Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery (3 page)

All this that takes so long to describe became apparent to me in a few
seconds. What I had always despised ascended the throne.

But with the finding of Bassett's cottage, as a sign-post close to
home, my former
sang-froid
, my stupidity, would doubtless return, and
my relief was therefore considerable when at length a faint gleam of
light appeared through the mist, against which the square dark shadow
of the chimney-line pointed upwards. After all, I had not strayed so
very far out of the way. Now I could definitely ascertain where I was
wrong.

Quickening my pace, I scrambled over a broken stone wall, and almost
ran across the open bit of grass to the door. One moment the black
outline of the cottage was there in front of me, and the next, when I
stood actually against it—there was nothing! I laughed to think how
utterly I had been deceived. Yet not utterly, for as I groped back
again over the wall, the cottage loomed up a little to the left, with
its windows lighted and friendly, and I had only been mistaken in my
angle of approach after all. Yet again, as I hurried to the door, the
mist drove past and thickened a second time—and the cottage was not
where I had seen it!

My confusion increased a lot after that. I scrambled about in all
directions, rather foolishly hurried, and over countless stone walls it
seemed, and completely dazed as to the true points of the compass. Then
suddenly, just when a kind of despair came over me, the cottage stood
there solidly before my eyes, and I found myself not two feet from the
door. Was ever mist before so deceptive? And there, just behind it, I
made out the row of pines like a dark wave breaking through the night.
I sniffed the wet resinous odour with joy, and a genuine thrill ran
through me as I saw the unmistakable yellow light of the windows. At
last I was near home and my troubles would soon be over.

A cloud of birds rose with shrill cries off the roof and whirled into
the darkness when I knocked with my stick on the door, and human
voices, I was almost certain, mingled somewhere with them, though it
was impossible to tell whether they were within the cottage or outside.
It all sounded confusedly with a rush of air like a little whirlwind,
and I stood there rather alarmed at the clamour of my knocking. By way,
too, of further proof that my imagination had awakened, the
significance of that knocking at the door set something vibrating
within me that most surely had never vibrated before, so that I
suddenly realized with what atmosphere of mystical suggestion is the
mere act of knocking surrounded—
knocking at a door
—both for him who
knocks, wondering what shall be revealed on opening, and for him who
stands within, waiting for the summons of the knocker. I only know that
I hesitated a lot before making up my mind to knock a second time.

And, anyhow, what happened subsequently came in a sort of haze. Words
and memory both failed me when I try to record it truthfully, so that
even the faces are difficult to visualise again, the words almost
impossible to hear.

Before I knew it the door was open and before I could frame the words
of my first brief question, I was within the threshold, and the door
was shut behind me.

I had expected the little dark and narrow hallway of a cottage,
oppressive of air and odour, but instead I came straight into a room
that was full of light and full of—people. And the air tasted like the
air about a mountain-top.

To the end I never saw what produced the light, nor understood how so
many men and women found space to move comfortably to and fro, and pass
each other as they did, within the confines of those four walls. An
uncomfortable sense of having intruded upon some private gathering was,
I think, my first emotion; though how the poverty-stricken country-side
could have produced such an assemblage puzzled me beyond belief. And my
second emotion—if there was any division at all in the wave of wonder
that fairly drenched me—was feeling a sort of glory in the presence of
such an atmosphere of splendid and vital
youth
. Everything vibrated,
quivered, shook about me, and I almost felt myself as an aged and
decrepit man by comparison.

I know my heart gave a great fiery leap as I saw them, for the faces
that met me were fine, vigourous, and comely, while burning everywhere
through their ripe maturity shone the ardours of youth and a kind of
deathless enthusiasm. Old, yet eternally young they were, as rivers and
mountains count their years by thousands, yet remain ever youthful; and
the first effect of all those pairs of eyes lifted to meet my own was
to send a whirlwind of unknown thrills about my heart and make me catch
my breath with mingled terror and delight. A fear of death, and at the
same time a sensation of touching something vast and eternal that could
never die, surged through me.

A deep hush followed my entrance as all turned to look at me. They
stood, men and women, grouped about a table, and something about
them—not their size alone—conveyed the impression of being
gigantic
, giving me strangely novel realisations of freedom, power,
and immense existence more or less than human.

I can only record my thoughts and impressions as they came to me and as
I dimly now remember them. I had expected to see old Tom Bassett
crouching half asleep over a peat fire, a dim lamp on the table beside
him, and instead this assembly of tall and splendid men and women stood
there to greet me, and stood in silence. It was little wonder that at
first the ready question died upon my lips, and I almost forgot the
words of my own language.

"I thought this was Tom Bassett's cottage!" I managed to ask at length,
and looked straight at the man nearest me across the table. He had wild
hair falling about his shoulders and a face of clear beauty. His eyes,
too, like all the rest, seemed shrouded by something veil-like that
reminded me of the shadowy man of whom I had first inquired the way.
They were
shaded
—and for some reason I was glad they were.

At the sound of my voice, unreal and thin, there was a general movement
throughout the room, as though everyone changed places, passing each
other like those shapes of fluid sort I had seen outside in the mist.
But no answer came. It seemed to me that the mist even penetrated into
the room about me and spread inwardly over my thoughts.

"Is this the way to the Manor House?" I asked again, louder, fighting
my inward confusion and weakness. "Can
no one
tell me?"

Then apparently everyone began to answer at once, or rather, not to
answer directly, but to speak to each other in such a way that I could
easily overhear. The voices of the men were deep, and of the women
wonderfully musical, with a slow rhythm like that of the sea, or of the
wind through the pine-trees outside. But the unsatisfactory nature of
what they said only helped to increase my sense of confusion and
dismay.

"Yes," said one; "Tom Bassett
was
here for a while with the sheep,
but his home was not here."

"He asks the way to a house when he does not even know the way to his
own mind!" another voice said, sounding overhead it seemed.

"And could he recognise the signs if we told him?" came in the singing
tones of a woman's voice close behind me.

And then, with a noise more like running water, or wind in the wings of
birds, than anything else I could liken it to, came several voices
together:

"And what sort of way does he seek? The splendid way, or merely the
easy?"

"Or the short way of fools!"

"But he must have
some
credentials, or he never could have got as far
as this," came from another.

A laugh ran round the room at this, though what there was to laugh at I
could not imagine. It sounded like wind rushing about the hills. I got
the impression too that the roof was somehow open to the sky, for their
laughter had such a spacious quality in it, and the air was so cool and
fresh, and moving about in currents and waves.

"It was I who showed him the way," cried a voice belonging to someone
who was looking straight into my face over the table. "It was the
safest way for him once he had got so far—"

I looked up and met his eye, and the sentence remained unfinished. It
was the hurrying, shadowy man of the hillside. He had the same shifting
outline as the others now, and the same veiled and shaded eyes, and as
I looked the sense of terror stirred and grew in me. I had come in to
ask for help, but now I was only anxious to be free of them all and out
again in the rain and darkness on the moor. Thoughts of escape filled
my brain, and I searched quickly for the door through which I had
entered. But nowhere could I discover it again. The walls were bare;
not even the windows were visible. And the room seemed to fill and
empty of these figures as the waves of the sea fill and empty a cavern,
crowding one upon another, yet never occupying more space, or less. So
the coming and going of these men and women always evaded me.

And my terror became simply a terror that the veils of their eyes might
lift, and that they would look at me with their clear, naked sight. I
became horribly aware of their eyes. It was not that I felt them evil,
but that I feared the new depths in me their merciless and terrible
insight would stir into life. My consciousness had expanded quite
enough for one night! I must escape at all costs and claim my own self
again, however limited. I must have sanity, even if with limitations,
but sanity at any price.

But meanwhile, though I tried hard to find my voice again, there came
nothing but a thin piping sound that was like reeds whistling where
winds meet about a corner. My throat was contracted, and I could only
produce the smallest and most ridiculous of noises. The power of
movement, too, was far less than when I first came in, and every moment
it became more difficult to use my muscles, so that I stood there,
stiff and awkward, face to face with this assemblage of shifting,
wonderful people.

"And now," continued the voice of the man who had last spoken, "and now
the safest way for him will be through the other door, where he shall
see that which he may more easily understand."

With a great effort I regained the power of movement, while at the same
time a burst of anger and a determination to be done with it all and to
overcome my dreadful confusion drove me forward.

He saw me coming, of course, and the others indeed opened up and made a
way for me, shifting to one side or the other whenever I came too near
them, and never allowing me to touch them. But at last, when I was
close in front of the man, ready both to speak and act, he was no
longer there. I never saw the actual change—but instead of a man it
was a woman! And when I turned with amazement, I saw that the other
occupants walking like figures in some ancient ceremony, were moving
slowly toward the far end of the room. One by one, as they filed past,
they raised their calm, passionless faces to mine, immensely vital,
proud, austere, and then, without further word or gesture, they opened
the door I had lost and disappeared through it one by one into the
darkness of the night beyond. And as they went it seemed that the mist
swallowed them up and a gust of wind caught them away, and the light
also went with them, leaving me alone with the figure who had last
spoken.

Moreover it was just here that a most disquieting thought flashed
through my brain with unreasoning conviction, shaking my personality,
as it were, to the foundations: viz., that I had hitherto been spending
my life in the pursuit of false knowledge, in the mere classifying and
labelling of effects, the analysis of results, scientific so called;
whereas it was the folk-lorist, and such like, who with their dreams
and prayers were all the time on the path of real knowledge, the trail
of causes; that the one was merely adding to the mechanical comfort and
safety of the body, ultimately degrading the highest part of man, and
never advancing the type, while the other—but then I had never yet
believed in a soul—and now was no time to begin, terror or no terror.
Clearly, my thoughts were wandering.

It was at this moment the sound of the purring first reached me—deep,
guttural purring—that made me think at once of some large concealed
animal. It was precisely what I had heard many a time at the Zoological
Gardens, and I had visions of cows chewing the cud, or horses munching
hay in a stall outside the cottage. It was certainly an animal sound,
and one of pleasure and contentment.

Semi-darkness filled the room. Only a very faint moonlight, struggling
through the mist, came through the window, and I moved back
instinctively toward the support of the wall against my back.
Somewhere, through openings, came the sound of the night driving over
the roof, and far above I had visions of those everlasting winds
streaming by with clouds as large as continents on their wings.
Something in me wanted to sing and shout, but something else in me at
the same time was in a very vivid state of unreasoning terror. I felt
immense, yet tiny, confident, yet timid; a part of huge, universal
forces, yet an utterly small, personal, and very limited being.

In the corner of the room on my right stood the woman. Her face was hid
by a mass of tumbling hair, that made me think of living grasses on a
field in June. Thus her head was partially turned from me, and the
moonlight, catching her outline, just revealed it against the wall like
an impressionist picture. Strange hidden memories stirred in the depths
of me, and for a moment I felt that I knew all about her. I stared
about me quickly, nervously, trying to take in everything at once. Then
the purring sound grew much louder and closer, and I forgot my notion
that this woman was no stranger to me and that I knew her as well as I
knew myself. That purring thing was in the room close beside me.
Between us two, indeed, it was, for I now saw that her arm nearest to
me was raised, and that she was pointing to the wall in front of us.