The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics)

by Edward Lucas White

  I looked him straight in the eyes. He forestalled my impending outburst by saying:

  ‘As far as I can discern, Pembroke’s influence over his retainers does them no harm, physical or mental. Kennard and Melville have as large incomes and as many patients and are as successful and prosperous, as popular and prominent among their fellow-physicians as if they had never sojourned here. Except in their enthusiasm for and admiration of Pembroke every human being on this island appears to me as healthy as if not under any influence of any kind.’

  ‘Even so,’ I blurted out, ‘you ought not to abet any such deviltries.’

  ‘I don’t admit,’ said Radnor, hotly, ‘that any deviltries exist on this island or that there is any approach to deviltry in what you have partly divined. Also I abet nothing, as I ought, but, as I also ought, I conceive that I am under obligations not to thwart Pembroke in any way. I am the island’s resident physician and his personal physician; I am here to treat injuries, cure maladies, relieve pain, and do all I can to keep healthy every dweller on this island. I live up to my conception of my duty. Don’t attempt to preach at me.’

  ‘I am impatient,’ I said, ‘at my enforced stay here, and revolted at the idea of succumbing to Pembroke’s influence.’

  Radnor laughed.

  ‘You are,’ he said, ‘the only human being who has reached the island, since Pembroke bought it, uninvited. You’ll get away by and by. And you are most unlikely to be affected by anything he or Mother Bevan may have in their power to do. Neither Kennard nor Melville ever suspected anything, or grew suspicious. You alone have half seen through the situation here. You are Mother Bevan’s most refractory subject, so far. Have no fear.’

  He went off, whistling Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz.

  I had frequent and recurrent fears, but I dissembled them. I think, among all the terrors which haunted me during the remainder of my sojourn on the island, that I came nearest to panic and horror within an hour after Radnor had left me. Hardly was he gone when Pembroke, arrayed precisely as before and reminding me of a stage-frog in a goblin pantomime, sauntered up and seated himself by me.

  I sweated with tremors of dismay, I was ready to despair, when I found myself, however I tried, unable to utter a word to him concerning the gander, Mother Bevan, or my suspicions; unable even to allude to the subject in any way, although he asked me bluntly:

  ‘Have you anything to complain of?’

  ‘Only that I am here,’ I replied.

  ‘I had nothing to do with your coming here,’ he retorted. ‘You came uninvited, of your own accord, or by accident. I trust I have been a courteous host, but I have not tried to pretend that you are welcome.

  ‘I am endeavoring to arrange that your departure shall not entail upon me any inconvenience or any danger of disadvantageous consequences. Believe me, I am doing all I can to expedite your return to your normal haunts. Meantime you’ll have to be patient.’

  I was most impatient and very nearly frantic at finding myself, no matter how I struggled inwardly, totally unable so much as to refer or allude to what lay heaviest on my mind.

  We exchanged vaguely generalized sentences for awhile and he left as abruptly as before, left me quivering with consternation, dreading that my inability to broach the subject on which I was eager to beard him was a premonition of my total enthrallment to Pembroke’s influence.

  As the days passed I became habituated to stoning that uncanny gander, chasing him into the basin of the fountain and having him hiss at me from behind one of the gratings; I became indifferent to the glimpses I caught of Mother Bevan hovering in the middle distance. I had a good appetite for my meals: in fact, the food set before me at my abode would have awakened the most finicky dyspeptic to zest and relish, even to voracity; while the dinners to which I was invited were delectable.

  But from night to night I slept less and less, until I was near insomnia. And, from day to day, I found it more and more difficult to absorb myself in reading, to keep my mind on what I read; even to read at all.

  Again I waylaid Radnor. I described to him my progressively worsening discomfort and distress.

  ‘I am now,’ I said, ‘or soon shall be, not merely in need of your help, but beyond any help from you or anybody. If you don’t do something for me I’ll go crazy, I’ll do something desperate I’ll commit suicide.’

  ‘I have been pondering,’ he said, ‘how to help you, and I have almost hit upon a method. Your condition does not yet justify my giving you anything to make you sleep. As yet I do not want to give you any sort of drug not even the simplest sedative. Honestly try to get to sleep to-night. Before to-morrow I think I’ll hit upon an entirely suitable prescription, salutary for you and yet avoiding any appearance, any hint, of my antagonizing Pembroke.’

  I did try to sleep that night, but I was still wide awake long after midnight. So tossing and turning on my comfortable bed, I heard outside in the moonless darkness some one whistling a tune. As the sound came nearer I made sure it was Radnor. Also I recognized the tune.

  It was that of ‘The Ballad of Nell Flaherty’s Drake.’

  The tune brought to my mind the words of the song’s refrain:

  ‘The dear little fellow,

  ‘His legs were so yellow,

  ‘He could fly like a swallow and swim like a hake’

  ‘Bad luck to the tober,

  ‘The haythen cashlober,

  ‘The monsther thot murthered Nell Flaherty’s drake!’

  All of a sudden I conceived that this was Radnor’s method of intimating to me by indirection what he did not dare to utter to me in plain words. I thought I knew what he meant as well as if it had been put into the plainest words. I rolled over, was asleep in three breaths, and slept till Fong ventured to waken me.

  After breakfast I went upstairs again and rummaged about in the closet where Fong had deposited what I had worn when I came under his care. I found there everything I remembered to have had about me. My automatic was well oiled and in good working order and its clip of cartridges was full. My belt, with the extra clips of cartridges, was as it had been when I last put it on. I put it on, over my feather-weight hot-weather habiliments; I strapped on my automatic; I strolled out, intent on somehow coming within speaking distance of Pembroke.

  Chance, or some unconscious whim, guided my footsteps to the beach and, in spite of the rapidly intensifying heat of the sun rays, along it to the remaining fragments of my wreck, barely visible under a great accumulation of beach foam, left by the breakers, hurled shorewards during the thunder storm which had raged while I slept.

  Not far beyond those vestiges of what had been an aeroplane, approaching me along the beach, I encountered Pembroke.

  I found I had now no difficulty in speaking out my mind.

  ‘Pembroke,’ I said, ‘I’m outdone with confinement on this island of yours. I’m irritated past endurance. If you don’t promptly speed me on my way elsewhere the tension inside me is going to get too much for me. Something inside me is going to snap and I’ll do something desperate, something you’ll regret.’

  He looked me straight in the eyes, handsome in his fantastic toggery; calm and cool, to all appearance.

  ‘Are you, by any chance,’ he drawled, ‘threatening to shoot me?’

  ‘I haven’t made any threats,’ I retorted, hotly, and I have no intentions of shooting you or anybody. I realize that this island of yours is part of the British Empire and that in no part of it are homicides or murderous assaults condoned or left unpunished. But, since you use the word “threat,” I am ready to make a threat. If you don’t soon set me free of my present captivity, if you don’t soon put me in the way of getting home, I’ll not shoot you or any human being, but I will shoot that devilish gander; and, I promise you, if I shoot at him I’ll hit him and if I hit him I’ll kill him. I fancy those are plain words and I conjecture that you understand me fully, with all the implications of what I say.’

  Pembroke’s expression of face a
ppeared to me to indicate not only amazement and surprise, but the emotion of a man at a loss and momentarily helpless in the face of wholly unexpected circumstances.

  ‘You come with me!’ he snapped.

  I followed him along the beach to the village, and, as we went, wondered to see him apparently comfortable in his tight-fitting suit and bare headed beneath the fierce radiance of the merciless sun rays, while I rejoiced in my flimsy garments and at being sheltered under the very adequate Panama I had chosen from the headgear Fong had offered me.

  We passed the end of the steel picket fence, the two beach guards saluting Pembroke, and, I thought, suppressing a tendency to grin at me. Just around the point was a wide aviation field with a long row of hangars opposite the beach. I marveled, for I had caught no glimpse of any avion in the air over or about the island.

  A half dozen Asiatics, apparently Annamites, rose as we approached and stood respectfully, eyes on Pembroke. He uttered some sort of order in a tongue unknown to me and two of them set wide open the doors of one of the hangars. In it, to my amazement, I saw a Visconti biplane, one of the fastest and most powerful single-seaters ever bullt.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ Pembroke queried.

  ‘I am astonished,’ I answered. ‘I was certain that no specimen of this type of machine had ever been on this side of the Atlantlic.’

  ‘This is the first and only Visconti to be set up on this side of the ocean,’ he replied. ‘The point is; could you fly it?’

  ‘I think I could,’ I said, ‘and I am sure I could try.’

  ‘Try then,’ Pembroke snapped. ‘I make you a present of it. The sooner you’re off and away the better I’ll be pleased.’

  He spoke at some length, apparently in the same unknown tongue, and strode off towards his palace.

  I spent that day and most of the next going over that Visconti biplane, with the deft, quick assistance of the docile Annamites. If there was anything about it defective, untrustworthy or out of order I could not find it. On the third morning (I had dined at Radnor’s both evenings), equipped admirably by Fong, who instantly provided me with whatever I asked for, I rose in that Visconti biplane, and, contrary to my fears, reached Miami in safety. But I was so overstrained by anxiety that it required six weeks in a sanatorium to make me myself again. During those, apparently, endless hours in the air I had been expecting every moment that something cunningly arranged beforehand and undiscoverable to my scrutiny in my inspections and reinspections, was going to go wrong with my conveyance and instantaneously annihilate me. The strain all but finished me. However, all’s well that ends well.

  Azrael

  My nurse-maid used a cruel plan,

  To curb her charges’ play,

  By tales about the Bogy-Man,

  Who carried you away.

  I used to waken when I dreamed

  And, in the inky night,

  I sat in my bed and screamed

  With childish fear and fright.

  I dreamed about a lovely land

  And there a girl and I

  Were faring forwards hand in hand

  Beneath a sunlit sky.

  Then, as we went, the sky grew dark,

  The shadows thickened round,

  I seemed to palpitate and hark

  For some approaching sound.

  On the unstable verge of sleep

  I swayed, appalled and numb;

  I knew the Bogy-Man, to leap

  On one of us, had come.

  The Ghoula

  From the lookout where I had lain

  I saw a figure drawing near;

  An Englishman who strayed alone,

  Careless of nomads, ghouls, or spells,

  To heat the waste of sand and stone

  For hares or bustards or gazelles.

  He spoke our homely Persian tongue;

  I found him nowise hard to fool;

  And yet, he was so tall and young,

  I wished that he had been a ghoul.

  My hunting had engrossed my mind,

  Since of my mate I was bereft.

  Now, staring through the months behind,

  I felt how lonely I was left.

  My starved mouth watered at the view

  Of pink cheeks, lender, plump, and nigh.

  And yet it seemed a pity too;

  He looked too comely for to die.

  As by my side he idly paced,

  Before the ruins we had neared,

  Between two boulders on the waste,

  Some distance off, a doe appeared.

  He raised his rifle and took aim.

  Then, as I watched to see her spring,

  lie stopped and said:

  “It seems a shame

  To kill the pretty, dainty thing.'

  It startled me to find this youth.

  So heedless, hale, and lithe of limb,

  Felt for his game the selfsame ruth

  Which I had felt at sight of him.

  She stood and stared before she ran.

  “What good to us that she should roam,”

  Firm flesh lo eat, clean blood to drink,

  Fitted to make my dear ones thrive.

  And yet, since then, I often think

  She was so handsome when alive.

  Who knows, hut for mv darlings’ need

  I might have softened, let him go?

  I find it in my heart indeed

  To wish that he had shot the doe.

  Edward Lucas White on Dreams

  “Preface” to The Song of the Sirens (extract)

  A DAY-DREAMER I have been from boyhood, haunted, no matter what my task, by imaginations, mostly approximating some form of fictitious narrative; imaginations beyond my power to banish and seldom entirely within my power to alter, modify or control.

  Besides, I have, in my sleep, dreamed many dreams which, after waking, I could remember: some dimly, vaguely or faintly: others clearly, vividly or even intensely. A majority of these dreams have been such as come to most sleepers, but a minority have been such as visit few dreamers.

  Sometimes I wake with the most distinct recollection o( a picture, definite and with a multitude of details. Such was the dream, on the night of February 17th, 1906, in which I saw the vision on which is based the tale of “The Song of the Sirens"; saw it not as a painted picture, but as if I had been on the cross-trees of a vessel under that intense blue sky, gazing at the magic islet and its portentous occupants. The dream was the more marvelous since there is nothing, either in literature or art. suggesting anything which I beheld in that vision of the two living shapes.

  Often I wake with the sensation of having just finished reading a hook or story. Generally I can recall the form and appearance of the book and can almost see the last page: size, shape, quality of paper and kind of type; with every letter ol the last sentences.

  Such a dream was that from which I woke shuddering, tingling with the horror of the revelation at the end of "The Flambeau Bracket,” with the last three sentences of it, word for word as they stand in the story, branded on my sight. Yet I was not able to recall in its entirety the tale I had just read; for, in the dream, die whole action took place on die window-sill, and what was done and said there disclosed all that had gone before and implied, unmistakably, all that was to come alter. This superlative artistry I could not attain to in writing the tale.

  “Afterword” to Lukundoo and Other Stories (extract)

  Flight of the stories in this hook I did not compose. I dreamed them, and in each the dream or nightmare needed little or no modification to make a story of it. . . .

  “Lukundoo” was written after my nightmare without any manipulation of mine, just as I dreamed it. But I should never have dreamed it had I not previously read H. G. Wells' very much better story, "Pollock and the Porroh Man.” Anvone inter-ested in dreams might relish comparing the two tales. They have resemblant features, hut are very' unlike, and the differences are such as no waking intellect would invent,
but such as come into a human mind only in a nightmare dream.

  The others are paragon nightmares.

  "The House of the Nightmare” is written just as I dreamed it, word for word, since I had the concurrent sensations of reading the tale in print and of it all happening to me in the archaic times when all motor-cars were right-hand-drive and with gearshift-levers outside the tonneau. The dream had the unusual peculiarity that I woke after the second nightmare, so shaken that my wife had to quiet and soothe me as if I had been a scared child; and then I went to sleep again and finished the dream! Its denouement came as a complete surprise to me, as much of a shock as the climax of “The Snout" or of “Amina.”

  It will be easy to realize that anyone dreaming such narratives as “The Picture Puzzle,” “The Message on the Slate” and “The Pig-skin Belt” just had to write them into stories to get them out of his system.