‘Why didn’t you send for me before?’ It was a cry of anguish wrung from me.
‘I’d never ’a sent for you. It was her doin’. Oh, to think as God A’mighty’s made men able to measure out such-like pecks o’ trouble for us womenfolk! Young man, I don’t know what you did to ’er to make ’er leave you; but it muster bin something cruel, for she loved the ground you walked on. She useter sit day after day a-lookin’ at your picture, an’ talkin’ to it, an’ kissin’ of it, when she thought I wasn’t takin’ no notice, and cryin’ till she made me cry too. She useter cry all night ’most. An’ one day, when I tells ’er to pray to God to ’elp ’er through ’er trouble, she outs with your putty face on a card, she does, an’, says she, with her poor little smile, “That’s my god, Nursey,” she says.’
‘Don’t!’ I said feebly, putting out my hands to keep off the torture; ‘not any more. Not now.’
‘Don’t,’ she repeated. She had risen, and was walking up and down the room with clasped hands. ‘Don’t, indeed! No, I won’t; but I shan’t forget you! I tell you, I’ve had you in my prayers time and again, when I thought you’d made a light-o’-love of my darling. I shan’t drop you outer them now, when I know she was your own wedded wife, as you chucked away when you tired of her, and left ’er to eat ’er ’art out with longin’ for you. Oh! I pray to God above us to pay you scot and lot for all you done to ’er. You killed my pretty. The price will be required of you, young man, even to the uttermost farthing. Oh God in Heaven, make him suffer! Make him feel it!’
She stamped her foot as she passed me. I stood quite still. I bit my lip till I tasted the blood hot and salt on my tongue.
‘She was nothing to you,’ cried the woman, walking faster up and down between the rush chairs and the table; ‘any fool can see that with half an eye. You didn’t love her, so you don’t feel nothin’ now; but some day you’ll care for someone, and then you shall know what she felt – if there’s any justice in Heaven.’
I, too, rose, walked across the room, and leaned against the wall. I heard her words without understanding them.
‘Can’t you feel nothin’? Are you mader stone? Come an’ look at ’er lyin’ there so quiet. She don’t fret arter the likes o’ you no more now. She won’t sit no more a-lookin’ outer winder an’ sayin’ nothin’ – only droppin’ ’er tears one by one, slow, slow on her lap. Come an’ see ’er; come an’ see what you done to my pretty – an’ then you can go. Nobody wants you ’ere. She don’t want you now. But p’raps you’d like to see ’er safe under ground afore yer go? I’ll be bound you’ll put a big stone slab on ’er – to make sure she don’t rise again.’
I turned on her. Her thin face was white with grief and rage. Her claw-like hands were clenched.
‘Woman,’ I said, ‘have mercy.’
She paused and looked at me.
‘Eh?’ she said.
‘Have mercy!’ I said again.
‘Mercy! You should ’a thought o’ that before. You ’adn’t no mercy on ’er. She loved you – she died loving you. An’ if I wasn’t a Christian woman, I’d kill you for it – like the rat you are! That I would, though I ’ad to swing for it afterwards.’
I caught the woman’s hands and held them fast, though she writhed and resisted.
‘Don’t you understand?’ I said savagely. ‘We loved each other. She died loving me. I have to live loving her. And it’s her you pity. I tell you it was all a mistake – a stupid, stupid mistake. Take me to her, and for pity’s sake, let me be left alone with her.’
She hesitated; then said, in a voice only a shade less hard: ‘Well, come along, then.’
We moved towards the door. As she opened it, a faint, weak cry fell on my ear. My heart stood still.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, stopping on the threshold.
‘Your child,’ she said shortly.
That too! Oh, my love! oh, my poor love! All these long months!
‘She allus said she’d send for you when she’d got over her trouble,’ the woman said, as we climbed the stairs. “I’d like him to see his little baby, nurse,” she says; “our little baby. It’ll be all right when the baby’s born,” she says. “I know he’ll come to me then. You’ll see.” And I never said nothin’, not thinkin’ you’d come if she was your leavin’s and not dreamin’ you could be ’er ’usband an’ could stay away from ’er a hour –’er bein’ as she was. Hush!’
She drew a key from her pocket and fitted it to a lock. She opened the door, and I followed her in. It was a large, dark room, full of old-fashioned furniture and a smell of lavender, camphor, and narcissus.
The big four-post bed was covered with white.
‘My lamb – my poor, pretty lamb!’ said the woman, beginning to cry for the first time as she drew back the sheet. ‘Don’t she look beautiful?’
I stood by the bedstead. I looked down on my wife’s face. Just so I had seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning, when the wind and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she would awaken, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek against mine – and that we should tell each other everything, and weep together, and understand, and be comforted.
So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the room.
But the red lips were like marble, and she did not waken. She will not waken now ever any more.
I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written.
3
I lay that night in a big room, filled with heavy dark furniture, in a great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains – a bed, the counterpart of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.
They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.
I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me it was I who had done that. The tall clock at the stair-head sounded the hours – eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was dark and very still.
I had not yet been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the intoxication of grief – a real drunkenness, more merciful than the sober calm that comes afterwards.
Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought. And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been about three when I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the ticking of a clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet determined not to hear it, because it came from the next room – the room where the corpse lay.
And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I was nervous – miserably nervous – a coward, and a brute. It meant that I, having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body – the dead body that lay in the next room to mine. The heads of the beds were placed against the same wall: and from that wall I had fancied that I heard slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So that when I say I became aware of them, I mean that I, at last, heard a sound so definite as to leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and fell on my cold hands, as I held my breath and listened.
I don’t know how long I sat there – there was no further sound – and at last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.
‘You fool!’ I said to myself; ‘dead or alive, is she not your darling, your he
art’s heart? Would you not go near to die of joy, if she came back to you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives you!’
‘I wish she would come,’ myself answered in words, while every fibre of my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.
I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked at the polished furniture – the commonplace details of an ordinary room. Then I thought of her, lying alone so near me, so quiet under the white sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up and walked across the floor, and turned the door-handle?
As I thought it, I heard – plainly, unmistakably heard – the door of the chamber of death open slowly. I heard slow steps in the passage, slow, heavy steps. I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain hands that felt for the latch.
Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.
I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened – that door on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet dared not turn away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the bed foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its chin. There was a scent of lavender and camphor and white narcissus. Its eyes were wide open, and looked at me with love unspeakable.
I could have shrieked aloud.
My wife spoke. It was the same dear voice that I had loved so to hear, but it was very weak and faint now; and now I trembled as I listened.
‘You aren’t afraid of me, darling, are you, though I am dead? I heard all you said to me when you came, but I couldn’t answer. But now I’ve come back from the dead to tell you. I wasn’t really so bad as you thought me. Elvira had told me she loved Oscar. I only wrote the letter to make it easier for you. I was too proud to tell you when you were so angry, but I am not proud any more now. You’ll love again now, won’t you, now I am dead. One always forgives dead people.’
The poor ghost’s voice was hollow and faint. Abject terror paralysed me. I could answer nothing.
‘Say you forgive me,’ the thin, monotonous voice went on; ‘say you love me again.’
I had to speak. Coward as I was, I did manage to stammer – ‘Yes; I love you. I have always loved you, God help me.’
The sound of my own voice reassured me, and I ended more firmly than I began. The figure by the bed swayed a little, unsteadily.
‘I suppose,’ she said wearily, ‘you would be afraid, now I am dead, if I came round to you and kissed you?’
She made a movement as though she would have come to me.
Then I did shriek aloud, again and again, and covered my face with the sheet and wound it round my head and body, and held it with all my force. There was a moment’s silence. Then I heard my door close, and then a sound of feet and of voices, and I heard something heavy fall. I disentangled my head from the sheet. My room was empty. Then reason came back to me. I leaped from the bed.
‘Ida, my darling, come back! I am not afraid! I love you. Come back! Come back!’
I sprang to my door and flung it open. Someone was bringing a light along the passage. On the floor, outside the door of the death chamber, was a huddled heap – the corpse, in its grave-clothes. Dead, dead, dead.
She is buried in Mellor churchyard, and there is no stone over her.
Now, whether it was catalepsy, as the doctor said, or whether my love came back, even from the dead, to me who loved her, I shall never know; but this I know, that if I had held out my arms to her as she stood at my bed-foot – if I had said, ‘Yes, even from the grave, my darling – from hell itself, come back, come back to me!’ – if I had had room in my coward’s heart for anything but the unreasoning terror that killed love in that hour, I should not now be here alone. I shrank from her – I feared her – I would not take her to my heart. And now she will not come to me any more.
Why do I go on living?
You see, there is the child. It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.
The Three Drugs
Roger Wroxham looked round his studio before he blew out the candle, and wondered whether, perhaps, he looked for the last time. It was large and empty, yet his trouble had filled it, and, pressing against him in the prison of those four walls, forced him out into the world, where lights and voices and the presence of other men should give him room to draw back, to set a space between it and him, to decide whether he would ever face it again – he and it alone together. The nature of his trouble is not germane to this story. There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments – and all of these reached out tendrils that wove and interwove till they made a puzzle-problem of which heart and brain were now weary. It was as though his life depended on his deciphering the straggling characters traced by some spider who, having fallen into the ink-well, had dragged clogged legs in a black zigzag across his map of the world.
He blew out the candle and went quietly downstairs. It was nine at night, a soft night of May in Paris. Where should he go? He thought of the Seine, and took – an omnibus. The chestnut trees of the Boulevards brushed against the sides of the one that he boarded blindly in the first light street. He did not know where the omnibus was going. It did not matter. When at last it stopped he got off, and so strange was the place to him that for an instant it almost seemed as though the trouble itself had been left behind. He did not feel it in the length of three or four streets that he traversed slowly. But in the open space, very light and lively, where he recognised the Taverne de Paris and knew himself in Montmartre, the trouble set its teeth in his heart again, and he broke away from the lamps and the talk to struggle with it in the dark quiet streets beyond.
A man braced for such a fight has little thought to spare for the detail of his surroundings. The next thing that Wroxham knew of the outside world was the fact that he had known for some time that he was not alone in the street. There was someone on the other side of the road keeping pace with him – yes, certainly keeping pace, for, as he slackened his own, the feet on the other pavement also went more slowly. And now they were four feet, not two. Where had the other man sprung from? He had not been there a moment ago. And now, from an archway a little ahead of him, a third man came.
Wroxham stopped. Then three men converged upon him, and, like a sudden magic-lantern picture on a sheet prepared, there came to him all that he had heard and read of Montmartre – dark archways, knives, Apaches, and men who went away from homes where they were beloved and never again returned. He, too – well, if he never returned again, it would be quicker than the Seine, and, in the event of ultra-mundane possibilities, safer.
He stood still and laughed in the face of the man who first reached him.
‘Well, my friend?’ said he, and at that the other two drew close.
‘Monsieur walks late,’ said the first, a little confused, as it seemed, by that laugh.
‘And will walk still later, if it pleases him,’ said Roger. ‘Goodnight, my friends.’
‘Ah!’ said the second, ‘friends do not say adieu so quickly. Monsieur will tell us the hour.’
‘I have not a watch,’ said Roger, quite truthfully.
‘I will assist you to search for it,’ said the third man, and laid a hand on his arm.
Roger threw it off. That was instinctive. One may be resigned to a man’s knife between one’s ribs, but not to his hands pawing one’s shoulders. The man with the hand staggered back.
‘The knife searches more surely,’ said the second.
‘No, no,’ said the third quickly, ‘he is too heavy. I for one will not carry him afterwards.’
They closed round him, hustling him between them. Their pale, degenerate faces spun and swung round him in the struggle. For there was a struggle. He had not meant that there should be a struggle. Someone would hear – someone would come.
But if any
heard, none came. The street retained its empty silence, the houses, masked in close shutters, kept their reserve. The four were wrestling, all pressed close together in a writhing bunch, drawing breath hardly through set teeth, their feet slipping, and not slipping, on the rounded cobble-stones.
The contact with these creatures, the smell of them, the warm, greasy texture of their flesh as, in the conflict, his face or neck met neck or face of theirs – Roger felt a cold rage possess him. He wrung two clammy hands apart and threw something off – something that staggered back clattering, fell in the gutter, and lay there.
It was then that Roger felt the knife. Its point glanced off the cigarette-case in his breast pocket and bit sharply at his inner arm. And at the sting of it Roger knew that he did not desire to die. He feigned a reeling weakness, relaxed his grip, swayed sideways, and then suddenly caught the other two in a new grip, crushed their faces together, flung them off, and ran. It was but for an instant that his feet were the only ones that echoed in the steep. Then he knew that the others too were running.
It was like one of those nightmares wherein one runs for ever, leaden-footed, through a city of the dead. Roger turned sharply to the right. The sound of the other footsteps told that the pursuers also had turned that corner. Here was another street – a steep ascent. He ran more swiftly – he was running now for his life – the life that he held so cheap three minutes before. And all the streets were empty – empty like dream-streets, with all their windows dark and unhelpful, their doors fast closed against his need.