by Algernon Blackwood (1926)
It is odd how trivial a thing can cause a first, instinctive dislike: the way a man wears his hat, the smirk with which a woman uses her mirror and lipstick in a public place — and the aversion is suddenly aroused. Later knowledge may justify this first dislike, but the actual start has been the merest triviality.
Some think, however, this cause has not been so trivial as it appears; that gesture, being an unconscious expression of the entire personality, may betray far more than speech, which is calculated. Moleson, thinking over the brusqueness of the stranger on the doorstep, the unnecessary way he pushed ahead of him and up the stairs, his whole air, indeed, of general resentment and disapproval, found himself recalling a rather significant answer that a very wise old man had once given in his hearing to a commonplace question. The question was not his own: he was listening to two friends discussing a third.
'Everything indicates,' said the first, carelessly enough, 'that I ought to like X. I have nothing against him. Quite the reverse, in fact. Yet I do not like him. I simply cannot like him, try as I will. Now — why don't I?'
'Your dislike,' was the reply, 'is probably chemical. Merely chemical.'
This came back to Moleson's mind now, as he unpacked his things and arranged himself in the top-floor bed-sitting room he had engaged that afternoon. It was in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum. The November twilight was setting in; the gas, electric light stopping at the second floor, was poor; his reading lamp was not yet unpacked. 'Chemical! … ' he thought. 'I wonder! … ' as he looked out a moment into the rather dismal street, where the Museum buildings blocked the sky with their sombre and formidable mass. He had, of course, the layman's vague knowledge of the loves and hates of atoms, their intense attraction and repulsion for each other, the dizzy rapidity with which they rushed towards, or away from, those they respectively liked or disliked. Had all the atoms of which he was composed, then, turned their backs instinctively upon those which made up the stranger's body, racing away at a headlong speed that caused him this acute and positive discomfort? Was his instantaneous loathing 'chemical merely? … '
As he bustled about arranging his things, his dislike of the fellow remained vivid and persistent. The recent scene again passed through his mind in detail.
He had called in the morning and interviewed Mrs Smith, with the result: 'Not at the moment, sir, I 'aven't got a room free'; then, after a rather curious hesitation, 'But later a little, maybe'; then more hesitation; 'This afternoon, per'aps — I — I might be able to manage it — if you could make it convenient — to call in again … '; whereupon, seeing that the house was so admirably close to the Reading Room where his daily work would be, Moleson offered to pay in advance, but was then quick enough to see that it was not the question of money alone that troubled the woman. Her hesitation, he perceived, was not mere independence, nor was it due to his unprosperous appearance. She wanted a lodger, clearly enough — if she could 'manage it', whatever that might mean — and it was not himself that she objected to. It was, he felt sure, a calculation of sorts she was trying to make in her own mind. He wisely decided to give her time to make it.
'I'll look in again,' he said, 'about three o'clock, say,' and he added, with his pleasant smile, that most of his time would be spent working in the Museum opposite.
It was on his return in the afternoon that the scene occurred.
He had rung the bell, and was waiting just inside the narrow hall while the maid hurried downstairs to fetch Mrs Smith, the street door still ajar behind him, when somebody, another lodger evidently, pushed past brusquely, offensively, almost resentfully, half shoving him, yet without actual contact, from where he stood at the foot of the Stairs — slightly in the way, perhaps — and without so much as By your Leave. There might, of course, have been a grunt of apology, for Moleson was a little deaf, but the man's attitude made it unlikely, and the pose of the head and shoulders, the face being turned away and not visible, was far more of resentful disapproval than of apology. Moleson, on the instant, loathed him, not because of the rudeness, but because of some presentment his appearance offered that stirred an intense, instinctive dislike amounting to positive repulsion. A moment later, when Mrs Smith arrived, panting and labouring, the man was up the stairs and out of sight, but at first the impression left was so vivid that Moleson would not have been altogether displeased if he had heard that no room was, after all, available. The contrary, however, took place. A bargain was struck, money passed hands, and the room was his.
The majority of young men in these circumstances would probably have given their attention to the landlady, to whom money must be paid, and on whose goodwill they must depend for their comfort and the like. Moleson, instead, found himself thinking only of this rude fellow-lodger. Over his dinner in a neighbouring restaurant he reflected that his sudden dislike was odd; he had never set eyes upon the fellow before, and as yet had not even seen the face nor heard the voice, yet this loathing had leaped into being. Revulsion, he called it. Its oddness, of course, lay in this want of proportion. He gave a passing thought, too, to his landlady, yet chiefly using her as a means of comparison with the other. Her rather sombre visage, an overwhelming melancholy in it, though certainly not attractive, woke nothing stronger in him than a vague, tolerant sympathy. He felt no dislike, at any rate; she merely didn't matter; a worthy soul, he decided, worn into sadness by life. Whereas the other human being gave him this instinctive, deep revulsion. Chemical? He wondered. For why, if chemical, should one unpleasing soul awake pity, and another, equally unpleasing, stir violent antipathy? …
Over his coffee, he dismissed the little puzzle. His room was admirably close to the Museum; Bloomsbury liked him; and it was the number in the street — Number eleven — his Manchester friend and employer had mentioned. The price, too, suited him, for money was scarce, otherwise he would not be 'devilling' for another man — looking up certain seventeenth-century facts for a writer who would probably clear one thousand pounds over his silly book, yet 'must be sure of my dates and facts, you know. Your expenses and five pounds a week, if you'll do it for me. …' The street and number, close to the Museum, were added. Young Moleson, ignorant of London, jumped at it.
It was some years before our Great Date this happened. Jim Moleson, engaged to a sweet girl, and now married to her, told me the details recently. The War intervened, of course. He had learnt something. At that time I should have described him as highly strung, sensitive at any rate, imaginative certainly, poetic probably. I, his senior by a quarter of a century, rather believed he wrote 'Celtic' poetry in his bedroom. The War undeceived us about that type, revealed them rather: their amazing courage, the splendour of their 'imagination', translated into reckless, inspired action. Jim, anyhow, was always headstrong, fierce-tempered, 'nasty' once his feelings were stirred, only these feelings were usually for others — for a lame dog, an injured cat, a bird in a cage, an overworked horse. Slights, even insults to himself he could stand, to the point of cowardice, some thought; but this was wrong; he was easy-going to that point; beyond it he saw red and — killed. This savage temper, rarely roused, and then with a curious suddenness, was an item I overlooked. But it was a human, not merely an animal, temper.
His work at the Museum, apparently, absorbed him; no more painstaking and accurate 'devil' ever devilled; and he got back to his room, tired mentally and physically. A nice-looking, upstanding lad with his mop of dark hair and blue eyes, he soon made a friend of Mrs Smith — over his letters first: 'Lef' at Number seven,' she informed him, the printed name of his employer's Institute on the envelope catching her trained, if mournful, eye perhaps. The postman arst me, and I thought they was for you,' she explained. So his slight deafness had again betrayed him, and his employer had said 'Number seven', instead of 'Number eleven'. They talked on a bit. He had the feeling she wanted to talk a bit, but wanted to talk about something in particular, and to him. He explained about the letters and his troublesome deafness in one ear; he heard her say 'your glass of porter' when she actually said, 'hot bath water', and then, after a nice little chat about the weather, prices, and ''ow times was changing', he noticed that she suddenly stuck.
This was after a week in the house, he told me. The appalling melancholy of her face came over him, but rather in a new way; he realized it in some personal sense, I think, as they stood awkwardly staring at one another, each waiting for the other to speak, so that through his sensitive, imaginative mind ran the thought: 'That's no ordinary sadness, I'll be bound! … ' — and then he stuck.
The impulse to say something kind rose in him, only he could think of nothing to say, nothing suitable. It was here he got his first clear, instinctive impression about this commonplace woman: that she was interested, namely, to ask some definite question of him, that, liking and trusting him, and, further, having watched carefully and waited anxiously the whole week, she now longed to put this definite query to him, yet was afraid. The same hesitation he had seen first on the doorstep showed itself in her face and sorrowful eyes.
He had been vaguely aware of this for some time evidently, but had not recognized it. It was not, he felt sure, any question about his comfort, for he was old enough to know that landladies rarely took that risk. Something, none the less, she wanted to know, something personal to himself. The suffering in her face made him wonder. A queer sympathy moved through him. He recalled the stationer round the corner in Bury Street, when he bought his paper and materials: 'Oh yes, I know, sir; that's Mrs Warley's,' saying he would send the parcel round, and, being corrected: 'No, Mrs Smith's,' he looked blank a moment, troubled a little, but in a kindly sense, before he agreed : 'Oh yes, to be sure, sir — Mrs Smith's — now. So it is. …' That 'now' was suggestive. She had changed her name, married again, no doubt, yet there had been trouble of some sort, Moleson gathered. And, though he had not pursued the matter at the time, this little memory came back now, as he stood chatting with her, trying to think of something pleasant he might say. He wondered …
'I'm very comfortable,' he said on impulse, presently. 'The room's just what I wanted —' and he was about to add some kind and soothing word when she interrupted in an eager way that startled him:
'Oh, then everything is all right, sir? There's nothing, I mean, interfering with your quiet? If anything annoys' - she changed the verb, before it was completed, to 'disturbs', then stopped dead.
It was not the words — commonplace enough: it was her face that startled him. It had been on the tip of her tongue, he felt, to say 'anyone' instead of 'anything'. He knew it in his bones. Also, she could have cut off that tongue for having let it say what it had said. That, too, he perceived. This question she longed yet feared to ask had nearly slipped out in spite of herself. Her face, anyhow, betrayed an emotion that for an instant obliterated its usual sadness. It was the emotion of terror.
Moleson, as he caught it, felt shocked. The sharp instinct came suddenly to him that it was wiser not to ask. He cut the talk short, as nicely as he could. 'Nothing, nothing,' he replied, gave her his pleasant smile, and went up quickly to his room.
Her question was an approach to the real one she wanted so much to ask. That, of course, he realized. Terror lay in it; it was wrapped round with terror as in a cocoon. Once the cocoon burst, was broken, out would come all the hideous wriggling things that lay concealed inside. This was the feeling Moleson carried upstairs with him. It was as though he had just caught a glimpse, behind her suddenly pale skin, of the hideous wriggling things that caused her sadness and her terror, But another certainty lay in him too at this moment: the question she had asked, this preliminary question that was an approach to another, referred — he felt positive of it — to someone he particularly sought to keep out of his thoughts as much as ever he could. She referred, indirectly thus, to the other lodger.
It was his habit at night, after his dinner round the corner, to sort out the Notes of his day's work before an early bed. Tonight, however, this talk stayed by him and prevented. He sat thinking about it … and eventually, it seems, thought circling and circling but coming to no satisfactory conclusion of course, he dropped asleep, to wake very suddenly much later in a state of uncommon distress — 'acute distress,' he called it, 'funk'.
This, I think, is one of the most curious and betraying things about the whole business: that, even when he told it all to me later, he kept off that unpleasant lodger, as he called him — kept him so long in the background. He had begun by emphasizing his unusual repulsion towards the fellow, dwelling upon it, stressing it, just as I have done in this written account. But then, when I was expecting the lodger to appear in some dreadful and dramatic guise — a sneak-thief, a forger with coining apparatus, a blackmailer in league with Mrs Warley-Smith (as I styled her), even a murderer hiding from the police with the woman's help — Moleson merely left him out. He ignored him, made no mention of him. He talked about his work, about Mrs Smith, his liking the house, yet disliking the room — feeling it disliked him and wanted him out — about anything except the sinister lodger. Having first firmly fixed him in my mind as an ominous character, he just left him there. Thus, when I tried to bring him to the point — this suggestive point of the sinister lodger, and a point he had himself established in opening his tale — he stopped abruptly, and stared into my face, his features working, his eyes gone positively googly. Some fear, I saw, still operated in him, unreleased. His face gave me a touch of goose flesh. There was an ingredient of salutary 'confession' in his delayed account, I began to gather. He lowered his voice. 'I knew you'd ask that before long,' he said. 'You see — I shirked him myself.'
'Refused to acknowledge him, you mean?' I queried vaguely. 'Tried to pretend he wasn't in the house?'
He nodded, looking down at his boots.
'You disliked him,' I insisted, 'to that point?' The expression in his eyes, as he glanced up quickly, answered me better than his words.
'It's unbelievable,' he whispered, 'how that fellow obsessed me. Obsessed is the term.'
I asked if he saw him often.
'After that first encounter on the front-door steps — only twice, all told.'
The intensity, a sort of inner secrecy in him still, made me hesitate, but as he said nothing, I presently asked boldly:
'But — in the end — you found out who he was, what he was doing there? In a word — why you loathed him so?' I got no straight answer, but I got the full story, told in his own evasive, curious way.
'I mentioned how I dropped asleep in my chair, and woke up suddenly feeling frightened,' he went on. 'Well — that's the point, you see.'
'What is?' I asked, justifiably dense.
He cast his eyes down as though he were ashamed of it. 'I'd been frightened all along,' he muttered. 'Damned frightened. Ever since I'd been in that awful house, I'd been frightened.'
'Of — him?'
He nodded.
He believed he had discovered why the fellow resented his being there: it was because Moleson occupied his room. Mrs Smith had hesitated that first morning whether she could turn him out or not — his rent probably overdue, and what not — but eventually had spoken to him — and Moleson, as described, cash in hand, had moved in. It was a sufficiently obvious explanation.
'But that didn't explain my own abhorrence — did it?'
Obviously not.
'He may have felt resentful, furious, because I'd got his room, but that couldn't have made me feel the physical repulsion, to the point of nausea, which I did feel. And dread too. I only saw him twice after that first meeting, but though I saw him so rarely, I knew he was in the house with me. I never forgot it. He was all over the house expresses it better. I was always expecting to meet him, to run across him on the stairs, to find him in the hall. When I came down the street I imagined him standing on the doorstep, fumbling with his latchkey. When I went to my bath halfway down the stairs, I thought we should pass. At night, if I went out to post a letter; in the morning when I opened my door to take my hot water in. But, no; he: made no sign, I did not meet him. What he did all day I have no notion: he never went out, so far as I saw or knew. But then I myself was out from nine to five, then again for my dinner between eight and nine, you see.'
At a great rate he rattled this off. He gave me a good deal in a very few words.
A definite question halted his rambling account, though it was my object, otherwise, to hear the tale just as he cared to tell it.
'Describe him?' He repeated my words. 'As I first saw him —? Oh yes. Though I didn't see the features, remember, that time.' Then he startled me by raising his voice most unexpectedly in his excitement: 'Misshapen!' he shouted in my face, so that I jumped. 'Well, you asked me; and that's what I felt about him. But mentally, morally, rather than physically. That's the impression he made on me.' And then he barked out another word: 'A monster!' A little shudder ran over him. 'I didn't see the face,' he went on, 'because he didn't mean me to see it. He moved sideways, the shoulder next to me humped up a trifle so as to hide it. A bit of a beard I saw, or whiskers, straggly hair, anyhow, that left in my mind some faint notion of pretence, of a wig perhaps. But my mind at the moment was on my business with Mrs Smith, and I wasn't trying to see what a stranger pushing rudely past me was like. I had no particular interest in him then. Clothes? … Oh, that I couldn't say with accuracy either, but a dark suit, and a bowler hat on his head. Dark,' he emphasized, 'the whole look and feel of the man was dark.'
I was still anxiously waiting for that account of his waking up frightened in his chair, for my interest was now deeply held. But I was patient; I had to be. He went on to tell me how he was for ever expecting to see the man again, yet did not see him. This repetition, in the tale as he told it, was not redundant, though, when written, it may seem so. It led up with a bang, as it were, to the meeting — the sight, rather — when it came. Every morning on going out to his work he was positive he must pass the fellow on the darkish stairs, but the stairs were empty; on the landing when he opened his door, on the front-door steps when he returned in the evening, but landing and steps were unoccupied. He would have a good look at the door first from a little way up the street, before coming to it, for the dread of meeting was established, horribly established, in his being — 'expectant dread,' he called it. Then, suddenly, he did see him. This was the second time.
'I was hardly settled at my desk in the Reading Room,' he described the incident, 'when I found I'd left my employer's letter on the mantelpiece. It had questions for me to verify, you see. I hurried back for it. It only took five minutes — that's why the house suited me so — but I had a good squint first from a distance to see if the doorstep was free. No one was visible. I ran up. Just as I slipped my latchkey in, I glanced up — something made me — and there he was, staring down at me from the window.'
'In your room!'
'I saw the face for the first time, but only for a second, just long enough for our eyes to meet. He withdrew it instantly — awfully quick, I mean. It was dark, unshaven, the beard not a real intended beard. I saw hanging lips. No, it was not what you'd call an evil face, not in that sense, but it was dreadful in the sense of being out of relation with any world I knew. Horrible, appalling, in that way. It was a mad face. Behind its darkness there was white — the white of terror. The face was all I really saw, with just a bit of the neck that had a thin red scarf about it … The key dropped out of my fingers with a clatter on the steps. I was shaking all over.
'Ferreting about in my room! … was my first thought - the room that used to be his! … But a second thought came with it simultaneously, and it was this second thought that unsettled me most, I believe. I realized in a flash that the fellow had been actually watching me ever since my arrival, keeping out of my way on purpose, waiting an opportunity, waiting for me to go out — oh, I can't describe it exactly - but he knew my every moment, I mean.'
'You rushed up —?' I interrupted. It was a stupid question, but the dread of this mysterious lodger in my mind excited me.
Moleson hesitated. 'I've got a vile temper, you know,' he said, shyly rather, as though I was not supposed to be aware of this, 'vile', he repeated with emphasis and a touch of shame, 'curiously sudden too —'
'That brute in your own room,' I helped him. For a moment I feared I was to hear of a violent assault.
'I was up those stairs in a second or two,' he went on, 'and the first thing I noticed on getting to the top was that my door was moving. There was no one on the landing. The room itself was empty.' He paused, looking at me significantly. 'The fellow,' he then added, 'had got out — just in time.' Again he paused for a moment. 'I shouldn't have waited to ask any questions, you know.'
I knew he meant it, but I was glad to have been spared details of an ugly assault. This savage temper in Moleson always alarmed me rather. I verily believe he would have done the fellow in. His face, as he told it, betrayed him. By this time, moreover, I already had a shrewd suspicion of what Was to prove the explanation of this unpleasant and mysterious lodger: a mad mind certainly, a maniac probably (I had glimpses of a homicidal maniac), he would turn out to be the son of Mrs Smith. That I was partly right, yet at the same time curiously wrong, is a tribute perhaps to the unconscious skill with which Moleson told his story, concealing its climax admirably, yet disdaining to mislead me by using false clues.
The crime of murder, at any rate, was meanwhile spared him. The room was empty, nothing had apparently been touched, and the corridor was empty too. His suggestion of having been 'watched' I disregarded. Later, however, I inclined to accept it.
'Across my landing,' Moleson continued, 'was one door only — the door of what I felt convinced was his room. It was closed. My first instinct was to bang at it and ask him what the devil … Well,' — he laughed a little — 'I didn't do it, that's all. My anger had cooled down somehow. I just snatched up the letter I'd come to fetch and went back to the Museum Reading Room.'
I looked at him, impressed by his admirable brevity, thinking of the MC gained in Flanders, of that runaway he once stopped, of the two hefty ruffians he fought, half killing one of them, in a Surrey lane when they objected to his interfering on behalf of their overloaded horses. He had various things to his credit of this sort, and he was delicate, of slight build, no muscles or brawn at all. Moleson, with his fierce, perhaps great, spirit, was not negligible. Any story he told, I mean, had value … 'Now,' I thought to myself, 'at last we'll get to this business about waking up frightened!' Not a bit of it. He must tell me something about Mrs Smith first. And though it delayed the thing I wanted to hear, it was worth listening to.
Poor lodging-houses have secrets, secret lodgers, as well, no doubt. His room was cheap, too cheap. But it was not his business, after all. 'Better leave it at that!' he decided. Only one thing troubled me about Mrs Smith — her interest, namely, in ascertaining if he was 'not interfered with' — as though she had rather expected that he would be disturbed. Her phrase had anchored itself in his mind; he was always recalling it; he couldn't forget it apparently. Why should he be 'interfered with'? What — who — should interfere with him? Who, indeed, he reflected, but this man? This man who had been turned out for him? This man whose room he now undoubtedly occupied? And so it was that, since Mrs Smith came to no closer terms with the real question she longed to ask, he now, for his part, decided to come to closer terms with the question he wanted to ask: 'Who is your other lodger?' For the floor below being empty, he knew, there was none but himself and this other lodger in the house.
After various hints, suggestions and the rest, chances he provided but she did not take, the expression in her face invariably making him pause — after numerous futile leads, he came abruptly one day to the direct question. Tired of fencing, a touch of his queer anger stirred in him. He made up his mind to know whether her feelings were upset or not. He put the brutal question, though he did it delicately enough:
'By the by,' he said, as they were in the narrow hall, money having just passed, 'I meant to ask you sooner, Mrs Smith — my typewriter at night — does it disturb anyone? The gentleman opposite, I mean?'
If he was prepared for evasion of some kind, he was certainly not prepared for the answer he received.
'She denied there being any gentleman opposite at all?' I asked, as Moleson hesitated, wondering, I fancied, how best to make her answer sound credible to a Philistine like myself.
'She didn't answer,' he said briefly. 'Her face turned white as a sheet. She fell back against the hatrack. She screamed. It was a curious scream, rather low, not noisy a bit. And it was pain, not fear. She was hurt, terribly hurt. She began to cry … '
Further explanation of the amazing collapse, beyond that her 'art caught me sudden — it's always been weak,' — there was none. It was in this brief fashion that Moleson related the incident, then left it there without another word — as I too must therefore leave it.
For some days after that nothing happened. He did not see the lodger. He avoided the landlady. He began to look forward to the end of his stay, hurrying his work at the Museum purposely. But his mind was for ever going back, he says, to that odd question about being 'interfered with', and one night in particular, as he sat over his Notes after dinner, memory carried him away rather forcibly, rather persistently, to that phrase which had inserted his original uneasiness. He sat in his chair, lolling back, and thinking about it, wondering afresh about this mysterious lodger, about what he did, why he hid so carefully, why he watched him. The old notions slipped through his mind, for no new ones occurred to him: was he a coiner of counterfeit money, a blackmailer, a lunatic, a man wanted by the police, a man who ought by rights to be shut up, a suicidal maniac … and so, eventually, he dropped asleep in his chair … to wake up suddenly 'frightened, and in acute distress'.
So, at last, we had got to it.
It was late. The night was very still, all noises in the street had stopped. No footsteps even were audible on the pavement through the open window. 'I woke up cold,' he said, 'cold to the bone. The room, in spite of the warm summer air, was icy. I was shivering.'
And at first, rather bewildered after his sleep, he sat there listening, waiting, wondering why he felt cold, wondering for some minutes what the matter was. That something was the matter, he felt sure. Something had been happening, had just happened, while he was asleep. But what? He collected his senses, remembering exactly where he was. Details, of course, came back quickly then. He says the first thing he noticed was that a change had come over the room. The room was somehow different. It had curiously altered. When he dropped off to sleep it had been one thing, now it was another. He glanced about him, searching uncomfortably for evidence of this change, but finding no single detail altered, nothing out of place, the furniture exactly as it always was — until his eye rested on the door. The door, he phrased it, 'drew' his attention, although a closed door — and it was closed now — must always, it seemed to me, look much the same.
'Well,' he said, 'it didn't.' He used the tone of challenge, anticipating disbelief. 'That door,' he declared, 'had been opened and shut while I was asleep.' He waited a moment. 'It had only just been shut.'
The imaginative statement struck me as singularly dramatic. Proof, of course, was not possible, yet a door, I reflected, is easily the most significant feature of a house, opened, closed, tapped on, locked; it is a frontier, a threshold, and when passed, either in exit or entrance, leads necessarily to other conditions of living, to other states of mind, since it leads to other people and other atmosphere. I could understand in a fashion that Moleson used those words. He rather convinced me, I mean, that he was possibly right.
'That's what made you wake,' I offered, filling the pause he left.
'Yes,' he returned flatly. 'While I slept, that door had been opened, someone had looked in, come in, moved about the room, done something, then gone out again — gone out just that instant.'
Aware of this change in the room, or in the atmosphere about him, he sat for some time staring at that door. He listened intently. A glance at his wrist-watch showed that it was two in the morning, so that he had slept several hours, The deep silence of the house came over him unpleasantly, and his distress, instead of passing, increased. He found himself still shivering. But a moment later his cold skin turned hot and broke out in a profuse perspiration — at a sound. It was a sound he recognized, having heard it before: the dragging of furniture or luggage across the landing, of heavy and awkward articles, difficult to move. He had heard it already several times, late at night, early in the morning, through his dreams as well, and he had always ascribed it to the lodger, busy arranging things in his room opposite, and using the landing sometimes in so doing. He had paid no particular attention to it, beyond a passing annoyance at the choice of hours, and the sounds had usually ceased after a few minutes at the most. Now, however, he was conscious of a difference, for in the first place it was two in the morning, when ordinary people were asleep; secondly, he realized distinctly, it was not furniture or luggage being moved — it was a piece of luggage, a heavy piece, for the sound was unmistakable. He thought of a trunk or portmanteau. Moreover — it was going on immediately outside his own door.
'The fellow was dragging this luggage of his across the landing just beyond my door,' Moleson underlined the fact. 'At two o'clock in the morning, if you please!'
The first effect upon him was one of a queer paralysis, mental and physical. He could neither think nor move.
'I just sat listening to the fellow dragging his great bag, or whatever it was, across the landing — dragging it, I supposed, towards his own room opposite. Then, very gradually, my mental numbness lifted, and I found myself wondering why. At two in the morning! Dragging luggage about! What was he doing with luggage on the landing of a Bloomsbury lodging-house at that unearthly hour? So close to my own door too? The bumping and scraping were audible enough; there was no pretence of doing it quietly. Where was he taking his luggage from? Where to? My mind worked quickly, once it started. A score of questions rushed over me. What could it be, this bag, this portmanteau, this heavy bundle so difficult to move? What could it contain? What had he put inside it? Taken?'
'Taken? … ' I repeated, not quite following him.
'Some of the questions, racing through my mind,' he explained, 'brought a kind of answer with them. That's the only way I can put it,' he added apologetically, a sop to me, the sceptical recipient of his confession.
'What had he taken?' he repeated, looking at me rather hard.
I had no notion.
'But I had,' said Moleson with decision, interpreting my blank expression,
'I guessed at once — half guessed, at least.'
He had me at a loss there, I admit; but I made no comment, merely nodding my head affirmatively. His next words took me completely by surprise:
'His great bag or bundle, whatever it was,' whispered Moleson, 'contained something he had just taken out of my room, While I slept, the fellow had sneaked in, crept about, found what he wanted, taken it, and sneaked out again with it — in his bag.'
Again I made no comment, the explanation being too preposterous to argue about. Moleson, besides, was now too earnest and convinced — he knew, remember, the climax, whereas I was still in ignorance — too eager to make his full confession for me to interfere and cavil with commonplace criticism. It might have stopped him, for one thing …
'You missed anything?' I asked, no disbelief in my face or voice. I had to repeat it before he replied, and his reply, when it came, again took me by surprise. Also, it sent a shiver through me, as though the hair were moving on my scalp:
'What he had taken,' he told me in a lowered voice, and speaking very slowly, 'was not in my room at that time — when I fell asleep, I mean. But it had been there — some time before.'
The statement, naturally, left me without a rejoinder. I lit a cigarette and waited in silence.
'At that moment,' he said impressively, still in his whisper, and loathing coming into his face with a leap, as it were, 'I knew — he was a — horror. Oh, in every meaning of the word. And a queer, sudden revulsion rushed over me — the intense desire to see him close, to look at him face to face, to speak to him — I never once heard his voice, you know — to — yes, even to touch the brute; and in so doing — somehow — God knows how — to get rid of him. So far he had avoided me deliberately. All this time he had evaded, escaped me. He meant to avoid and escape me, but now at last I had him close — a few feet away — busy, occupied, within reach, unable to get away — if I just opened that door, I need only open that door, and I should see him — catch him in the act.'
Longing to ask 'In what act?' I ventured instead: 'You felt angry all of a sudden?' and hit the mark better than I knew.
He admitted it, ashamed a little, with a nod. 'I felt cold all over, mind you,' he went on, always in that low voice, 'scared as well, really scared, but at the same time, as you say, I felt' — he chose a queer word — 'vicious. Exasperated, too, a bit. I wanted to be done with it. I wanted to get at the fellow. Why the devil should he make this infernal row at two in the morning? How dared he? How dared he come into another man's room, even if it had once been his own? Why should he watch me, bother me, haunt me, get into my mind — and all the rest of it? Yes,' — with a touch of fierceness — 'you're right — I did feel angry all of a sudden. I decided abruptly I'd go out —'
'Open that door?' — I simply couldn't keep it back. Personally, I should not have opened that door at two in the morning under the circumstances.
'Yes, open the door, go out, and tell the brute to go to hell. I decided to do that — and more —'
I knew what that 'more' meant.
'— but when I tried to get up from my chair, I found I couldn't move. I just sat there, furious angry, struggling — like a mechanical doll whose machinery had run down. I was dying to get at the fellow. I was perspiring all over. I felt that if he answered back, showed any insolence, I'd — strangle him — just go for him and be done with it. Throttle the devil! I felt my fingers at his throat, the prickle of his filthy beard, saw his hanging lips drop wider as he fought for breath, his beastly eyes bulge out, his face turn black — oh, I was in this odd, sudden fury, I admit — and yet — I couldn't move an inch.
'Perhaps — probably — I made a noise of some kind - cursed aloud most likely, but anyhow the sound of the dragging luggage suddenly stopped. A deep, rather an extraordinary, silence followed. I could hear the blood beating in my head. I sat fixed in my chair like a dummy, staring at the door. Only that door separated us. He existed there — breathing, vivid, intense — a few feet from where I sat rigid in my chair, unable to get at him, unable to move a muscle. He seemed to exert some tremendous pressure on me, paralysing my will, holding me helpless where I was.'
Moleson mopped his forehead a moment.
'I was so angry,' he went on, rather breathless now in his excitement, as though he lived over again his fury and exasperation, 'that I felt murder in me. Positively, I felt myself a murderer.'
Curiously, he stopped dead suddenly. A look of shyness came over him. He stared at me, I stared back at him. Such language, of course, in anybody else, would have been merely extravagant, hysterical. In his case it was real. I knew his sudden, ungovernable temper; I knew, too, he was ashamed of it. In a less civilized country he must always have been in trouble with his gun. He was the type that saw red and killed. And a quick flash of understanding somehow came into me, so that I guessed in that instant the explanation both of his abrupt pause and of his queer shyness. Having this dangerous thing in himself, he recognized it in others too. That sympathy existed.
'That's how I knew,' he muttered, looking down, having guessed my thought.
'What he was?' I asked, fumbling With my cigarette.
'A murderer,' he said quietly.
I waited in silence, wondering what he was going to tell me. His face was rather white, his excitement only kept under by his doubt of being believed. It was best now, I felt, to ask no questions. In his own way he would presently go on. But curiosity, I confess, devoured me. Did he open that door? Did he see the other fellow, speak to him, touch him, perhaps go for him?
His own mind, however, was an odd psychological revelation — of himself.
'And the instant I realized that,' he went on, 'the power to move came back to me. My muscles acted. The pressure the fellow exerted was lifted, because we understood one another. There was that ghastly sympathy between us. I got out of my chair and crossed the floor. I reached the door. Then I stopped a moment and listened. He, too, I knew, was listening a few inches away from my face, nothing but half an inch of thin boards between us, listening to my movements, bending to the keyhole probably, crouching, his luggage neglected for a moment while he waited to see what I was going to do. A second later I caught the handle, turned it, and flung the door wide open with a rush.
'There he was before me. Quite close. He was bending down, exactly as I had imagined, crouching, his head lowered; and at his feet, less than a yard beyond me, I saw on the floor the dark blotch that was his luggage.
'What happened then happened so quickly that it seemed less than a second. From the stooping position he did not rise, nor make any attempt to rise. One hand, still stretched out upon the bag, began to work. He pulled at it. He had been pulling at it when I opened the door, and he went on pulling at it — dragging it, dragging it away from me, away from the door, and across the landing floor. I, for my part, had one hand raised to strike, to clutch, to kill if necessary, but my hand did not fall, I did nothing violent, because I made in that very instant a horrible discovery. I suddenly realized that he did not see me. He had not noticed me. He was not aware of my being there close beside him. He did not react to my presence in any way, because he was simply not conscious of it. He continued doing what he had been doing just before — dragging his luggage across the landing floor. I saw the dark mass of it go hitching along in jerks as he pulled. It was very heavy.
'And this — this not being aware of me, I mean — came as a tremendous shock. The surprise of it, perhaps. It was the last thing in the world I'd expected. I had rather looked for something sudden, violent. I was prepared for it. This way he just ignored me turned me cold. It struck me as unnatural. I stood and stared, for I didn't know what else to do, and my body was trembling, and I felt queerly uncertain of my legs. I watched him go on dragging at that heavy thing, which I now saw was not luggage after all, not ordinary luggage, at least. It was neither bag nor portmanteau, nor anything like that. It was a sack of awkward shape and outline, It was unpleasant, I thought, the way it bulged. But more than that, more than unusual, it gave me a turn — I felt it somewhere awful. And realizing this, I made an unconscious movement evidently, for I felt my breath catch, and { must have staggered a little. I caught at the edge of the door to steady myself, and the door, naturally, yielded with my weight; I lurched with it, sideways at first, then a little outwards as the door came with me, and then — forwards. Before I could recover balance, I was against him. I was right into him.
'But I didn't fall. I didn't, thank God, collide with the monstrous creature and his awful sack, but I was so close against him that the shock of finding nothing solid — there was no substance there at all — stopped my heart for a second. It seemed to rush up into my throat. Then my breath came back, and I let out a yell into the night that must have been heard in the street. At which moment, still dragging at his bundle, he made a sudden, rather violent, movement. He turned in a new way. I saw his face clearly.
'By "clearly" I mean close — dreadfully close. It was turned up, but I saw it obliquely rather, a kind of sideways glimpse, and even then he wasn't looking at me. The light from the open door behind fell on it, and I saw the eyes, blazing eyes, the hanging lips, the white skin smudged with unshaven hair of the growing black beard, and — to my utter amazement — tears upon the cheeks. It was a maniac's face, if ever I saw one. The other thing that I saw clearly was that the thin red scarf about the neck was not a scarf at all. It was a thin red line of contused blood in the flesh of the neck itself, a line that only a rope, drawn very tightly, could have made.'
Moleson stopped then and sank back in his chair, looking away from me, and glad, I think, that he had got so far without interruption. His words and manner, his facial expression above all, conveyed his horror far better than his jerked-out sentences, I smoked a moment in silence, handing him a cigarette too, which he refused. But he said nothing for some little time, while I also kept back a dozen questions that rushed up in me.
'What happened then?' I ventured at length. 'What did you do?'
'Nothing,' he replied briefly, looking up at me again, his manner now quiet and collected. 'I did nothing. It seemed, somehow, there was nothing I wanted to do. A feeling I must shout, strike out, do something violent passed. What was done next, he did. I merely looked on and watched. There was no emotion in me of any sort. I was just numb. My whole consciousness, I think, was in my eyes.'I stared … as he went on dragging that heavy mass across the landing, always a little farther from me, hitching and shoving it along with great effort — towards the door of his room. Then he opened the door, but the light from my room did not reach to it, and as it was not lit inside, I saw nothing but a black space. I watched. I saw everything he did, every movement he made. He stepped to one side, across the bundle, so that he was then pushing instead of dragging. His whole body was bent double with the effort to get the thing through the door and inside the room. Apparently it was difficult to do. He accomplished it after several minutes. He closed the door, putting his weight against it heavily from outside, and then — after that — well — he wasn't there any more.'
'He'd gone into the room?'
Moleson shrugged his shoulders. 'Can't say,' he answered rather curtly. 'I tell you he simply wasn't there. I couldn't see him any more. I'd lost sight of him.' He added sheepishly: 'Something happened to my eyes, I suppose. I didn't see him go — but he was gone.'
Fully five minutes passed, Moleson then told me slowly, before he could think, much less move. He was struck dumb with terror and amazement. He felt stupid, empty of life, unable to act at all.
'It may have been five minutes,' he said, 'but it may just as well have been twenty — for all I know. The only thing I remember clearly is that my awful yell — that wild shriek I let out into the night some time before — still seemed to me echoing through the house and down the stairs. I had a feeling it must have been heard in the street and the police would be in. But nothing happened. The fellow's disappearance bewildered me to a point I can't describe properly. I knew I hadn't been dreaming, but I knew damned little else, it seems to me.
'I moved at last, after a bit. I moved backwards. I threw my own door as wide as it would go, so as to get all the light there was, and the light streamed across the landing and fell on the door — his door. I knew I was going to open that door. I had to.'
His pluck hardly surprised me, for I already knew it. I admired it. Nothing in this world or the next could have induced me to go near that door, much less open it. Moleson, however, did more: he went over and knocked loudly against its boards.
'The sound echoed,' he told me, 'but not inside. It echoed down the stairs, I mean. The boards sounded dull. That dullness explained itself,' he added, with a quick glance up at me as though, of course, I understood what he meant. But I did not understand, and my eyebrows went up in query and response. 'lt wasn't an ordinary door,' he said.
'You — opened it?' I had no inkling what he meant.
'I guessed it wasn't a proper door,' he replied, changing his adjective, but leaving me more ignorant than before. 'I'd felt that some time before.'
'Sham? … '
'Not an ordinary door into an ordinary room,' he explained, with a hint of impatience at my stupidity. 'When I knocked,' he went on, 'and got no answer, I knew I was right. The dead sound proved it.'
'Oh! … '
'Yes,' he went on quietly, 'the dead muffled sound it made. I waited a moment. Then I opened it. It was the door of a cupboard — a rather shallow cupboard.' He paused, then said something that made my blood curdle: 'That's why the creature had to shove it in so hard — stuff it in — to make it stay —'
'Upright? … ' I gasped, catching the ghastly meaning at last.
'Upright,' was all he replied.
The dusk was now fallen into our room between us, and I saw the glow of my cigarette-end in the mirror, behind his chair. It had been a dreadful story. I longed for light and a glass of whisky. Moleson had so convinced me of the truth, the reality, of his confession, yet I got the feeling that he hoped I would tear it to pieces and demolish it utterly, proving to his satisfaction how absurd it all was, and using nice words like hallucination, overwrought nerves, and the like.
Instead, I remained rather quiet and non-committal, and certainly dumb; I could not honestly comfort him in the way he wished.
'I told you,' he resumed, his voice much lower now, 'that I imagined that shriek of mine still echoing in the house and down the stairs? Well, a few moments later, while I still stood glaring at that ghastly cupboard, all black and empty … I heard a sound on the stairs. It was below me, coming nearer, I couldn't move — not an inch, one way or the other. I was just stuck to the floor. But I felt sure of one thing — it wasn't — but he couldn't say the word he meant, the word in his mind — 'it wasn't' — He stuck again.
'Who was it?' I asked quickly, eager to help him, but to help myself at the same time.
'I saw the light first,' he said, 'the light of a candle, evidently, flickering on the wall, then on the ceiling. Next came the shadow, enormously magnified and grotesque. Then came a large white face of melancholy and terror mixed, looming at me over the banisters. There was a thin voice:
'" … interfered with … " I heard from what seemed an immense distance. … "He showed hisself, then, did he? … May God forgive me …" and something about a "broken promise" and a "room I didn't oughter 'ave let to anyone … " And then, as, to my shame, I felt myself being helped up from the floor — for I had no idea I had let my legs give way like that — something — oh, horrible and dreadful — about " … they 'anged him for it; oh, they 'anged him at the Scrubs … it was 'is own father, you see … and now over twenty years ago … "'
There were gulping sounds, he remembers, and these odd, broken words.
Moleson, curiously enough, had never gone to the trouble to verify anything, and it was my vile curiosity that had to find its own satisfaction. The British Museum, where he had worked so hard, gave me certain facts in the newspapers of long before the war. The 'Warley Parricide', I discovered, and the unpleasant details about how the body was found stuffed into a cupboard, and how the public signed a petition and the lawyers urged homicidal mania, but without the intended result. The Home Secretary, one paper dared to mention, had married again and had stepsons of his own …