hand, had heard His reassuring whisper in his ears, had known the touch of His lips upon his forehead. No harm could come to him whilst his Friend was in the house—and his Friend was always there.
He went always with his mother into the streets when she did her shopping or simply took the air. It was natural that on these occasions he should be more frightened than during his hours in the house. In the first place his Friend did not accompany him on these out-of-door excursions, and his mother was not nearly so strong a protector as his Friend.
Then he was disturbed by the people who pressed and pushed about him—he had a sense that they were all like birds with flapping wings and strange cries, rushing down upon him— the colours and confusion of the shops bewildered him. There was too much here for him properly to understand; he had enough to do with the piano, the mirror, the shadowed passages, the staring windows.
But in the Square he was happy again. Mrs Slater never ventured into the garden; that was for her superiors, and she complacently accepted a world in which things were so ordered as the only world possible. But there was plenty of life outside the garden.
There were, on the different days of the week, the various musicians, and Henry was friendly with them all. He delighted in music; as he stood there, listening to the barrel-organ, the ideas, pictures, dreams, flew like flocks of beautiful birds through his brain, fleet and always just beyond his reach, so that he could catch nothing, but would nod his head and would hope that the tune would be repeated, because next time he might, perhaps, be more fortunate.
‘The Colonel’, who played the harp on Saturdays, was a friend of Mrs Slater. ‘Nice little feller, that of yours, mum,’ he would say. ‘ ’Ad one meself once.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Yes, sure enough. . . . Nice day. . . . Would you believe it, this is the only London square left for us to play in? . . . ’Tis, indeed. Cruel shame, I call it; life’s ’ard. . . . You’re right, mum, it is. Well, good day.’
Mrs Slater looked after him affectionately. ‘Pore feller; and yet I dare say he makes a pretty bit of it if all was known.’
Henry sighed. The birds were flown again. He was left with the blue-flecked sky and the grey houses that stood around the garden like beasts about a water-pool. The sun (a red disc) peered over their shoulders. He went with his mother within doors. Instantly on his entrance the house began to rustle and whisper.
II
Mrs Slater, although an amiable and kind-hearted human being who believed with confident superstition in a God of other people’s making, did not, on the whole, welcome her lady friends with much cordiality. It was not, as she often explained, as though she had her own house into which to ask them. Her motto was, ‘Friendly with All, Familiar with None’, and to this she very faithfully held. But in her heart there was reason enough for this caution; there had been days—yes, and nights too—when, during her lamented husband’s lifetime, she had ‘taken a drop’, taken it, obviously enough, as a comfort and a solace when things were going very hard with her, and ‘ ’Enry preferrin’ me to be jolly meself to keep ’im company’. She had protested, but Fate and Henry had been too strong for her. ‘She had fallen into the habit!’ Then, when No. 21 had come under her care, she had put it all sternly behind her, but one did not know how weak one might be, and a kindly friend might with her persuasion—
Therefore did Mrs Slater avoid her kindly friends. There was, however, one friend who was not so readily to be avoided; that was Mrs Carter. Mrs Carter also was a widow, or rather, to speak the direct truth, had discovered one morning, twenty years ago, that Mr Carter ‘was gone’; he had never returned. Those who knew Mrs Carter intimately said that, on the whole, ‘things bein’ as they was’, his departure was not entirely to be wondered at. Mrs Carter had a temper of her own, and nothing inflamed it so much as a drop of whisky, and there was nothing in the world she liked so much as ‘a drop’.
To meet her casually, you would judge her nothing less than the most amiable of womankind—a large, stout, jolly woman, with a face like a rose, and a quantity of black hair. At her best, in her fine Sunday clothes, she was a superb figure, and wore round her neck a rope of sham pearls that would have done credit to a sham countess. During the week, however, she slipped, on occasion, into ‘déshabillé’, and then she appeared not quite so attractive. No one knew the exact nature of her profession. She did a bit of ‘char’; she had at one time a little sweetshop, where she sold sweets, the Police Budget, and— although this was revealed only to her best friends—indecent photographs. It may be that the police discovered some of the sources of her income; at any rate the sweetshop was suddenly, one morning, abandoned. Her movements in everything were sudden; it was quite suddenly that she took a fancy to Mrs Slater. She met her at a friend’s, and at once, so she told Mrs Slater, ‘I liked yer, just as though I’d met yer before. But I’m like that. Sudden or not at all is my way, and not a bad way either!’
Mrs Slater could not be said to be everything that was affectionate in return. She distrusted Mrs Carter, disliked her brilliant colouring and her fluent experiences, felt shy before her rollicking suggestiveness, and timid at her innuendoes. For a consider-able time she held her defences against the insidious attack. Then there came a day when Mrs Carter burst into reluctant but passionate tears, asserting that Life and Mr Carter had been, from the beginning, against her; that she had committed, indeed, acts of folly in the past, but only when driven desperately against a wall; that she bore no grudge against anyone alive, but loved all humanity; that she was going to do her best to be a better woman, but couldn�
��t really hope to arrive at any satisfactory improvement without Mrs Slater’s assistance; that Mrs Slater, indeed, had shown her a New Way, a New Light, a New Path.
Mrs Slater, humble woman, had no illusions as to her own importance in the scheme of things; nothing touched her so surely as an appeal to her strength of character. She received Mrs Carter with open arms, suggested that they should read the Bible together on Sunday mornings, and go, side by side, to St Matthew’s on Sunday evenings. There was nothing like a study of the ‘Holy Word’ for ‘defeating the bottle’, and there was nothing like ‘defeating the bottle’ for getting back one’s strength and firmness of character.
It was along these lines that Mrs Slater proposed to conduct Mrs Carter.
Now, unfortunately, Henry took an instant and truly savage dislike to his mother’s new friend. He had been always, of course, ‘odd’ in his feelings about people, but never was he ‘odder’ than he was with Mrs Carter. ‘Little lamb,’ she said, when she saw him for the first time. ‘I envy you that child, Mrs Slater, I do indeed. Backwards ’e may be, but ’is being dependent, as you may say, touches the ’eart. Little lamb!’
She tried to embrace him; she offered him sweets. He shuddered at her approach, and his face was instantly grey, like a pool the moment after the sun’s setting. Had he been able himself to put into words his sensations, he would have said that the sight of Mrs Carter assured him, quite definitely, that something horrible would soon occur.
The house upon whose atmosphere he so depended instantly darkened; his Friend was gone, not because he was no longer able to see Him (his consciousness of Him did not depend at all upon any visual assurance), but because there was now, Henry was perfectly assured, no chance whatever of His suddenly appearing. And, on the other hand, those Others—the one with the taloned claws behind the piano, the one with the black-hooded eyes—were stronger, more threatening, more dominating. But, beyond her influence on the house, Mrs Carter, in her own physical and actual presence, tortured Henry. When she was in the room Henry suffered agony. He would creep away were he allowed, and, if that were not possible, then he would retreat into the most distant corner and watch. If he were in the room his eyes never left Mrs Carter for a moment, and it was this brooding gaze more than his disapproval that irritated her. ‘You never can tell with poor little dears when they’re “queer” what fancies they’ll take. Why, he quite seems to dislike me, Mrs Slater!’
Mrs Slater could venture no denial; indeed, Henry’s attitude aroused once again in her mind her earlier suspicions. She had all the reverence of her class for her son’s ‘oddness’. He knew more than ordinary mortal folk, and could see farther; he saw beyond Mrs Carter’s red cheeks and shining black hair, and the fact that he was, as a rule, tractable to cheerful kindness, made his rejection the more remarkable. But it might, nevertheless, be that the black things in Mrs Carter’s past were the marks impressed upon Henry’s sensitive intelligence; and that he had not, as yet, perceived the new Mrs Carter growing in grace now day by day.
‘E’ll get over ’is fancy, bless ’is ’eart.’ Mrs Slater pursued, then, her work of redemption.
III
On a certain evening in November, Mrs Carter, coming in to see her friend, invited sympathy for a very bad cold.
‘Drippin’ and runnin’ at the nose I’ve been all day, my dear. Awake all night I was with it, and ’tain’t often that I’ve one, but when I do it’s somethin’ cruel.’ It seemed to be better this evening, Mrs Slater thought, but when she congratulated her friend on this, Mrs Carter, shaking her head, remarked that it had left the nose and travelled into the throat and ears. ‘Once it’s earache, and I’m done,’ she said. Horrible pictures she drew of this earache, and it presently became clear that Mrs Carter was in perfect terror of a night made sleepless with pain. Once, it seemed, had Mrs Carter tried to commit suicide by hanging herself to a nail in a door, so maddening had the torture been. Luckily (Mrs Carter thanked Heaven) the nail had been dragged from the door by her weight—‘not that I was anything very ’eavy, you understand.’ Finally, it appeared that only one thing in the world could be relied upon to stay the fiend.
Mrs Carter produced from her pocket a bottle of whisky.
Upon that it followed that, since her reformation, Mrs Carter had come to loathe the very smell of whisky, and as for the taste of it!—but rather than be driven by flaming agony down the long stony passages of a sleepless night—anything.
It was here, of course, that Mrs Slater should have protested, but, in her heart, she was afraid of her friend, and afraid of herself. Mrs Carter’s company had, of late, been pleasant to her. She had been strengthened in her own resolves towards a fine life by the sight of Mrs Carter’s struggle in that direction, and that good woman’s genial amiability (when it was so obvious from her appearance that she could be far otherwise) flattered Mrs Slater’s sense of power. No, she could not now bear to let Mrs Carter go.
She said, therefore, nothing to her friend about the whisky, and on that evening Mrs Carter did take the ‘veriest sip’. But the cold continued—it continued in a marvellous and terrible manner. It seemed ‘to ’ave taken right ’old of my system’.
After a few evenings it was part of the ceremonies that the bottle should be produced; the kettle was boiling happily on the fire, there was lemon, there was a lump of sugar. . . . On a certain wet and depressing evening Mrs Slater herself had a glass ‘just to see that she didn’t get a cold like Mrs Carter’s.’
IV
Henry’s bedtime was somewhere between the hours of eight and nine, but his mother did not care to leave Mrs Carter (dear friend, though she was) quite alone downstairs with the bottom half of the house unguarded (although, of course, the doors were locked), therefore Mrs Carter came upstairs with her friend to see the little fellow put to bed; ‘and a hangel he looks, if ever I see one,’ declared the lady enthusiastically.
When the two were gone and the house was still, Henry would sit up in bed and listen; then, moving quietly, he would creep out and listen again.
There, in the passage, it seemed to him that he could hear the whole house talking—first one sound and then another would come, the wheeze of some straining floor, the creak of some whispering board, the shudder of a door. ‘Look out! Look out! Look out!’ and then, above that murmur, some louder voice: ‘Watch! There’s danger in the place!’ Then, shivering with cold and his sense of evil, he would creep down into a lower passage and stand listening again; now the voices of the house were deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage, cabinets and high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred echo of the London life, whirring, buzzing, like a cloud of gnats at the window-pane. ‘Look out! Look out! Look out!’ the house cried, and Henry, with chattering teeth, was on guard.
There came an evening when standing thus, shivering in his little shirt, he was aware that the Terror, so long anticipated, was upon him. It seemed to him, on this evening, that the house was suddenly still; it was as though all the sounds, as of running water, that passed up and down the rooms and passages, were, in a flashing second, frozen. The house was holding its breath.
He had to wait for a breathless, agonising interval before he heard the next sound, very faint and stifled breathing coming up to him out of the darkness in little uncertain gusts. He heard the breathings pause, then recommence again in quicker and louder succession. Henry, stirred simply, perhaps, by the Terror of his anticipation, moved back into the darker shadows in the nook of the cabinet, and stayed there with his shirt pressed against his little trembling knees.
Then followed, after a long time, a half yellow circle of light that touched the top steps of the stairs and a square of the wall; behind the light was the stealthy figur
e of Mrs Carter. She stood there for a moment, one hand with a candle raised, the other pressed against her breast; from one finger of this hand a bunch of heavy keys dangled. She stood there, with her wide, staring eyes, like glass in the candle-light, looking about her, her red cheeks rising and falling with her agitation, her body seeming enormous, her shadow on the wall huge in the flickering light. At the sight of his enemy Henry’s terror was so frantic that his hands beat with little spasmodic movements against the wall.
He did not see Mrs Carter at all, but he saw rather the movement through the air and darkness of the house of something that would bring down upon him the full naked force of the Terror that he had all his life anticipated. He had always known that the awful hour would arrive when the Terror would grip him; again and again he had seen its eyes, felt its breath, heard its movements, and these movements had been forewarnings of some future day. That day had arrived.
There was only one thing that he could do; his Friend alone in all the world could help him. With his soul dizzy and faint from fear, he prayed for his Friend, had he been less frightened he would have screamed aloud for Him to come and help him.
The boy’s breath came hot into his throat and stuck there, and his heart beat like a high, unresting hammer.
Mrs Carter, with the candle raised to throw light in front of her, moved forward very cautiously and softly. She passed down the passage, and then paused very near to the boy. She looked at the keys, and stole like some heavy, stealthy animal to the door of the long drawing-room. He watched her as she tried one key after another, making little dissatisfied noises as they refused to fit; then at last one turned the lock and she pushed back the door.
