“I have had a
dream past the wit of man to say what dream
it was.” - MIDSUMMER
NIGHT’S DREAM.
“Mr. Locke! Mr. Locke!”
I opened heavy eyes to meet the eyes
of Ethan Vere, who bent over me. Phillida was
there, too, pale of face. But what was That just
vanishing into the darkness beyond my window-sill?
What malignant glare seared disappointment and grim
promise across my consciousness? Had I brought
with me or did I hear now a whispered: “Pygmy,
again!”
“Cousin, Cousin, are you very
ill?” Phillida was half sobbing. “Won’t
you drink the brandy, please? Oh, Ethan, how cold
he is to touch!”
“Hush, dear,” Vere bade,
in his slow steadfast way. “Mr. Locke, can
you swallow some of this?”
I became aware that his arm supported
me upright in my chair while he held a glass to my
lips. Mechanically I drank some of the cordial.
Vere put down the glass and said a curious thing.
He asked me:
“Shall I get you out of this room?”
Why should he ask that, since the
spectre was for me alone? Or if he had not seen
It, how did he know this room was an unsafe area?
My stupefied brain puzzled over these questions while
I managed a sign of refusal. Any effort was impossible
to me. The cold of the unearthly sea still numbed
my body. My heart labored, staggering at each
beat.
Vere’s support and nearness
were welcome to me. His tact let me rest in the
mute inaction necessary to recovery, while my body,
astonished that it still lived, hesitatingly resumed
the task of life. Somehow he reassured and directed
Phillida. Presently she was busied with the coffee
apparatus in the corner of the room.
It was too much weariness even to
turn my eyes aside from the expanse of the table before
me. The vase was upset, I noted, as I had seemed
to see it. The spray of purple heliotrope Phillida
had put there the day before lay among the wet sheets
of music. The Book of Hermas lay open at the
page I had last turned, the rosy lamplight upon the
text.
“Behold, I saw a great Beast
that he might devour a city whose name is
Hegrin. Thou hast escaped because thou
didst not fear for so terrible a Beast. If, therefore,
ye shall have prepared yourselves, yet may escape”
What did they mean, the old, old words
men have rejected? What had Hermas glimpsed in
his visions? How many men are written down liars
because they traveled in strange lands indeed, and
explorers, strove to report what they had seen?
Who before me had stood at the Barrier and set foot
on the Frontier between the worlds?
The fog still dense outside was whitening
with daybreak. A few hours while the sun ran
its course once more for me, then night again, bringing
completion of the menace. I recognized that this
delay could not affect the end. Perhaps it would
have been easier if all had finished for me tonight,
easier if Vere and Phillida had not found me in time
to bring me back.
How had they found out my condition?
Wonder stirred under my lethargy. Had I called
or cried out? It did not seem that I could have
done so. Certainly I had not tried! I was
not quite so poor an adventurer as that.
Phillida was back with a cup of steaming
black coffee, tiptoeing in her anxiety and questioning
Vere with her eyes. He took the cup, stooping
to receive my glance of assent to the new medicine.
The brandy had stimulated, but sickened
me. The coffee revived me so much that I was
able to take the second cup without Vere’s help.
When I had walked up and down the room a few times,
leaning on his arm, life had taken me back, if only
for a little while.
The two nurses were so good in their
care of me that our first words were of my gratitude
to them. Then my curiosity found voice.
“How did you happen to come
in at this hour?” I asked. “How did
you know I was ill?”
“I cannot imagine what made
Ethan wake up,” said Phillida, with a puzzled
look toward her husband. “He woke me by
rushing out of the room and letting the door slam
behind him. Of course I knew something must be
wrong to make Drawls hurry like that. Usually
he does such a tremendous lot in a day while looking
positively lazy. So I came rushing after and
found him in here, trying to waken you. I I
thought at first that you were not living, Cousin
Roger. It was horrible! You were all white
and cold” she shivered.
Vere poured another cup of coffee.
He said nothing on the subject, merely observing that
the stimulant would hardly hurt me and some might
be good for Phil. I asked her to bring cups for
them both.
“I am not sure I really care
about the coffee, but I’ll make some more,”
she nodded, dimpling. “I love to drink from
your wee porcelain cups with their gold holders.
You do have pretty things, you bachelors from town.”
When she was across the room, I asked quietly:
“What was it, Vere? What sent you to me?”
He answered in as subdued a tone,
looking at the tinted shade of the lamp instead of
at my face.
“The young lady woke me, Mr.
Locke. She came to the bedside, whispering that
you were dying would be dead if I didn’t
get to help you in time. She was gone before
Phillida roused up so she doesn’t know anything
about it.”
My heart, so nearly stopped forever
and so lethargic still, leaped in a strong beat.
Desire, then, had come back to save me. For all
my doubt and seemingly broken faith, she had brought
her slight power to help me in my hour of danger.
For my sake she had broken through her mysterious
seclusion to call Vere and send him to my rescue.
Neither he nor I being unsophisticated,
I understood what Vere believed, and why he looked
at the lamp rather than at me. But even that matter
had to yield precedence to my first eagerness.
“You saw her?” I demanded.
“You call her young. You saw her face, then?”
“I could forget it if I had,”
he said dryly. “As it happened, I didn’t.
She was wrapped in a lot of floating thin stuff; gray,
I guess? The room was pretty dark, and I was
jumping out of sleep. I don’t know why she
seemed young unless it was the easy, light way she
moved. By the time I got what she was saying
and sat up, she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“She went out the door like
a puff of smoke. I just saw a gray figure in
the doorway, where the hall lamp made it brighter than
in the room. When I came into the hall there
wasn’t a sign of anybody about. Nor afterward,
either!”
I considered briefly.
“I suppose I know what you are
thinking, Vere. It is natural, but wrong.
The lady”
“Mr. Locke,” he checked
me, “I’m not thinking.
I guess you’re as good a judge as I am about
what goes on in this house. After the way you’ve
treated us from the first, I’d be pretty dull
not to know you’re as choice of Phillida as
I am; and she is all that matters.”
“Who is?” demanded Phillida,
returning. “Me? I haven’t the
least idea what you are talking about, Drawls, but
I think Cousin Roger matters a great deal more than
I do, just now. Perhaps now he is able to tell
us about this attack, and if he should have a doctor.
I have noticed for weeks how thin and grave he has
been growing to be. If only he would drink
buttermilk!”
I looked into the candid, affectionate
face she turned to me. From her, I looked to
her husband, whose New England steadiness had been
tempered by a sailor’s service in the war and
broadened by the test of his experience in a city
cabaret. A new thought cleaved through my perplexities
like an arrow shot from a far-off place.
“How much do you both trust
me?” I slowly asked. “I do not mean
trust my character or my good intentions, but how
much confidence have you in my sanity and commonsense?
Would you believe a thing because I told it to you?
Or would you say: ’This is outside usual
experience. He is deceiving us, or mad’?”
They regarded one another, smiling
with an exquisite intimacy of understanding.
“Don’t you see yourself
one little, little bit, Cousin?” she wondered
at me.
“Anything you say, goes all
the way with us,” Vere corroborated.
“Wait,” I bade. “Drink your
coffee while I think.”
“Please drink yours, Cousin Roger, all fresh
and hot.”
I emptied the cup she urged upon me,
then leaned my forehead in my hands and tried to review
the situation. They obeyed like well-bred children,
settling down on a cushioned seat together and taking
their coffee as prettily as a pair of parakeets.
They seemed almost children to me, although there
was little difference in years between Vere and myself.
But then, I stood on the brink where years stopped.
With the next night, my triumphant
enemy could be put off no longer. That I could
not doubt. I cannot say that I was unafraid, yet
fear weighed less upon me than a heavy sense of solemnity
and realization of the few hours left during which
I could affect the affairs of life. What remained
to be done?
On one of my visits to New York, I
had called on my lawyer and made my will. There
were a few pensioners for whom provision should continue
after my death. The aged music master under whom
I developed such abilities as I had, who was crippled
now by rheumatism and otherwise dependent on a hard-faced
son-in-law; the three small daughters of a dead friend,
an actor, whose care and education at a famous school
of classic dancing I had promised him to finance a
few such obligations had been provided for, and the
rest was for Phillida.
But now, what of Desire Michell?
She had seemed so apart from common
existence that I never had thought of her possible
needs any more than of the needs of a bird that darted
in and out of my windows. Until tonight, when
I had seen her and she had proved herself all woman
by her appeal to Ethan Vere. It was not a spirit
or a seeress or “ye foule witch, Desire
Michell” who had fled to him for help in rescuing
me. It was simply a terrified girl. What
was to become of this girl? Under what circumstances
did she dwell? Had she a home, or did she need
one? Could I care for this matter while I was
here?
Day was so far advanced that a clamor
of birds came in to us along with a freshening air.
The strangely persistent fog had not lifted, but the
lamps already looked wan and faded in the new light.
I switched them out before speaking to the pair who
watched me.
“I have a story to tell you
both,” I said. “The beginning of it
Phillida has already heard. PerhapsHave
you told Vere about the woman who visited this room,
the first night I spent in the house? Who cut
her hair and left the braid in my hand to escape from
me?”
“Yes,” she nodded, wide-eyed.
“Will you go to my chiffonier,
there in the alcove, and bring a package wrapped in
white silk from the top drawer?”
She did as she was asked and laid
the square of folded silk before me. I put back
the covering, showing that sumptuous braid. The
rich fragrance of the gold pomander wrapped with it
filled the air like a vivifying elixir. Phillida
gathered up the braid with a cry of envious rapture.
“Oh! The gorgeous thing!
How do some lucky girls have hair like that? If
it was unbound, my two hands could not hold it all.
What a pity to have cut it! Look, Ethan, how
it crinkles and glitters.”
She held it out to him, extended across
her palms. Vere refrained from touching the braid,
surveying it where it lay. Being a mere bachelor,
I had no idea of Phillida’s emotions, until
Vere’s usual gravity broke in a mischievous,
heart-warming smile into the brown eyes uplifted to
him.
“Beautiful,” he agreed politely.
No more. But as I saw the wistful
envy pass quite away from my little cousin’s
plain face and leave her content, I advanced in respect
for him.
In the beginning, it was even harder
to speak than I had anticipated. When Phillida
laid the braid back in its wrapping, I left it uncovered
before me and looked at its reassuring reality rather
than at my listeners. How, I wondered, could
anyone be expected to credit the story I had to tell?
How should I find words to embody it?
Only at first! Whether there
clung about me some atmosphere of that land between
the worlds where I so recently had stood; or the room
indeed kept, as I fancied, the melancholy chill of
the unseen tide that had washed through it, I met
no scepticism from the two who heard my tale of wild
experience. They did not interrupt me. Phillida
crept close to her husband, putting her hand in his,
but she did not exclaim or question.
Silence held us all for a while after
I had finished. I had a discouraged sense of
inadequacy. After all, they had received but a
meagre outline. The color and body of the events
escaped speech. How could they feel what I had
felt? How could they conceive the charm of Desire
Michell, the white magic of her voice in the dark,
the force of her personality that could impress her
image “sight unseen” beyond all time to
erase? How convey to a listener that, understanding
her so little, I yet knew her so well?
“I have told you all this because
I need your help,” I said presently. “Will
you give it to me?”
“Go away!” Phillida burst
forth. She beat her palms together in her earnestness.
“Cousin Roger, take your car and go away far
off! Go where nothing can
reach you. You must not spend another single night
here. Ethan will go with you. I will, too,
if you want us. You must not be left alone until
you are quite safe; perhaps in New York?”
“And, Desire Michell?”
“She is in no danger, I suppose.
She is not my cousin, anyhow. And even she told
you to go away.”
“You believe my story, then?
You do not think me suffering from delusions?”
“Ethan saw the girl, too.
If he had not come here in time to save you, I believe
you would have died in that terrible stupor. Besides,
I have seen for weeks that something was changing
you.”
“What does Vere say?”
I questioned, studying the absorbed gravity of his
expression. I wondered what I myself would have
said if anyone had brought me such a story.
He passed his arm around Phillida
and drew her to him with a quieting, protective movement.
His regard met mine with more significance than he
chose to voice.
“I’m satisfied to take
the thing as you tell it, Mr. Locke,” he answered.
“Phil is right, it seems to me, about you not
staying here. I don’t think the young lady
ought to stay, either.”
“She refuses to leave, Vere.
What can I offer her that I have not offered?
How can I find her? You have heard how I searched
the countryside for a hint of such a girl’s
presence. No one has ever seen her; or else someone
lies very cleverly.”
In the pause, Phillida hesitatingly ventured an idea:
“Perhaps she is not real.
If the monster is a ghost thing, may not she be one,
too? If we are to believe in such things at all?
She almost seems to intend that you shall believe
her the ghost of the witch girl in that old book.”
I shook my head with the helpless
feeling of trying to explain some abstruse knowledge
to a child. I had spoken of the colossal spaces,
the solemn immensities of the place where I had set
my human foot. I had tried to paint the desolate
bleakness of that Borderland where the unnamed Thing
and I met, each beyond his own law-decreed boundary,
and locked in combat bitter and strong. Phillida
had listened; and talked of ghosts the bugbears of
grave-yard superstition. Did Vere comprehend me
better? Did he visualize the struggle, weirdly
akin to legends of knight and dragon, as prize of
which waited Desire Michell; forlornly helpless as
white Andromeda chained to her black cliff? Could
the Maine countryman, the cabaret entertainer, seize
the truths glimpsed by Rosicrucians and mystics of
lost cults, when the highly bred college girl failed?
It seemed so. At least his dark
eyes met mine with intelligence; hers held only bewilderment
and fear.
“They are not ghosts,” I said only.
“But how can you be sure?” she persisted.
Beneath the braid and the pomander
lay the sheet of paper on which Desire had written
weeks before; the first page of that composition now
pouring gold into my hands. This I passed to Phillida.
“Do ghosts write?” I queried.
She read the lines aloud.
“’We walk upon the shadows
of hills, across a level thrown, and pant like climbers.’”
“They do write, people say,
with ouija boards and mediums,” she murmured.
I looked at Vere with despair of sustaining
this argument. He stood up as if my appeal had
been spoken, drawing her with him.
“Now that it’s a decent
hour, don’t you think Cristina might give us
some breakfast?” he suggested. “I
guess bacon and eggs would be sort of restoring.
If you feel up to taking my arm as far as the porch,
Mr. Locke, the fresh air might be good medicine, too.”
I have speculated sometimes upon how
civilized man would get through days not spaced by
his recurrent meals into three divisions. Those
meals are hyphens between his mind and his body, as
it were. What sense of humor can view too intensely
a creature who must feed himself three times a day?
Are we not pleasantly urged out of our heroics and
into the normal by breakfast, luncheon and dinner?
Deny it as we will, when we do not heed them we are
out of touch with nature.
We went downstairs.
After breakfast was over, Vere and
I walked across the orchard to a seat placed near
the lake. There I sat down, while he remained
standing in his favorite attitude: one foot on
a low boulder, his arm resting on his knee as he gazed
into the shallow, amber-tinted water. Fog still
overlay the countryside, but without bringing coolness.
The damp heat was stifling, almost tropical as the
sun mounted higher in the hidden sky.
I watched my companion, waiting for
him to speak. He appeared intent upon the darting
movements of a group of tiny fish, but I knew his
thoughts were afar.
“Mr. Locke, I didn’t want
to speak before Phillida, because it would not do
any good for her to hear what I have to say,”
he finally began. “It is properly the answer
to what you asked upstairs, about our believing you
had not imagined that story. Did anything slip
out over the window-sill when you were waking up?”
Startled, for I had not spoken of this, I met his
gaze.
“Yes. Did you see”
“Nothing, exactly. Something,
though! Like well, like something pouring
itself along; a big, thick mass. Something sort
of smooth and glistening; like black, oily molasses
slipping over. Only alive, somehow; drawing coils
of itself out of the dark into the dark. I can’t
put it very plain.”
“What did you think?”
“The air in the room was bad
and close, hard to breathe. I guessed maybe I
was a little dizzy, jumping out of bed the way I did
and finding you like dead, almost.” He
paused, and returned his contemplation to the fish
darting in the lake.
“That is what I thought,”
he concluded. “What I felt well,
it was the kind of scare I didn’t use to know
you could feel outside of bad dreams; the kind you
wake up from all shaking, with your face and hands
dripping sweat. That isn’t all, either!”
This time the pause was so long that
I thought he did not mean to continue.
“My excuse for speaking of such
matters before Phillida is that I may need a woman
friend for Desire Michell,” I reverted to the
implied rebuke I acknowledged his right to give.
“I wanted her help, and yours. More than
ever, since you have shared my experience so far, I
want your advice.”
“I’ll be proud to give
it, in a minute. First, it’s only fair to
say I’ve felt enough wrong around here to be
able to understand a lot that once I might have laughed
at. Nothing compared to you! But I’ve
been working about the lake sometimes after dark or
before daylight was strong, when a kind of horror
would come over me well, I’d feel
I had to get away and into the house or go crazy.
That morning when you called from your window to ask
where I’d been so early, and I told you looking
for turtles that was one time. I had
gone out looking for turtles, but that horror drove
me in. When you hailed me, I had it so bad that
I could just about make out not to run for the house
like a scared cat, yelling all the way. Turning
back to the lake with you was a poser. But I
did; and the feeling was all gone as quick as it came.
We had a nice morning’s shooting. Once
in a while I’ve felt it sort of driving me indoors
when I stepped off the porch or over to the barn at
night. That’s a funny thing: the fear
was always outside, not in the house. I thought
of that while you were telling us how the Thing at
the window kept trying to get in at you. We haven’t
got a haunted house, but a haunted place!”
“Why have you not spoken of
this before?” I asked, deeply stirred.
He made a gesture, too American to
be called a shrug. He said nothing, watching
a large bubble rise through the pure, brown-green water,
float an instant on the surface, then vanish with
the abrupt completeness of a miniature explosion.
I watched also, with an always fresh interest in the
pretty phenomenon. Then I repeated my question,
rather impatiently as I considered what a relief his
companionship in experience would have afforded all
these weeks.
“Why not, Vere?”
“Mr. Locke, I don’t like
to keep saying that you never exactly got used to
me as your cousin’s husband,” he reluctantly
replied. “But I can see it’s a kind
of surprise to you right along that I don’t break
down or break out in some fashion. Of course
I haven’t known that you were meeting queer
times, too! If you hadn’t been through any
of this, what would you have thought if I’d
come to you with stories of the place being haunted
by something nobody could see? You would have
judged I was a liar, trying to fix up an excuse for
getting away from the work here and shoving off.
I don’t want to go away. I don’t intend
to go. I can’t see any need of it for Phil
and me. But and this is the advice
you spoke of! I think you ought to leave and
leave now. It’s little better than suicide
to stay.”
“And abandon Desire Michell?”
He turned his dark observant eyes toward me.
“If I said yes, you wouldn’t
do it. Phil and I will take care of the young
lady, if she will let us. Couldn’t a note
be left for her, telling her to come to us?”
I shook my head.
“She would not come. Now,
less than ever” I broke off,
shot with sharp self-reproach at the memory of how
I had driven her from me last night.
“You won’t be any help to her if you’re
dead,” he bluntly retorted.
At that I rose and walked a few paces
to knock out my post-breakfast pipe against an apple-tree.
I was not so sure that he was right, self-evident
as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly
in my mind, convictions somehow impressed when that
golden-bronze spot of light so gently came to rest
above my heart when I last stood at the Barrier; the
light so like the bright imagined head of Desire.
To fly from my place now, herded like a cowardly sheep
by the Thing of the Frontier, would that not be to
thrust her away to save myself?
No! Not myself, my life!
I had the answer now. I walked back to Vere and
took my seat again.
“Both of us, or neither,”
I told him. “If you can help me make it
both by any ingenuity, I shall be mighty glad.
It’s a pleasant world! But we will not
talk any more of my running for New York like a kicked
pup. The question is, will you and Phillida take
care of the lady who calls herself Desire Michell,
if tomorrow morning finds her free, but alone and
friendless?”
“As long as we live, Mr. Locke,”
he answered. “But I guess there isn’t
any disgrace in your going to New York, running or
not, if you take her with you. And that is what
ought to have been done long ago.”
“Vere?”
He nodded.
“You’ve got me! Just
pick the lady up, carry her out of that room, and
have a show-down. Put her in your car and take
her to town.”
“I gave her my word not”
“People can’t stand bowing
to each other when the ship’s afire. If
she is worth dying for, she doesn’t want you
to die for her.”
The simplicity of it! And, leaping the breach
of faith, the temptation!
What harm could I do Desire by this
plan of Vere’s? What good might I not do
her? Was it mere slavishness of mind on my part
not to overrule her timid will? She must pardon
me when she realized my desperate case. A dying
man might be excused for some roughness of haste, surely.
Whether flight could save us I did not know. I
did know absolutely that my enemy had crossed the
Barrier last night, and I was prey merely withheld
from It by the chance respite of a few daylight hours.
Suppose our escape succeeded?
A whole troup of pictures flitted across the screen
of my fancy. Desire beside me in the city, my
wife. Desire in those delightful shops that make
Fifth Avenue gay as a garden of tulips, where I might
buy for her frocks and hats, shoes of conspicuous
frivolity and those long white gloves that seem to
caress a woman’s arm everything fair
and fine. Restaurants I had described for her,
where she might dine in silken ease and perhaps hear
played the music she had named
I aroused myself and looked at Vere.
“You’ll do it?” he translated my
expression.
“I will, if she gives me the opportunity.”
“Do you judge she will?”
“I hope so. Since she went
so far as to show herself to you in order to send
help to me when I was in danger, I believe she will
come to my room tonight if I wait there”
He looked at me silently. The
consternation and protest in his face were speech
enough.
“If I wait there alone,”
I finished somewhat hurriedly. “If she comes
in time, we will try the plan. Have the car ready.
You and Phillida will be prepared, of course.
We will waste no time in getting away as far as possible.”
“And if that Thing comes before she does, Mr.
Locke?”
“Is there any other way?”
“I guess you haven’t considered
that you’re inviting me to stand by while you
get yourself killed,” he said stiffly. “I’m
not an educated man. I never heard the names
you mentioned this morning of people who used to study
out things like this. I never heard of any worlds
except earth and heaven and hell. But then I
couldn’t explain how an electric car runs.
I know the car does run; and I know you nearly died
last night. If you go back and stay alone in
that room, we both know what you are going to meet.”
I turned away from him because I sickened
at the prospect he evoked. The memory of that
death-tide was too near and rolled too coldly across
the future. If the trial had been hard when mercifully
unanticipated, what would it be to meet my enemy now
that I knew myself conquered? Would It not deliberately
forestall Desire’s coming, tonight?
“Mightn’t you help the
lady more if you went away now, and came back?”
he urged.
The deserter’s argument, time
without end! Was I to fall as low as that?
Phillida’s voice called to Vere
from the veranda, summoning him to some need of farm
or household.
“In a moment, Pretty,” he called assent.
But he did not move. I guessed
that he hoped much from my silence and would not disturb
me lest my decision be hindered or changed.
By and by I stood up.
“Vere, in your varied experiences
in peace and war, did you ever chance to meet a coward?”
“Once,” he answered briefly.
“And, did you like the sight?”
“No.”
“Then,” I said, “let
us not invite one another to that display. Shall
we go in to Phillida?”