The Dark Descent, page 117
I held out my hand. “Good night, good night!” she cried. “He that fights and runs away. Ah, good night, Mr. Withers; come again soon!” She thrust out her cheek at Alice, and we all three filed slowly out of the room.
Black shadow darkened the porch and half the spreading sycamore. We walked without speaking up the dusty village street. Here and there a crimson window glowed. At the fork of the high-road I said goodbye. But I had taken hardly more than a dozen paces when a sudden impulse seized me.
“Seaton!” I called.
He turned in the cool stealth of the moonlight.
“You have my address; if by any chance, you know, you should care to spend a week or two in town between this and the—the Day, we should be delighted to see you.”
“Thank you, Withers, thank you,” he said in a low voice.
“I dare say”—I waved my stick gallantly at Alice—“I dare say you will be doing some shopping; we could all meet,” I added, laughing.
“Thank you, thank you, Withers—immensely,” he repeated.
And so we parted.
But they were out of the jog-trot of my prosaic life. And being of a stolid and incurious nature, I left Seaton and his marriage, and even his aunt, to themselves in my memory, and scarcely gave a thought to them until one day I was walking up the Strand again, and passed the flashing gloaming of the second-rate jeweller’s shop where I had accidentally encountered my old schoolfellow in the summer. It was one of those stagnant autumnal days after a night of rain. I cannot say why, but a vivid recollection returned to my mind of our meeting and of how suppressed Seaton had seemed, and of how vainly he had endeavoured to appear assured and eager. He must be married by now, and had doubtless returned from his honeymoon. And I had clean forgotten my manners, had sent not a word of congratulation, nor—as I might very well have done, and as I knew he would have been pleased at my doing—even the ghost of a wedding present. It was just as of old.
On the other hand, I pleaded with myself, I had had no invitation. I paused at the corner of Trafalgar Square, and at the bidding of one of those caprices that seize occasionally on even an unimaginative mind, I found myself pelting after a green bus, and actually bound on a visit I had not in the least intended or foreseen.
The colours of autumn were over the village when I arrived. A beautiful late afternoon sunlight bathed thatch and meadow. But it was close and hot. A child, two dogs, a very old woman with a heavy basket I encountered. One or two incurious tradesmen looked idly up as I passed by. It was all so rural and remote, my whimsical impulse had so much flagged, that for a while I hesitated to venture under the shadow of the sycamore-tree to enquire after the happy pair. Indeed I first passed by the faint-blue gates and continued my walk under the high, green and tufted wall. Hollyhocks had attained their topmost bud and seeded in the little cottage gardens beyond; the Michaelmas daisies were in flower; a sweet warm aromatic smell of fading leaves was in the air. Beyond the cottages lay a field where cattle were grazing, and beyond that I came to a little churchyard. Then the road wound on, pathless and houseless, among gorse and bracken. I turned impatiently and walked quickly back to the house and rang the bell.
The rather colourless elderly woman who answered my enquiry informed me that Miss Seaton was at home, as if only taciturnity forbade her adding, “But she doesn’t want to see you.”
“Might I, do you think, have Mr. Arthur’s address?” I said.
She looked at me with quiet astonishment, as if waiting for an explanation. Not the faintest of smiles came into her thin face.
“I will tell Miss Seaton,” she said after a pause. “Please walk in.”
She showed me into the dingy undusted drawing-room, filled with evening sunshine and with the green-dyed light that penetrated the leaves overhanging the long French windows. I sat down and waited on and on, occasionally aware of a creaking footfall overhead. At last the door opened a little, and the great face I had once known peered round at me. For it was enormously changed; mainly, I think, because the aged eyes had rather suddenly failed, and so a kind of stillness and darkness lay over its calm and wrinkled pallor.
“Who is it?” she asked.
I explained myself and told her the occasion of my visit.
She came in, shut the door carefully after her, and, though the fumbling was scarcely perceptible, groped her way to a chair. She had on an old dressing-gown, like a cassock, of a patterned cinnamon colour.
“What is it you want?” she said, seating herself and lifting her blank face to mine.
“Might I just have Arthur’s address?” I said deferentially. “I am so sorry to have disturbed you.”
“H’m. You have come to see my nephew?”
“Not necessarily to see him, only to hear how he is, and, of course, Mrs. Seaton, too. I am afraid my silence must have appeared . . .”
“He hasn’t noticed your silence,” croaked the old voice out of the great mask; “besides, there isn’t any Mrs. Seaton.”
“Ah, then,” I answered, after a momentary pause, “I have not seemed so black as I painted myself! And how is Miss Outram?”
“She’s gone into Yorkshire,” answered Seaton’s aunt.
“And Arthur too?”
She did not reply, but simply sat blinking at me with lifted chin, as if listening, but certainly not for what I might have to say. I began to feel rather at a loss.
“You were no close friend of my nephew’s, Mr. Smithers?” she said presently.
“No,” I answered, welcoming the cue, “and yet, do you know, Miss Seaton, he is one of the very few of my old school-fellows I have come across in the last few years, and I suppose as one gets older one begins to value old associations . . .” My voice seemed to trail off into a vacuum. “I thought Miss Outram,” I hastily began again, “a particularly charming girl. I hope they are both quite well.”
Still the old face solemnly blinked at me in silence.
“You must find it very lonely, Miss Seaton, with Arthur away?”
“I was never lonely in my life,” she said sourly. “I don’t look to flesh and blood for my company. When you’ve got to be my age, Mr. Smithers (which God forbid), you’ll find life a very different affair from what you seem to think it is now. You won’t seek company then, I’ll be bound. It’s thrust on you.” Her face edged round into the clear green light, and her eyes groped, as it were, over my vacant, disconcerted face. “I dare say, now,” she said, composing her mouth, “I dare say my nephew told you a good many tarradiddles in his time. Oh, yes, a good many, eh? He was always a liar. What, now, did he say of me? Tell me, now.” She leant forward as far as she could, trembling, with an ingratiating smile.
“I think he is rather superstitious,” I said coldly, “but, honestly, I have a very poor memory, Miss Seaton.”
“Why?” she said. “I haven’t.”
“The engagement hasn’t been broken off, I hope.”
“Well, between you and me,” she said, shrinking up and with an immensely confidential grimace, “it has.”
“I’m sure I’m very sorry to hear it. And where is Arthur?”
“Eh?”
“Where is Arthur?”
We faced each other mutely among the dead old bygone furniture. Past all my analysis was that large, flat, grey, cryptic countenance. And then, suddenly, our eyes for the first time really met. In some indescribable way out of that thick-lidded obscurity a far small something stooped and looked out at me for a mere instant of time that seemed of almost intolerable protraction. Involuntarily I blinked and shook my head. She muttered something with great rapidity, but quite inarticulately; rose and hobbled to the door. I thought I heard, mingled in broken mutterings, something about tea.
“Please, please, don’t trouble,” I began, but could say no more, for the door was already shut between us. I stood and looked out on the long-neglected garden. I could just see the bright weedy greenness of Seaton’s tadpole pond. I wandered about the room. Dusk began to gather, the last birds in that dense shadowiness of trees had ceased to sing. And not a sound was to be heard in the house. I waited on and on, vainly speculating. I even attempted to ring the bell; but the wire was broken, and only jangled loosely at my efforts.
I hesitated, unwilling to call or to venture out, and yet more unwilling to linger on, waiting for a tea that promised to be an exceedingly comfortless supper. And as darkness drew down, a feeling of the utmost unease and disquietude came over me. All my talks with Seaton returned on me with a suddenly enriched meaning. I recalled again his face as we had stood hanging over the staircase, listening in the small hours to the inexplicable stirrings of the night. There were no candles in the room; every minute the autumnal darkness deepened. I cautiously opened the door and listened, and with some little dismay withdrew, for I was uncertain of my way out. I even tried the garden, but was confronted under a veritable thicket of foliage by a padlocked gate. It would be a little too ignominious to be caught scaling a friend’s garden fence!
Cautiously returning into the still and musty drawing-room, I took out my watch, and gave the incredible old woman ten minutes in which to reappear. And when that tedious ten minutes had ticked by, I could scarcely distinguish its hands. I determined to wait no longer, drew open the door and, trusting to my sense of direction, groped my way through the corridor that I vaguely remembered led to the front of the house.
I mounted three or four stairs and, lifting a heavy curtain, found myself facing the starry fanlight of the porch. From here I glanced into the gloom of the dining-room. My fingers were on the latch of the outer door when I heard a faint stirring in the darkness above the hall. I looked up and became conscious of, rather than saw, the huddled old figure looking down on me.
There was an immense hushed pause. Then, “Arthur, Arthur,” whispered an inexpressibly peevish rasping voice, “is that you? Is that you, Arthur?”
I can scarcely say why, but the question horribly startled me. No conceivable answer occurred to me. With head craned back, hand clenched on my umbrella, I continued to stare up into the gloom, in this fatuous confrontation.
“Oh, oh,” the voice croaked. “It is you, is it? That disgusting man! . . . Go away out. Go away out.”
At this dismissal, I wrenched open the door and, rudely slamming it behind me, ran out into the garden, under the gigantic old sycamore, and so out at the open gate.
I found myself half up the village street before I stopped running. The local butcher was sitting in his shop reading a piece of newspaper by the light of a small oil-lamp. I crossed the road and enquired the way to the station. And after he had with minute and needless care directed me, I asked casually if Mr. Arthur Seaton still lived with his aunt at the big house just beyond the village. He poked his head in at the little parlour door.
“Here’s a gentleman enquiring after young Mr. Seaton, Millie,” he said. “He’s dead, ain’t he?”
“Why, yes, bless you,” replied a cheerful voice from within. “Dead and buried these three months or more—young Mr. Seaton. And just before he was to be married, don’t you remember, Bob?”
I saw a fair young woman’s face peer over the muslin of the little door at me.
“Thank you,” I replied, “then I go straight on?”
“That’s it, sir; past the pond, bear up the hill a bit to the left, and then there’s the station lights before your eyes.”
We looked intelligently into each other’s faces in the beam of the smoky lamp. But not one of the many questions in my mind could I put into words.
And again I paused irresolutely a few paces further on. It was not, I fancy, merely a foolish apprehension of what the raw-boned butcher might “think” that prevented my going back to see if I could find Seaton’s grave in the benighted churchyard. There was precious little use in pottering about in the muddy dark merely to discover where he was buried. And yet I felt a little uneasy. My rather horrible thought was that, so far as I was concerned—one of his extremely few friends—he had never been much better than “buried” in my mind.
Ivan Turgenev
Clara Militch
Ivan Turgenev was one of the few masters of supernatural horror fiction outside the English language in the nineteenth century. He was a Russian writer of enormous prestige and influence, and his supernatural works span his entire career, the best of them coming from his mature years. Clara Militch is a short novel and perhaps the best of all his works in the horror mode. Turgenev maintained that love is a supernatural phenomenon, an intriguing notion that underpins this story of requited love and horror. Turgenev’s works were widely read in translation at the end of the nineteenth century. One might also note that in a contemporary scholarly edition of the text, the last word of the novella is “horror.”
I
In the spring of 1878 there was living in Moscow, in a small wooden house in Shabolovka, a young man of five-and-twenty, called Yakov Aratov. With him lived his father’s sister, an elderly maiden lady, over fifty, Platonida Ivanovna. She took charge of his house, and looked after his household expenditure, a task for which Aratov was utterly unfit. Other relations he had none. A few years previously, his father, a provincial gentleman of small property, had moved to Moscow together with him and Platonida Ivanovna, whom he always, however, called Platosha; her nephew, too, used the same name. On leaving the country-place where they had always lived up till then, the elder Aratov settled in the old capital, with the object of putting his son to the university, for which he had himself prepared him; he bought for a trifle a little house in one of the outlying streets, and established himself in it, with all his books and scientific odds and ends. And of books and odds and ends he had many—for he was a man of some considerable learning . . . “an out-and-out eccentric,” as his neighbours said of him. He positively passed among them for a sorcerer; he had even been given the title of an “insectivist.” He studied chemistry, mineralogy, entomology, botany, and medicine; he doctored patients gratis with herbs and metallic powders of his own invention, after the method of Paracelsus. These same powders were the means of his bringing to the grave his pretty, young, too delicate wife, whom he passionately loved, and by whom he had an only son. With the same powders he fairly ruined his son’s health too, in the hope and intention of strengthening it, as he detected anæmia and a tendency to consumption in his constitution inherited from his mother. The name of “sorcerer” had been given him partly because he regarded himself as a descendant—not in the direct line, of course—of the great Bruce, in honour of whom he had called his son Yakov, the Russian form of James.
He was what is called a most good-natured man, but of melancholy temperament, pottering, and timid, with a bent for everything mysterious and occult . . . A half-whispered ah! was his habitual exclamation; he even died with this exclamation on his lips, two years after his removal to Moscow.
His son, Yakov, was in appearance unlike his father, who had been plain, clumsy, and awkward; he took more after his mother. He had the same delicate pretty features, the same soft ash-coloured hair, the same little aquiline nose, the same pouting childish lips, and great greenish-grey languishing eyes, with soft eyelashes. But in character he was like his father; and the face, so unlike the father’s face, wore the father’s expression; and he had the triangular-shaped hands and hollow chest of the old Aratov, who ought, however, hardly to be called old, since he never reached his fiftieth year. Before his death, Yakov had already entered the university in the faculty of physics and mathematics; he did not, however, complete his course; not through laziness, but because, according to his notions, you could learn no more in the university than you could studying alone at home; and he did not go in for a diploma because he had no idea of entering the government service. He was shy with his fellow-students, made friends with scarcely any one, especially held aloof from women, and lived in great solitude, buried in books. He held aloof from women, though he had a heart of the tenderest, and was fascinated by beauty . . . He had even obtained a sumptuous English keepsake, and (oh shame!) gloated adoringly over its “elegantly engraved” representations of the various ravishing Gulnaras and Medoras . . . But his innate modesty always kept him in check. In the house he used to work in what had been his father’s study, it was also his bedroom, and his bed was the very one in which his father had breathed his last.
The mainstay of his whole existence, his unfailing friend and companion, was his aunt Platosha, with whom he exchanged barely a dozen words in the day, but without whom he could not stir hand or foot. She was a long-faced, long-toothed creature, with pale eyes, and a pale face, with an invariable expression, half of dejection, half of anxious dismay. For ever garbed in a grey dress and a grey shawl, she wandered about the house like a spirit, with noiseless steps, sighed, murmured prayers—especially one favourite one, consisting of three words only, “Lord, succour us!”—and looked after the house with much good sense, taking care of every halfpenny, and buying everything herself. Her nephew she adored; she was in a perpetual fidget over his health—afraid of everything—not for herself but for him; and directly she fancied the slightest thing wrong, she would steal in softly, and set a cup of herb tea on his writing-table, or stroke him on the spine with her hands, soft as wadding. Yakov was not annoyed by these attentions—though the herb tea he left untouched—he merely nodded his head approvingly. However, his health was really nothing to boast of. He was very impressionable, nervous, fanciful, suffered from palpitations of the heart, and sometimes from asthma; like his father, he believed that there are in nature, and in the soul of man, mysteries which may sometimes be divined, but to which one can never penetrate; he believed in the existence of certain powers and influences, sometimes beneficent, but more often malignant . . . and he believed too in science, in its dignity and importance. Of late he had taken a great fancy to photography. The smell of the chemicals used in this pursuit was a source of great uneasiness to his old aunt—not on her own account again, but on Yasha’s, on account of his chest; but for all the softness of his temper, there was not a little obstinacy in his composition, and he persisted in his favourite pursuit. Platosha gave in, and only sighed more than ever, and murmured, “Lord, succour us!” whenever she saw his fingers stained with iodine.
