The Cats of Ulthar

The Cats of Ulthar

by H.P. Lovecraft

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a headdress with two horns and a curious disk betwixt the horns.
There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
On the third morning of the wanderers’ stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.
That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes’ kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn—behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man .and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper’s son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.

Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Beyond the Wall of Sleep
by H.P. Lovecraft

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon
the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to
which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are
perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences -
Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism - there are still a certain
remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary
interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests
possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important
than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable
barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to
terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life
of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest
and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and
fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in
dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not
necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves
comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer
life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the
secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I
arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic
institution in which I served as an intern was brought the man whose case has
ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe
Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the
Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive
Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly
fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of
barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed
brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond
exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals
are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any
other section of native American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four
state policemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character,
certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when I first beheld
him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was
given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of
his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth
of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was
unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties
exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed
condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.
From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered
of his case: this man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange
in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond
the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a
manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative
populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke
save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his
utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without
apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors,
and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at
least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine,
hall-amiable normality like that of the other hilldwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually
increased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at
the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the
authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey
debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most
suddenly, with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several
neighbors to his cabin - a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as
indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft
and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting
his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and
walls and floor and the loud queer music far away." As two men of moderate size
sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming
of his desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that shines and shakes
and laughs." At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a
sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of
blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he would "jump high in the air and
burn his way through anything that stopped him."
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous
of them returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like
thing that had been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers
had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his
death from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams from
a distant ravine they realized that he had somehow managed to survive, and that
his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed
searching-party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became
that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by
accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and
taken to the nearest jail, where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as
his senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to
sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awakened to
find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled
corpse of his neighbor Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the
woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his
crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert
questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact.
That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no
singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who
had been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a
certain gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an all but
imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when
questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and
only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After
some show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that
the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a straightjacket.
The alienists listened with keen attention to his words, since their curiosity
had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and
incoherent stories of his family and neighbors. Slater raved for upward of
fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of green edifices of light,
oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of
all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and
mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible
wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order
to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every
obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest
suddenness he ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder
he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled
the leather harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in
persuading Slater to don it of his own volition, for his own good. The man had
now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not why.
Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned
little. On the source of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since
he could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or
fairy-tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come
from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the
unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved of
things he did not understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed to
have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normal or
connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the
foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely
dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due formality
Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed
to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from
this you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of
the new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He
seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me, born no doubt of the interest I
could not conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he
ever recognized me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic
but cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit
by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for
the mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His family never called to see
him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the manner of decadent
mountain folk.
By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and
fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in
mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described
in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or
even exceptional brain could conceive How, I often asked myself, could the
stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very
possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard
have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance
and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I
inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay
the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something
infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative
medical and scientific colleagues.
And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my
investigation was, that in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater wandered
or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities,
and palaces of light, in a region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he
was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life,
moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, who
seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear
to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught
save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which
the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.
From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he
and the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the
man was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression
was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all
that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words
wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the
conclusion that if a dream world indeed existed, oral language was not its
medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream soul
inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which
the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter? Could it be that I
was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if
I could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians
of these things, for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept
new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his
paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic
or molecular motion, convertible into ether waves or radi ant energy like heat,
light and electricity. This belief had early led me to contemplate the
possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus,
and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving
instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless
telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a
fellow-student, but achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other
scientific odds and ends for possible future use.
Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I
sought these instruments again, and spent several days in repairing them for
action. When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their
trial. At each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the transmitter to his
forehead and the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments for
various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little
notion of how the thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an
intelligent response in my brain, but I felt certain that I could detect and
interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments, though informing no one
of their nature.
It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I
look back across the years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder
if old Doctor Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited
imagination. I recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I
told him, but afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year's
vacation on which I departed the next week.
That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the
excellent care he had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it
was his mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had
grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of
vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as
darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep.
I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since
I saw that he was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder
once more before passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two
ends of my cosmic "radio," hoping against hope for a first and last message from
the dream world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse,
a mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think
to inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly
in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical
breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded a little later.
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and
harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight
burst the stupendous spectacle ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves
of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in
air, extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable
splendor. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather,
supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains
and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes, covered with every
lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eyes could conceive of, yet
formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in consistency
partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own
brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which
appeared to me was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this
elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar
to me; just as it had been for uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be
for like eternities to come.
Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy
with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour
was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last
from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the
accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might
be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated
thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the
objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth - where I
least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it
gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit
the scene, fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the
other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous
one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it
would be the last time. The sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less
than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way
and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity.
A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of
light from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in
my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was
indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I
saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been
present. The lips, too, seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the
force of a stronger character than had been Slater's. The whole face finally
began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes.
I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged
headband of my telepathic "radio," intent to catch any parting message the
dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my
direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what
I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at
me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have
deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was `visible in that gaze, and I felt
beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high
order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence
operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly
and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message
had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no
actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and
expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary
English.
"Joe Slater is dead," came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from
beyond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious
horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was
still intelligently animated. "He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the
active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed
adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much an animal,
too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to
discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has
been in my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.
"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of
dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the
effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your
real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel
empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have
drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies
of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter.
How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed,
ought it to know for its own tranquility!
"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its
distant presence - you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the
name of Algol, the Demon-Star It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I
have vainly striven for eons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as
a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky
close by the Demon-Star.
"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and
the coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend
on this planet - the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent
form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again - perhaps in the shining
mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps
in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when
the solar system shall have been swept away."
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the
dreamer - or can I say dead man? - commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor
I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and
pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open,
disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I
shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I
left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an instant and unaccountable
craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical
effect? I have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing
you to construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old
Doctor Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I
was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on
full pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honor
that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have
come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulated in even the most
decadent of communities. All this he tells me - yet I cannot forget what I saw
in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased witness,
another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax
you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim
from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Professor Garrett P.
Serviss:
"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor
Anderson of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that
point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it
outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a
few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye."

The Beast in the Cave

The Beast in the Cave
by H.P. Lovecraft


April 21, 1905

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my
confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely,
hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as
I might, In no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable
of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I
behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the
beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest
unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of
philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my
unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies
into which were thrown the victims of similar situation, I experienced none of
these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.
Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of
an ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must
die, I reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a
sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford, a conception which carried
with it more of tranquillity than of despair.
Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew,
had gone mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would
not be mine.  My disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unknown
to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and,
wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself
unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my
companions.
Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total
and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the
waning, unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my
coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of
consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health
from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady,
uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in
strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages
as I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a
long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy
and vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this
point had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a
departure from this life.
As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to
leave no stone unturned, no possible means of escape neglected; so, summoning
all the powers possessed by my lungs, I set up a series of loud shoutings, in
the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet, as I
called, I believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose, and that my
voice, magnified and reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze
about me, fell upon no ears save my own.
All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that
I heard the sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern.
Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my
horrible apprehensions been for naught, and was the guide, having marked my
unwarranted absence from the party, following my course and seeking me out in
this limestone labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain, I was
on the point of renewing my cries, in order that my discovery might come the
sooner, when in an instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened; for my
ever acute ear, now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete silence of
the cave, bore to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful
knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man. In the
unearthly stillness of this subterranean region, the tread of the booted guide
would have sounded like a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts were
soft, and stealthy, as of the paws of some feline. Besides, when I listened
carefully, I seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet.
I was now convinced that I had by my own cries aroused and attracted some
wild beast, perhaps a mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the
cave. Perhaps, I considered, the Almighty had chosen for me a swifter and more
merciful death than that of hunger; yet the instinct of self-preservation, never
wholly dormant, was stirred in my breast, and though escape from the on-coming
peril might but spare me for a sterner and more lingering end, I determined
nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I could command. Strange
as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent on the part of the visitor save
that of hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, In the hope that the
unknown beast would, In the absence of a guiding sound, lose its direction as
had I, and thus pass me by. But this hope was not destined for realisation, for
the strange footfalls steadily advanced, the animal evidently having obtained my
scent, which in an atmosphere so absolutely free from all distracting influences
as is that of the cave, could doubtless be followed at great distance.
Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defense against an uncanny and
unseen attack in the dark, I groped about me the largest of the fragments of
rock which were strewn upon all parts of the floor of the cavern In the
vicinity, and grasping one in each hand for immediate use, awaited with
resignation the inevitable result. Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws
drew near. Certainly, the conduct of the creature was exceedingly strange. Most
of the time, the tread seemed to be that of a quadruped, walking with a singular
lack of unison betwixt hind and fore feet, yet at brief and infrequent intervals
I fancied that but two feet were engaged in the process of locomotion. I
wondered what species of animal was to confront me; it must, I thought, be some
unfortunate beast who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the
entrances of the fearful grotto with a life-long confinement in its interminable
recesses. It doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish, bats and rats of the
cave, as well as some of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet
of Green River, which communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the
cave. I occupied my terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alteration
cave life might have wrought In the physical structure of the beast, remembering
the awful appearances ascribed by local tradition to the consumptives who had
died after long residence in the cave. Then I remembered with a start that, even
should I succeed in felling my antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my
torch had long since been extinct, and I was entirely unprovided with matches.
The tension on my brain now became frightful. My disordered fancy conjured up
hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness that surrounded me, and
that actually seemed to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful
footfalls approached. It seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream, yet
had I been sufficiently irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could
scarce have responded. I was petrified, rooted to the spot. I doubted if my
right arm would allow me to hurl its missile at the oncoming thing when the
crucial moment should arrive. Now the steady pat, pat, of the steps was close at
hand; now very close. I could hear the laboured breathing of the animal, and
terror-struck as I was, I realised that it must have come from a considerable
distance, and was correspondingly fatigued. Suddenly the spell broke. My right
hand, guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with full force the
sharp-angled bit of limestone which it contained, toward that point in the
darkness from which emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to
relate, it nearly reached its goal, for I heard the thing jump landing at a
distance away, where it seemed to pause.
Having readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time moat
effectively, for with a flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what
sounded like a complete collapse and evidently remained prone and unmoving.
Almost overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me, I reeled back
against the wall. The breathing continued, in heavy, gasping inhalation. and
expirations, whence I realised that I had no more than wounded the creature. And
now all desire to examine the thing ceased. At last something allied to
groundless, superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did not approach the
body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the
extinction of its life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I
could estimate in my frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come.
Suddenly I heard a sound or rather, a regular succession of sounds. In another
Instant they had resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks.
This time there was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled,
screamed, even shrieked with joy as I beheld in the vaulted arches above the
faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to be the reflected light of an
approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could completely
understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the
guide, embracing his boots and gibbering. despite my boasted reserve, in a most
meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same
time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length, I awoke
to something like my normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon
the arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own
intuitive sense of direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of
by-passages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me, locating my
whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.
By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his
company, began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short
distance back in the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain, by the
flashlight's aid, what manner of creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced
my steps, this time with a courage born of companionship, to the scene of my
terrible experience. Soon we descried a white object upon the floor, an object
whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself. Cautiously advancing, we gave
vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for of all the unnatural
monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in surpassing degree
the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions,
escaped, perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white, a
thing due no doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky
confines of the cave, but it was also surprisingly thin, being indeed largely
absent save on the head, where it was of such length and abundance that it fell
over the shoulders in considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us,
as the creature lay almost directly upon it. The inclination of the limbs was
very singular, explaining, however, the alternation in their use which I bad
before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on other occasions
but two for its progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes, long rat-like
claws extended. The hands or feet were not prehensile, a fact that I ascribed to
that long residence in the cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed evident
from the all-pervading and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the
whole anatomy. No tail seemed to be present.
The respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his
pistol with the evident intent of despatching the creature, when a sudden sound
emitted by the latter caused the weapon to fall unused. The sound was of a
nature difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known
species of simian, and I wonder if this unnatural quality were not the result of
a long continued and complete silence, broken by the sensations produced by the
advent of the light, a thing which the beast could not have seen since its first
entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly attempt to classify as a
kind of deep-tone chattering, was faintly continued.
All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of
the beast. The paws went through a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted.
With a jerk, the white body rolled over so that its face was turned in our
direction. For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed
that I noted nothing else. They were black, those eyes, deep jetty black, in
hideous contrast to the snow-white hair and flesh. Like those of other cave
denizens, they were deeply sunken in their orbits, and were entirely destitute
of iris. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a face less
prognathous than that of the average ape, and infinitely less hairy. The nose
was quite distinct. As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision,
the thick lips opened, and several sounds issued from them, after which the
thing relaxed in death.
The guide clutched my coatsleeve and trembled so violently that the light
shook fitfully, casting weird moving shadows on the walls.
I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the
floor ahead.
The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its
place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on
the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the
strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!!

The Alchemist

The Alchemist

by H.P. Lovecraft - 1908

High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are
wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the
old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned
down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and
stronghold for the proud house whose honored line is older even than the
moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of
generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in
the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all
France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts,
and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to
the footsteps of the invader.
But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above
the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its
alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our
line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling
stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty
moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the
sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all
tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then
another of the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single
tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the
estate.
It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that
I, Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light
of day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and
shadowy forests, the wild ravines and grottos of the hillside below, were spent
the first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been
killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a
stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle. And my
mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one
remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose
name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of companionship
which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by
my aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose
abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of
the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me
because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company.
Now I know tht its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the
dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the simple
tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage
hearths.
Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my
childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted
library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the
perpetual dust of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its
foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired
a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and
occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention.
Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small
knowledge of it I was able to gain seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at
first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my
paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention
of my great house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able. to piece together
disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which
had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a
certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became
dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all
the Counts of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this
but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered
long upon these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings
of the old man, who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the
lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two
years. Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family
document which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to
son, and continued by each possessor. Its contents were of the most startling
nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. At this time,
my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have
dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.
The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the
old castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of
a certain ancient man who had once dwelled on our estates, a person of no small
accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant, by name, Michel,
usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his
sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such
things as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed
wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one
son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, who had
therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned by all
honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said
to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable
disappearance of many small peasant children was laid at the dreaded door of
these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father and son ran one redeeming
ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity,
whilst the youth had for his parent a more than filial affection.
One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by
the vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri, the Count. A searching party,
headed by the frantic father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there
came upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron.
Without certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Count
laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold, his
victim was no more. Meanwhile, joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of
young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling too
late that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Count and his associates
turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles Le
Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing
about told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's
fate. Then, slowly advancing to meet the Count, he pronounced in dull yet
terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C-.
<i>`May ne'er a noble of they murd'rous line
<br>Survive to reach a greater age than thine!'</i>
spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black woods, he drew
from his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his
father's slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The
Count died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than
two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could
be found, though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighboring woods and
the meadowland around the hill.
Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the
minds of the late Count's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the
whole tragedy and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting
at the age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his
demise. But when, years afterward, the next young Count, Robert by name, was
found dead in a nearby field of no apparent cause, the peasants told in whispers
that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when
surprised by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at
the same fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous
chronicle: Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy and
virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his
murder.
That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made
certain to me by the words which I had read. My life, previously held at small
value, now became dearer to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the
mysteries of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science
had produced no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as
wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of
demonological and alchemical learning. Yet read as I might, in no manner could I
account for the strange curse upon my line. In unusually rational moments I
would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early
deaths of my ancestors to the sinister > <HR><H3>Transfer interrupted!</H3> ,
having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the
alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavor to find a
spell, that would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I
was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for, since no other branch of my
family was in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.
As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond.
Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved
to wander in life. Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human
creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to
cease its vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled
to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met. Much of my time was now
occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the
old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which old
Pierre had once told me had not been trodden by human foot for over four
centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered.
Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long
dampness, met my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun
everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of
the otherwise untenanted gloom.
Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record,
for each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off
so much of my doomed existence. At length I approached that time which I had so
long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been seized some
little while before they reached the exact age of Count Henri at his end, I was
every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what strange
form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved at least that
it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. With new vigour I applied
myself to my examination of the old chateau and its contents.
It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the
deserted portion of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I
felt must mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have
not even the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath. that I came upon the
culminating event of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning
in climbing up and down half ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of
the ancient turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels,
descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or
a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the
nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving became
very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank,
water-stained wall impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell
upon a small trapdoor with a ring, which lay directly beneath my foot. Pausing,
I succeeded with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black
aperture, exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and
disclosing in the unsteady glare the top of a flight of stone steps.
As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely
and steadily, I commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow
stone-flagged passage which I knew must be far underground. This passage proved
of great length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with the
moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it. Ceasing
after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back some distance
toward the steps when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most
profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without
warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted
hinges. My immediate sensations were incapable of analysis. To be confronted in
a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of
the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the most acute
description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must
have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld.
There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a
man clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair
and flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible
profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks,
deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and
gnarled, were of such a deadly marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere
seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely
bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But
strangest of all were his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in
expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were now
fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot
whereon I stood.
At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with
its dull hollowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse
was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men
of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the
works of the old alchemists and demonologists. The apparition spoke of the curse
which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong
perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the
revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He told how young Charles has escaped into the
night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as
he approached the age which had been his father's at his assassination; how he
had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the
even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous
narrator, how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field, forced poison
down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two, thus maintaing
the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine
the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled
since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of nature have died,
for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two
wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles
Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it
eternal life and youth.
His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes
the black malevolence that had first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish
glare returned and, with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the
stranger raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had
Charles Le Sorcier, six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor.
Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defense, I broke through the spell
that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the
creature who menaced my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly against
the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit
the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent
malice emitted by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken
nerves, and I fell prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint.
When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind,
remembering what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding any more; yet
curiosity over-mastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how
came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of
Michel Mauvais, and how bad the curse been carried on through all the long
centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted
from my shoulder, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my
danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to
learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and
made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon further
exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch
which I had with me.
First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the
mysterious stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I
turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found what
seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of
shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may
have been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was strangely affected
by that which I had undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was an
opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside
forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realizing how the man had obtained access to
the chauteau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of
the stranger with averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear
emanating from it a faint sound,. as though life were not yet wholly extinct.
Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor.
Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in
which they were set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to
interpret. The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well
understand. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied
that the words `years' and `curse' issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at
a loss to gather the purport of his disconnnected speech. At my evident
ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me,
until, helpless as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.
Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his
piteous head from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed
with fear, he found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words
which have ever afterward haunted my days and nights. `Fool!' he shrieked, `Can
you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize the will
which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon the
house? Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how
the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for
six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am Charles Le Sorcier!'

THEY

THEY

 by Rudyard Kipling


 One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the
county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping
forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels. The
orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass
of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower
coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen
level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded
hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that
precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I
found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in
eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks
diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex
them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that
cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple.
Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it
out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little further on I disturbed a
red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.

   As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the
bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty miles
across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would bring
me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I did not
allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged me first
into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a gloomy tunnel
where last year's dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tyres. The
strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple of
generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech
to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on
whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly,
white-stalked blue-bells nodded together. As the slope favoured I shut off
the power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a
keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under
the twilight of the trees.

   Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my
way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw sunshine
through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.

   It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my
fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen
ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek
round-headed maids of honour -- blue, black, and glistening -- all of
clipped yew. Across the lawn -- the marshalled woods besieged it on three
sides -- stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with
mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by
semi-circular walls, also rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side,
and at their feet a box hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof
about the slim brick chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal
dove-house behind the screening wall.

   Here, then, I stayed; a horseman's green spear laid at my breast; held by
the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.

   ``If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not
ride a wallop at me,'' thought I, ``Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least
must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea.''

   A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved
a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another
bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and turning
to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw the silver
of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The doves on the
roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I caught the
utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.

   The garden door -- heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall --
opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the
time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming
some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

   ``I heard you,'' she said. ``Isn't that a motor car?''

   ``I'm afraid I've made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up
above -- I never dreamed --'' I began.

   ``But I'm very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be
such a treat --'' She turned and made as though looking about her. ``You --
you haven't seen any one, have you -- perhaps?''

   ``No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance.''

   ``Which?''

   ``I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little
chap in the grounds.''

   ``Oh, lucky you!'' she cried, and her face brightened. ``I hear them, of
course, but that's all. You've seen them and heard them?''

   ``Yes,'' I answered. ``And if I know anything of children one of them's
having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.''

   ``You're fond of children?''

   I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

   ``Of course, of course,'' she said. ``Then you understand. Then you won't
think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or
twice -- quite slowly. I'm sure they'd like to see it. They see so little,
poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but --'' she threw out
her hands towards the woods. ``We're so out of the world here.''

   ``That will be splendid,'' I said. ``But I can't cut up your grass.''

   She faced to the right. ``Wait a minute,'' she said. ``We're at the South
gate, aren't we? Behind those peacocks there's a flagged path. We call it
the Peacock's Walk. You can't see it from here, they tell me, but if you
squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and
get on to the flags.''

   It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of
machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of
the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay
like one star-sapphire.

   ``May I come too?'' she cried. ``No, please don't help me. They'll like
it better if they see me.''

   She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foot on
the step she called: ``Children, oh, children! Look and see what's going to
happen!''

   The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that
underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout
behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled at
our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint of his
blue blouse among the still horsemen.

   Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request
backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but stood
far off and doubting.

   ``The little fellow's watching us,'' I said. ``I wonder if he'd like a
ride.''

   ``They're very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see
them! Let's listen.''

   I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the
scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was
clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.

   ``Oh, unkind!'' she said weariedly.

   ``Perhaps they're only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window
looks tremendously interested.''

   ``Yes?'' She raised her head. ``It was wrong of me to say that. They are
really fond of me. It's the only thing that makes life worth living -- when
they're fond of you, isn't it? I daren't think what the place would be
without them. By the way, is it beautiful?''

   ``I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.''

   ``So they all tell me. I can feel it, of course, but that isn't quite the
same thing.''

   ``Then have you never?'' I began, but stopped abashed.

   ``Not since I can remember. It happened when I was only a few months old,
they tell me. And yet I must remember something, else how could I dream
about colours? I see light in my dreams, and colours, but I never see them.
I only hear them just as I do when I'm awake.''

   ``It's difficult to see faces in dreams. Some people can, but most of us
haven't the gift,'' I went on, looking up at the window where the child
stood all but hidden.

   ``I've heard that too,'' she said. ``And they tell me that one never sees
a dead person's face in a dream. Is that true?''

   ``I believe it is -- now I come to think of it.''

   ``But how is it with yourself -- yourself?'' The blind eyes turned
towards me.

   ``I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,'' I answered.

   ``Then it must be as bad as being blind.''

   The sun had dipped behind the woods and the long shades were possessing
the insolent horsemen one by one. I saw the light die from off the top of a
glossy-leaved lance and all the brave hard green turn to soft black. The
house, accepting another day at end, as it had accepted an hundred thousand
gone, seemed to settle deeper into its rest among the shadows.

   ``Have you ever wanted to?'' she said after the silence.

   ``Very much sometimes,'' I replied. The child had left the window as the
shadows closed upon it.

   ``Ah! So've I, but I don't suppose it's allowed. . . . Where d'you
live?''

   ``Quite the other side of the county -- sixty miles and more, and I must
be going back. I've come without my big lamp.''

   ``But it's not dark yet. I can feel it.''

   ``I'm afraid it will be by the time I get home. Could you lend me some
one to set me on my road at first? I've utterly lost myself.''

   ``I'll send Madden with you to the cross-roads. We are so out of the
world, I don't wonder you were lost! I'll guide you round to the front of
the house; but you will go slowly, won't you, till you're out of the
grounds? It isn't foolish, do you think?''

   ``I promise you I'll go like this,'' I said, and let the car start
herself down the flagged path.

   We skirted the left wing of the house, whose elaborately cast lead
guttering alone was worth a day's journey; passed under a great rose-grown
gate in the red wall, and so round to the high front of the house which in
beauty and stateliness as much excelled the back as that all others I had
seen.

   ``Is it so very beautiful?'' she said wistfully when she heard my
raptures. ``And you like the lead-figures too? There's the old azalea garden
behind. They say that this place must have been made for children. Will you
help me out, please? I should like to come with you as far as the
cross-roads, but I mustn't leave them. Is that you, Madden? I want you to
show this gentleman the way to the cross-roads. He has lost his way but --
he has seen them.''

   A butler appeared noiselessly at the miracle of old oak that must be
called the front door, and slipped aside to put on his hat. She stood
looking at me with open blue eyes in which no sight lay, and I saw for the
first time that she was beautiful.

   ``Remember,'' she said quietly, ``if you are fond of them you will come
again,'' and disappeared within the house.

   The butler in the car said nothing till we were nearly at the lodge
gates, where, catching a glimpse of a blue blouse in a shrubbery, I swerved
amply lest the devil that leads little boys to play should drag me into
child-murder.

   ``Excuse me,'' he asked of a sudden, ``but why did you do that, Sir?''

   ``The child yonder.''

   ``Our young gentleman in blue?''

   ``Of course.''

   ``He runs about a good deal. Did you see him by the fountain, Sir?''

   ``Oh, yes, several times. Do we turn here?''

   ``Yes, Sir. And did you 'appen to see them upstairs too?''

   ``At the upper window? Yes.''

   ``Was that before the mistress come out to speak to you, Sir?''

   ``A little before that. Why d'you want to know?''

   He paused a little. ``Only to make sure that -- that they had seen the
car, Sir, because with children running about, though I'm sure you're
driving particularly careful, there might be an accident. That was all, Sir.
Here are the cross-roads. You can't miss your way from now on. Thank you,
Sir, but that isn't our custom, not with --''

   ``I beg your pardon,'' I said, and thrust away the British silver.

   ``Oh, it's quite right with the rest of 'em as a rule. Good-bye, Sir.''

   He retired into the armour-plated conning tower of his caste and walked
away. Evidently a butler solicitous for the honour of his house, and
interested, probably through a maid, in the nursery.

   Once beyond the signposts at the cross-roads I looked back, but the
crumpled hills interlaced so jealously that I could not see where the house
had lain. When I asked its name at a cottage along the road, the fat woman
who sold sweetmeats there gave me to understand that people with motor cars
had small right to live -- much less to ``go about talking like carriage
folk.'' They were not a pleasant-mannered community.

   When I retraced my route on the map that evening I was little wiser.
Hawkin's Old Farm appeared to be the survey title of the place, and the old
County Gazetteer, generally so ample, did not allude to it. The big house of
those parts was Hodnington Hall, Georgian with early Victorian
embellishments, as an atrocious steel engraving attested. I carried my
difficulty to a neighbour -- a deep-rooted tree of that soil -- and he gave
me a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.

   A month or so later -- I went again, or it may have been that my car took
the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded
every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the
high-walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the
cross-roads where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed
an internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that
cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the sun
and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that wood
which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty serious
business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit, spanners,
pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It was a trap to
catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the children would not be
far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but the wood was so full of
the noises of summer (though the birds had mated) that I could not at first
distinguish these from the tread of small cautious feet stealing across the
dead leaves. I rang my bell in an alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I
repented, for to a child a sudden noise is very real terror. I must have
been at work half an hour when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind
woman crying: ``Children, oh, children, where are you?'' and the stillness
made slow to close on the perfection of that cry. She came towards me, half
feeling her way between the tree-boles, and though a child, it seemed, clung
to her skirt, it swerved into the leafage like a rabbit as she drew nearer.

   ``Is that you?'' she said, ``from the other side of the county?''

   ``Yes, it's me from the other side of the county.''

   ``Then why didn't you come through the upper woods? They were there just
now.''

   ``They were here a few minutes ago. I expect they knew my car had broken
down, and came to see the fun.''

   ``Nothing serious, I hope? How do cars break down?''

   ``In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty-first.''

   She laughed merrily at the tiny joke, cooed with delicious laughter, and
pushed her hat back.

   ``Let me hear,'' she said.

   ``Wait a moment,'' I cried, ``and I'll get you a cushion.''

   She set her foot on the rug all covered with spare parts, and stooped
above it eagerly. ``What delightful things!'' The hands through which she
saw glanced in the chequered sunlight. ``A box here -- another box! Why
you've arranged them like playing shop!''

   ``I confess now that I put it out to attract them. I don't need half
those things really.''

   ``How nice of you! I heard your bell in the upper wood. You say they were
here before that?''

   ``I'm sure of it. Why are they so shy? That little fellow in blue who was
with you just now ought to have got over his fright. He's been watching me
like a Red Indian.''

   ``It must have been your bell,'' she said. ``I heard one of them go past
me in trouble when I was coming down. They're shy -- so shy even with me.''
She turned her face over her shoulder and cried again: ``Children! Oh,
children! Look and see!''

   ``They must have gone off together on their own affairs,'' I suggested,
for there was a murmur behind us of lowered voices broken by the sudden
squeaking giggles of childhood. I returned to my tinkerings and she leaned
forward, her chin on her hand, listening interestedly.

   ``How many are they?'' I said at last. The work was finished, but I saw
no reason to go.

   Her forehead puckered a little in thought. ``I don't quite know,'' she
said simply. ``Sometimes more -- sometimes less. They come and stay with me
because I love them, you see.''

   ``That must be very jolly,'' I said, replacing a drawer, and as I spoke I
heard the inanity of my answer.

   ``You -- you aren't laughing at me,'' she cried. ``I -- I haven't any of
my own. I never married. People laugh at me sometimes about them because --
because --''

   ``Because they're savages,'' I returned. ``It's nothing to fret for. That
sort laugh at everything that isn't in their own fat lives.''

   ``I don't know. How should I? I only don't like being laughed at about
them. It hurts; and when one can't see. . . . I don't want to seem silly,''
her chin quivered like a child's as she spoke, ``but we blindies have only
one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It's
different with you. You've such good defences in your eyes -- looking out --
before any one can really pain you in your soul. People forget that with
us.''

   I was silent, reviewing that inexhaustible matter -- the more than
inherited (since it is also carefully taught) brutality of the Christian
peoples, beside which the mere heathendom of the West Coast nigger is clean
and restrained. It led me a long distance into myself.

   ``Don't do that!'' she said of a sudden, putting her hands before her
eyes.

   ``What?''

   She made a gesture with her hand.

   ``That! It's -- it's all purple and black. Don't! That colour hurts.''

   ``But how in the world do you know about colours?'' I exclaimed, for here
was a revelation indeed.

   ``Colours as colours?'' she asked.

   ``No. Those Colours which you saw just now.''

   ``You know as well as I do,'' she laughed, ``else you wouldn't have asked
that question. They aren't in the world at all. They're in you -- when you
went so angry.''

   ``D'you mean a dull purplish patch, like port-wine mixed with ink?'' I
said.

   ``I've never seen ink or port-wine, but the colours aren't mixed. They
are separate -- all separate.''

   ``Do you mean black streaks and jags across the purple?''

   She nodded. ``Yes -- if they are like this,'' and zigzagged her finger
again, ``but it's more red than purple -- that bad colour.''

   ``And what are the colours at the top of the -- whatever you see?''

   Slowly she leaned forward and traced on the rug the figure of the Egg
itself.

   ``I see them so,'' she said, pointing with a grass stem, ``white, green,
yellow, red, purple, and when people are angry or bad, black across the red
-- as you were just now.''

   ``Who told you anything about it -- in the beginning?'' I demanded.

   ``About the colours? No one. I used to ask what colours were when I was
little -- in table-covers and curtains and carpets, you see -- because some
colours hurt me and some made me happy. People told me; and when I got older
that was how I saw people.'' Again she traced the outline of the Egg which
it is given to very few of us to see.

   ``All by yourself?'' I repeated.

   ``All by myself. There wasn't any one else. I only found out afterwards
that other people did not see the Colours.''

   She leaned against the tree-bole plaiting and unplaiting chance-plucked
grass stems. The children in the wood had drawn nearer. I could see them
with the tail of my eye frolicking like squirrels.

   ``Now I am sure you will never laugh at me,'' she went on after a long
silence. ``Nor at them.''

   ``Goodness! No!'' I cried, jolted out of my train of thought. ``A man who
laughs at a child -- unless the child is laughing too -- is a heathen!''

   ``I didn't mean that of course. You'd never laugh at children, but I
thought -- I used to think -- that perhaps you might laugh about them. So
now I beg your pardon. . . . What are you going to laugh at?''

   I had made no sound, but she knew.

   ``At the notion of your begging my pardon. If you had done your duty as a
pillar of the state and a landed proprietress you ought to have summoned me
for trespass when I barged through your woods the other day. It was
disgraceful of me -- inexcusable.''

   She looked at me, her head against the tree trunk -- long and steadfastly
-- this woman who could see the naked soul.

   ``How curious,'' she half whispered. ``How very curious.''

   ``Why, what have I done?''

   ``You don't understand . . . and yet you understood about the Colours.
Don't you understand?''

   She spoke with a passion that nothing had justified, and I faced her
bewilderedly as she rose. The children had gathered themselves in a roundel
behind a bramble bush. One sleek head bent over something smaller, and the
set of the little shoulders told me that fingers were on lips. They, too,
had some child's tremendous secret. I alone was hopelessly astray there in
the broad sunlight.

   ``No,'' I said, and shook my head as though the dead eyes could note.
``Whatever it is, I don't understand yet. Perhaps I shall later -- if you'll
let me come again.''

   ``You will come again,'' she answered. ``You will surely come again and
walk in the wood.''

   ``Perhaps the children will know me well enough by that time to let me
play with them -- as a favour. You know what children are like.''

   ``It isn't a matter of favour but of right,'' she replied, and while I
wondered what she meant, a dishevelled woman plunged round the bend of the
road, loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony as she ran. It was my
rude, fat friend of the sweetmeat shop. The blind woman heard and stepped
forward. ``What is it, Mrs. Madehurst?'' she asked.

   The woman flung her apron over her head and literally grovelled in the
dust, crying that her grandchild was sick to death, that the local doctor
was away fishing, that Jenny the mother was at her wits' end, and so forth,
with repetitions and bellowings.

   ``Where's the next nearest doctor?'' I asked between paroxysms.

   ``Madden will tell you. Go round to the house and take him with you. I'll
attend to this. Be quick!'' She half-supported the fat woman into the shade.
In two minutes I was blowing all the horns of Jericho under the front of the
House Beautiful, and Madden, in the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler
and a man.

   A quarter of an hour at illegal speeds caught us a doctor five miles
away. Within the half-hour we had decanted him, much interested in motors,
at the door of the sweetmeat shop, and drew up the road to await the
verdict.

   ``Useful things cars,'' said Madden, all man and no butler. ``If I'd had
one when mine took sick she wouldn't have died.''

   ``How was it?'' I asked.

   ``Croup. Mrs. Madden was away. No one knew what to do. I drove eight
miles in a tax cart for the Doctor. She was choked when we came back. This
car 'd ha' saved her. She'd have been close on ten now.''

   ``I'm sorry,'' I said. ``I thought you were rather fond of children from
what you told me going to the cross-roads the other day.''

   ``Have you seen 'em again, Sir -- this mornin'?''

   ``Yes, but they're well broke to cars. I couldn't get any of them within
twenty yards of it.''

   He looked at me carefully as a scout considers a stranger -- not as a
menial should lift his eyes to his divinely appointed superior.

   ``I wonder why,'' he said just above the breath that he drew.

   We waited on. A light wind from the sea wandered up and down the long
lines of the woods, and the wayside grasses, whitened already with summer
dust, rose and bowed in sallow waves.

   A woman, wiping the suds off her arms, came out of the cottage next the
sweetmeat shop.

   ``I've be'n listenin' in de back-yard,'' she said cheerily. ``He says
Arthur's unaccountable bad. Did ye hear him shruck just now? Unaccountable
bad. I reckon t'will come Jenny's turn to walk in de wood nex' week along,
Mr. Madden.''

   ``Excuse me, Sir, but your lap-robe is slipping,'' said Madden
deferentially. The woman started, dropped a curtsey, and hurried away.

   ``What does she mean by `walking in the wood'?'' I asked.

   ``It must be some saying they use hereabouts. I'm from Norfolk myself,''
said Madden. ``They're an independent lot in this county. She took you for a
chauffeur, Sir.''

   I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed
wench who clung to his arm as though he could make treaty for her with
Death. ``Dat sort,'' she wailed -- ``dey're just as much to us dat has 'em
as if dey was lawful born. Just as much -- just as much! An' God he'd be
just as pleased if you saved 'un, Doctor. Don't take it from me. Miss
Florence will tell ye de very same. Don't leave 'im, Doctor!''

   ``I know. I know,'' said the man, ``but he'll be quiet for a while now.
We'll get the nurse and the medicine as fast as we can.'' He signalled me to
come forward with the car, and I strove not to be privy to what followed;
but I saw the girl's face, blotched and frozen with grief, and I felt the
hand without a ring clutching at my knees when we moved away.

   The Doctor was a man of some humour, for I remember he claimed my car
under the Oath of Aesculapius, and used it and me without mercy. First we
convoyed Mrs. Madehurst and the blind woman to wait by the sick-bed till the
nurse should come. Next we invaded a neat county town for prescriptions (the
Doctor said the trouble was cerebro-spinal meningitis), and when the County
Institute, banked and flanked with scared market cattle, reported itself out
of nurses, for the moment we literally flung ourselves loose upon the
county. We conferred with the owners of great houses -- magnates at the ends
of overarching avenues whose big-boned womenfolk strode away from their
tea-tables to listen to the imperious Doctor. At last a white-haired lady
sitting under a cedar of Lebanon and surrounded by a court of magnificent
Borzois -- all hostile to motors -- gave the Doctor, who received them as
from a princess, written orders which we bore many miles at top speed,
through a park, to a French nunnery, where we took over in exchange a
pallid-faced and trembling Sister. She knelt at the bottom of the tonneau
telling her beads without pause till, by short cuts of the Doctor's
invention, we had her to the sweetmeat shop once more. It was a long
afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of
our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through
which we raced at right angles; and I went home in the dusk, wearied out, to
dream of the clashing horns of cattle; round-eyed nuns walking in a garden
of graves; pleasant tea-parties beneath shaded trees; the carbolic-scented,
grey-painted corridors of the County Institute; the steps of shy children in
the wood, and the hands that clung to my knees as the motor began to move.

                      *    *    *    *    *    *    *

I had intended to return in a day or two, but it pleased Fate to hold me
from that side of the county, on many pretexts, till the elder and the wild
rose had fruited. There came at last a brilliant day, swept clear from the
south-west, that brought the hills within hand's reach -- a day of unstable
airs and high filmy clouds. Through no merit of my own I was free, and set
the car for the third time on that known road. As I reached the crest of the
Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking
down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through
polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging
the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze,
I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene
behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun
aloft the first dry sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road
the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the
groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England
vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the
ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their
outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the
folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the
salt-rime stuck to my lips.

   Inland the smell of autumn loaded the thickened fog among the trees, and
the drip became a continuous shower. Yet the late flowers -- mallow of the
wayside, scabious of the field, and dahlia of the garden -- showed gay in
the mist, and beyond the sea's breath there was little sign of decay in the
leaf. Yet in the villages the house doors were all open, and bare-legged,
bare-headed children sat at ease on the damp doorsteps to shout ``pip-pip''
at the stranger.

   I made bold to call at the sweetmeat shop, where Mrs. Madehurst met me
with a fat woman's hospitable tears. Jenny's child, she said, had died two
days after the nun had come. It was, she felt, best out of the way, even
though insurance offices, for reasons which she did not pretend to follow,
would not willingly insure such stray lives. ``Not but what Jenny didn't
tend to Arthur as though he'd come all proper at de end of de first year --
like Jenny herself.'' Thanks to Miss Florence, the child had been buried
with a pomp which, in Mrs. Madehurst's opinion, more than covered the small
irregularity of its birth. She described the coffin, within and without, the
glass hearse, and the evergreen lining of the grave.

   ``But how's the mother?'' I asked.

   ``Jenny? Oh, she'll get over it. I've felt dat way with one or two o' my
own. She'll get over. She's walkin' in de wood now.''

   ``In this weather?''

   Mrs. Madehurst looked at me with narrowed eyes across the counter.

   ``I dunno but it opens de 'eart like. Yes, it opens de 'eart. Dat's where
losin' and bearin' comes so alike in de long run, we do say.''

   Now the wisdom of the old wives is greater than that of all the Fathers,
and this last oracle sent me thinking so extendedly as I went up the road
that I nearly ran over a woman and a child at the wooded corner by the lodge
gates of the House Beautiful.

   ``Awful weather!'' I cried, as I slowed dead for the turn.

   ``Not so bad,'' she answered placidly out of the fog. ``Mine's used to
'un. You'll find yours indoors, I reckon.''

   Indoors, Madden received me with professional courtesy, and kind
inquiries for the health of the motor, which he would put under cover.

   I waited in a still, nut-brown hall, pleasant with late flowers and
warmed with a delicious wood fire -- a place of good influence and great
peace. (Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a
creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything
save the truth of those who have lived in it.) A child's cart and a doll lay
on the black-and-white floor, where a rug had been kicked back. I felt that
the children had only just hurried away -- to hide themselves, most like --
in the many turns of the great adzed staircase that climbed statelily out of
the hall, or to crouch at gaze behind the lions and roses of the carven
gallery above. Then I heard her voice above me, singing as the blind sing --
from the soul:

     In the pleasant orchard-closes.

And all my early summer came back at the call.

     In the pleasant orchard-closes,
       God bless all our gains say we --
     But may God bless all our losses,
       Better suits with our degree.

She dropped the marring fifth line, and repeated --

     Better suits with our degree!

   I saw her lean over the gallery, her linked hands white as pearl against
the oak.

   ``Is that you -- from the other side of the county?'' she called.

   ``Yes, me from the other side of the county,'' I answered, laughing.

   ``What a long time before you had to come here again.'' She ran down the
stairs, one hand lightly touching the broad rail. ``It's two months and four
days. Summer's gone!''

   ``I meant to come before, but Fate prevented.''

   ``I knew it. Please do something to that fire. They won't let me play
with it, but I can feel it's behaving badly. Hit it!''

   I looked on either side of the deep fireplace, and found but a
half-charred hedge-stake with which I punched a black log into flame.

   ``It never goes out, day or night,'' she said, as though explaining. ``In
case any one comes in with cold toes, you see.''

   ``It's even lovelier inside than it was out,'' I murmured. The red light
poured itself along the age-polished dusky panels till the Tudor roses and
lions of the gallery took colour and motion. An old eagle-topped convex
mirror gathered the picture into its mysterious heart, distorting afresh the
distorted shadows, and curving the gallery lines into the curves of a ship.
The day was shutting down in half a gale as the fog turned to stringy scud.
Through the uncurtained mullions of the broad window I could see valiant
horsemen of the lawn rear and recover against the wind that taunted them
with legions of dead leaves.

   ``Yes, it must be beautiful,'' she said. ``Would you like to go over it?
There's still light enough upstairs.''

   I followed her up the unflinching, wagon-wide staircase to the gallery,
whence opened the thin fluted Elizabethan doors.

   ``Feel how they put the latch low down for the sake of the children.''
She swung a light door inward.

   ``By the way, where are they?'' I asked. ``I haven't even heard them
to-day.''

   She did not answer at once. Then, ``I can only hear them,'' she replied
softly. ``This is one of their rooms -- everything ready, you see.''

   She pointed into a heavily-timbered room. There were little low gate
tables and children's chairs. A doll's house, it's hooked front half open,
faced a great dappled rocking-horse, from whose padded saddle it was but a
child's scramble to the broad window-seat overlooking the lawn. A toy gun
lay in a corner beside a gilt wooden cannon.

   ``Surely they've only just gone,'' I whispered. In the failing light a
door creaked cautiously. I heard the rustle of a frock and the patter of
feet -- quick feet through a room beyond.

   ``I heard that,'' she cried triumphantly. ``Did you? Children, oh,
children, where are you?''

   The voice filled the walls that held it lovingly to the last perfect
note, but there came no answering shout such as I had heard in the garden.
We hurried on from room to oak-floored room; up a step here, down three
steps there; among a maze of passages; always mocked by our quarry. One
might as well have tried to work an unstopped warren with a single ferret.
There were bolt-holes innumerable -- recesses in walls, embrasures of deep
slitten windows now darkened, whence they could start up behind us; and
abandoned fireplaces, six feet deep in the masonry, as well as the tangle of
communicating doors. Above all, they had the twilight for their helper in
our game. I had caught one or two joyous chuckles of evasion, and once or
twice had seen the silhouette of a child's frock against some darkening
window at the end of a passage; but we returned empty-handed to the gallery,
just as a middle-aged woman was setting a lamp in its niche.

   ``No, I haven't seen her either this evening, Miss Florence,'' I heard
her say, ``but that Turpin he says he wants to see you about his shed.''

   ``Oh, Mr. Turpin must want to see me very badly. Tell him to come to the
hall, Mrs. Madden.''

   I looked down into the hall whose only light was the dulled fire, and
deep in the shadow I saw them at last. They must have slipped down while we
were in the passages, and now thought themselves perfectly hidden behind an
old gilt leather screen. By child's law, my fruitless chase was as good as
an introduction, but since I had taken so much trouble I resolved to force
them to come forward later by the simple trick, which children detest, of
pretending not to notice them. They lay close, in a little huddle, no more
than shadows except when a quick flame betrayed an outline.

   ``And now we'll have some tea,'' she said. ``I believe I ought to have
offered it you at first, but one doesn't arrive at manners, somehow, when
one lives alone and is considered -- h'm -- peculiar.'' Then with very
pretty scorn, ``would you like a lamp to see to eat by?''

   ``The firelight's much pleasanter, I think.'' We descended into that
delicious gloom and Madden brought tea.

   I took my chair in the direction of the screen, ready to surprise or be
surprised as the game should go, and at her permission, since a hearth is
always sacred, bent forward to play with the fire.

   ``Where do you get these beautiful short faggots from?'' I asked idly.
``Why, they are tallies!''

   ``Of course,'' she said. ``As I can't read or write I'm driven back on
the early English tally for my accounts. Give me one and I'll tell you what
it meant.''

   I passed her an unburnt hazel-tally, about a foot long, and she ran her
thumb down the nicks.

   ``This is the milk-record for the home farm for the month of April last
year, in gallons,'' said she. ``I don't know what I should have done without
tallies. An old forester of mine taught me the system. It's out of date now
for every one else; but my tenants respect it. One of them's coming now to
see me. Oh, it doesn't matter. He has no business here out of office hours.
He's a greedy, ignorant man -- very greedy or -- he wouldn't come here after
dark.''

   ``Have you much land then?''

   ``Only a couple of hundred acres in hand, thank goodness. The other six
hundred are nearly all let to folk who knew my folk before me, but this
Turpin is quite a new man -- and a highway robber.''

   ``But are you sure I sha'n't be --?''

   ``Certainly not. You have the right. He hasn't any children.''

   ``Ah, the children!'' I said, and slid my low chair back till it nearly
touched the screen that hid them. ``I wonder whether they'll come out for
me.''

   There was a murmur of voices -- Madden's and a deeper note -- at the low,
dark side door, and a ginger-headed, canvas-gaitered giant of the
unmistakable tenant farmer type stumbled or was pushed in.

   ``Come to the fire, Mr. Turpin,'' she said.

   ``If -- if you please, Miss, I'll -- I'll be quite as well by the door.''
He clung to the latch as he spoke, like a frightened child. Of a sudden I
realised that he was in the grip of some almost overpowering fear.

   ``Well?''

   ``About that new shed for the young stock -- that was all. These first
autumn storms settin' in . . . but I'll come again, Miss.'' His teeth did
not chatter much more than the door latch.

   ``I think not,'' she answered levelly. ``The new shed -- m'm. What did my
agent write you on the 15th?''

   ``I -- fancied p'r'aps that if I came to see you -- ma -- man to man
like, Miss -- but --''

   His eyes rolled into every corner of the room, wide with horror. He half
opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again --
from without and firmly.

   ``He wrote what I told him,'' she went on. ``You are overstocked already.
Dunnett's Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks -- even in Mr.
Wright's time. And he used cake. You've sixty-seven and you don't cake.
You've broken the lease in that respect. You're dragging the heart out of
the farm.''

   ``I'm -- I'm getting some minerals -- superphosphates -- next week. I've
as good as ordered a truck-load already. I'll go down to the station
to-morrow about 'em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in
the daylight. . . . That gentleman's not going away, is he?'' He almost
shrieked.

   I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to
tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat.

   ``No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin.'' She turned in her chair and
faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece
of scheming that she forced from him -- his plea for the new cowshed at his
landlady's expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next
year's rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the
enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his
greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that
ran wet on his forehead.

   I ceased to tap the leather -- was, indeed, calculating the cost of the
shed -- when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft
hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and
acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers. . . .

   The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm -- as a gift on
which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful
half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when
grown-ups were busiest -- a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago.

   Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I
looked across the lawn at the high window.

   I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that
she knew.

   What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a
log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in
the chair very close to the screen.

   ``Now you understand,'' she whispered, across the packed shadows.

   ``Yes, I understand -- now. Thank you.''

   ``I -- I only hear them.'' She bowed her head in her hands. ``I have no
right, you know -- no other right. I have neither borne nor lost -- neither
borne nor lost!''

   ``Be very glad then,'' said I, for my soul was torn open within me.

   ``Forgive me!''

   She was still, and I went back to my sorrow and my joy.

   ``It was because I loved them so,'' she said at last, brokenly. ``That
was why it was, even from the first -- even before I knew that they -- they
were all I should ever have. And I loved them so!''

   She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the
shadow.

   ``They came because I loved them -- because I needed them. I -- I must
have made them come. Was that wrong, think you?''

   ``No -- no.''

   ``I -- I grant you that the toys and -- and all that sort of thing were
nonsense, but -- but I used to so hate empty rooms myself when I was
little.'' She pointed to the gallery. ``And the passages all empty. . . .
And how could I ever bear the garden door shut? Suppose --''

   ``Don't! For pity's sake, don't!'' I cried. The twilight had brought a
cold rain with gusty squalls that plucked at the leaded windows.

   ``And the same thing with keeping the fire in all night. I don't think it
so foolish -- do you?''

   I looked at the broad brick hearth, saw, through tears I believe, that
there was no unpassable iron on or near it, and bowed my head.

   ``I did all that and lots of other things -- just to make believe. Then
they came. I heard them, but I didn't know that they were not mine by right
till Mrs. Madden told me --''

   ``The butler's wife? What?''

   ``One of them -- I heard -- she saw -- and knew. Hers! Not for me. I
didn't know at first. Perhaps I was jealous. Afterwards, I began to
understand that it was only because I loved them, not because -- . . . Oh,
you must bear or lose,'' she said piteously. ``There is no other way -- and
yet they love me. They must! Don't they?''

   There was no sound in the room except the lapping voices of the fire, but
we two listened intently, and she at least took comfort from what she heard.
She recovered herself and half rose. I sat still in my chair by the screen.

   ``Don't think me a wretch to whine about myself like this, but -- but I'm
all in the dark, you know, and you can see.''

   In truth I could see, and my vision confirmed me in my resolve, though
that was like the very parting of spirit and flesh. Yet a little longer I
would stay since it was the last time.

   ``You think it is wrong, then?'' she cried sharply, though I had said
nothing.

   ``Not for you. A thousand times no. For you it is right. . . . I am
grateful to you beyond words. For me it would be wrong. For me only. . . .''

   ``Why?'' she said, but passed her hand before her face as she had done at
our second meeting in the wood. ``Oh, I see,'' she went on simply as a
child. ``For you it would be wrong.'' Then with a little indrawn laugh,
``and, d'you remember, I called you lucky -- once -- at first. You who must
never come here again!''

   She left me to sit a little longer by the screen, and I heard the sound
of her feet die out along the gallery above.