NIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE Read online

  Mrs Bond felt, bit by bit, her attention wander from her work; irritated, she shrugged the feeling off at first, but it returned, slyly persistent, jogging her shoulder, whispering in her ear—the utter absence of the usual buzz and murmur of the circling insects worried her, at first subconsciously, then consciously. She found herself concentrating on this problem, to the exclusion of anything else; her writing became spasmodic, erratic, and at last ceased altogether. Pushing back her chair with an irritated sigh, she rose from the table.

  ‘Peter—I really think I must have a touch of the sun! Can’t concentrate in the least tonight somehow—it must be the heat.’

  The Revd. Peter looked up solicitously.

  ‘Try an aspirin, my dear,’ he suggested mildly. His wife shook her head impatiently.

  ‘No—that’s no good. I feel oppressed, nervy, somehow—perfectly idiotic, I know, but there it is. It’s this—awful stillness, not even a fly in the room. Don’t you feel it, too, Peter—or has this life got on my nerves till I’m imagining things?’

  ‘Well—now you come to mention it, I’ve been feeling a little odd for some time. And now you point it out, it is curious, the absence of the—er—usual insect life around the lamp. It must be a storm brewing—or, as you say, we are both a little overdone.’

  The words were valiant, but there was trepidation in the little man’s mild blue eyes—trepidation vague, formless but present. Mrs Bond struck her hand on the wall in a spasm of irritation, born of the quick inrush of fear that had now seized her, like a stealthy enemy rendered suddenly bolder, at the discovery that the same creeping dread had been working its spell upon her husband’s peace of mind as well.

  ‘Peter!’ She spoke firmly. ‘This is either sheer foolishness on our part, of which we ought to be thoroughly ashamed—or else someone is trying to play tricks upon us . . . for doing our duty as Christians to our flock, despite their ignorant prejudices.’

  It was odd how, instinctively, it seemed, her mind reverted to the matter of Takkari and Mefren—the former’s menacing, sullen eyes.

  The little clergyman looked frankly frightened.

  ‘You mean you think Takkari! . . .’ His sentence was unfinished.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean anything really—what’s-its-name—uncanny!’ Mrs Bond snapped. ‘I should hope I’m too good a Christian for that—but I wouldn’t be surprised if Takkari and some of her precious friends tried to work some of their jugglers’ tricks on us, to frighten us . . . pure nastiness, of course! Nothing else is possible. . . .’

  Her tone was a shade too decided; against her will as she talked, partly at random, she could not but realise that the weight and monotony of the silence seemed rising like a sea about them—and . . . was it so, or was it a trick of her agitated imagination? The fresh lamp now seemed to cast a ring of smaller size, of decreased brilliance; shadows, surely, surely, loomed more deeply in the corners behind the bamboo chairs! There was a curious break in Peter Bond’s voice as he answered—a little quake of fear.

  ‘Are you sure, Matilda? I thought so . . . but tonight, I kept thinking of the witch who tempted Samuel—the Witch of Endor . . . of Our Lord’s strange words of wickedness in high places. . . . And I wondered . . .’

  With a decisive movement, Mrs Bond strode over to the window and slammed it to, pulling the curtains together to shut out the night—and reeled away with a strangled shriek of terror! Rushing to her assistance, her frightened husband peered out into the darkness, but all was still, save the faint rustling among the tamarisks as the little wind crept through them.

  There was no light in the distant hut that housed Takkari and her sullen anger. At the table Mrs Bond shivered and gasped, gradually regaining her self-control.

  ‘What, my dear . . . what happened?’ The dead silence, the crowding shadows, seemed to listen for her reply. With a huge effort the woman sat up and gulped down her terrors, replying with a steadiness that spoke well for her pluck.

  ‘Peter—something—something awful seized my wrist as I pulled those curtains! Now don’t you tell me I’m mad—I was never saner! I grant I was feeling a little nervy—things seem odd tonight somehow—but just at that moment I was perfectly balanced. What—what you said about the . . . well, you know what you said—suddenly made me realise we were allowing ourselves to become—well, foolishly, unchristianly frightened at nothing at all—it must be nothing at all!—and I went to pull the curtains, to shut out the night and the wind and make ourselves cosy and sensible. I was going to suggest we played Patience . . . and all of a sudden a hand took me by the wrist, strongly, and tried to prevent the curtains being pulled! I told you Takkari was up to something . . . though how . . .’

  Her eyes, frightened, angry, bewildered, met her husband’s—and read there a greater terror than hers.

  ‘Wait!’ His voice was a mere whisper. ‘I can tell you now . . . but I did not dare to tell you, Matilda, lest it be a mere hallucination on my part. I know’—the humiliated tears were very near—‘alas, I am a weak man, Matilda! . . . I thought perhaps the stillness of the night and—and my own foolish fears, for I must freely admit that I have been far from easy the whole of the evening—were working upon me till I saw, or thought I saw . . .’

  ‘What?’ Mrs Bond’s face was strained; beads of perspiration speckled the little chaplain’s lean jaw as he answered, in a voice that shook uncontrollably in the now definitely gathering gloom.

  ‘Something—something swathed and indefinite, but Something that wasn’t a shadow—I swear—stand beside you and bend over to watch you write!’

  Mrs Bond shrank back with an involuntary cry of terror. The bald statement was horrible, and the woman shuddered as she listened.

  The Revd. Peter’s knees were shaking, his voice gathering speed, a hoarse whisper as he rushed on, his frightened eyes seeking from side to side . . . and still the lamp sank lower and the silence gathered, fold on fold, about the trembling pair.

  ‘I stared and stared . . . and looked away and forced myself to write. I prayed and sweated and dared not look again, dared not speak for fear it was hallucination and you might think my brain going with the heat and work—till you spoke. Then I dared look—and it was gone! Thank God . . . I spoke, I believe, rationally enough . . . and then you rose to draw the curtain, and Matilda, as I am a priest of God and hope for salvation, suddenly It rose at your side again, and Its face pressed close to yours . . . and the horror of it was Its face was no human face at all, but a gilded mask!’

  The hurrying voice rose high and culminated in a half shriek—for on the last word the lamp, now a dying flicker on the table, went out, and with one stride darkness entered the room.

  Utterly unnerved, Peter Bond collapsed whimpering on the table, but although shaking in every limb, his wife rose dauntlessly, and biting her lips to still their quivering, faced the darkness that had entered into possession of the room. Silence, dead, heavy, menacing, ruled supreme, broken only by the sobs of the terrified chaplain, the heavy breathing of his wife. Like a cornered creature at bay, she backed sturdily against the table, panting hard, turning her head from side to side, her hands clammy with moisture, clenching and unclenching. There was, indeed, something pathetically valiant about this woman driven thus to fight so hopelessly one-sided a battle, for, in the dire, stealthy strength of the Force that she now dimly realised was arrayed against her, all her shivering, gallant bravery went for no more than a reed’s feeble stand against the gale. Upright in the swirling shadows that clustered about her, she stood, clutching hard at her sanity, her self-control, while her little narrow soul shrank within her and grew shrivelled and puny with terror, like a last year’s walnut in its shell. She knew now—she knew the Thing behind all this—in some way some streak of lightning clarity had told her—somewhere behind this awful manifestation moved Something that belonged to Egypt, that had demanded Its right of Its land, and had through her been denied it . . . yet, though sweating with terror, shaking in every limb,
Mrs Bond, true to her stern type, held grimly to her convictions, and her shaking lips muttered prayer on prayer, while her soul crawled in terror, but not regret. . . . But the end was at hand, and mercifully. With a final huge effort to throw off the spell, with some vague idea that even to try and light the lamp, anything humdrum, ordinary, might break the influence that held her so bound, Mrs Bond stretched out a fumbling hand along the table for the matches . . . and touched another hand! Dry and cold and leathery, with sharply pointed nails, it lay alongside hers, and as she touched it, withdrew sharply, but it was too late. Even as Mrs Bond, her last quivering defences down, opened her mouth to shriek, It grew beside her swiftly in the darkness, indefinite, macabre, and of a terror unspeakable; a Thing swathed and clumsy and vague, shapeless, yet dreadfully, appallingly powerful, a blind Horror seeking vengeance. . . .

  In a frenzy of fear the woman flung herself backwards across the table where crouched poor little Peter Bond, gibbering, hysterical, in his panic . . . but the Shape rose above her against the moving dark, the crowding shadows, and she saw It clearly, bulbous eyes in a horrible still face of gleaming gold, sinister and pitiless as It bent over her and . . . as her senses mercifully left her, laid Its ghastly cheek to hers!

  * * * * *

  Frith knocked out his pipe. As the echoes of his voice died away into the tense silence a little ripple stirred the intent group of listeners, held in the grip of sheer horror. Dennison, the soldier, was the first to find his voice:

  ‘Good Lord—what a beastly yarn! But go on, Frith—that can’t be the end? You’ve got us all on tenterhooks!’

  Frith smiled drily.

  ‘That’s just where the clever storyteller should leave his audience! I’d rather leave things where they are—on the pitch of the climax, but, of course, there is an aftermath. Fact is, I happened to be strolling near the chapel that night and heard Mrs Bond scream—rushed in and found her lying in a faint, with poor little Bond perfectly hysterical at her side, burbling wildly, and quite unstrung—for the moment a complete lunatic. Oh, yes, the lamp flared up again just as I got inside the room—no, I saw nothing; but I tell you what I did notice—the awful smell in the room!’

  ‘What sort of a smell?’ asked Hellier sharply.

  ‘Bitumen,’ said Frith simply. ‘Bitumen and natron and dried spices and the intolerably ancient smell of the grave—the smell of the burial rites of old Egypt—stern, undying. The place stank like a newly-opened tomb!’

  ‘But what, actually, was it? The Thing with the gold face, I mean?’ My curiosity was greater than my shyness as I put the question.

  Frith raised his eyebrows as he poured himself out another liqueur brandy.

  ‘Ah—well, that no one can say for certain. Egypt keeps her secrets now as well as ever she did, but I think I can give a good guess, at least. If I knew the history of Takkari, a strange old daughter of the Nile sands, with the blood, perhaps, of Pharaohs dead ten thousand years ago in her veins . . . you see, it’s true that the system of embalmment died out long ago, yet, like other strange ceremonies, religions, beliefs, no one can swear, even now, that it is utterly dead and forgotten . . . and who knows what age-old memories, what instincts, what fears, may have haunted those two women from the mysterious Desert as they suffered and agonised over the Stillborn!’

  We fell silent, spellbound, as he went on, his voice thrilling, his eyes distant on the blue-gold ancient country he so greatly loved. ‘You see—in the old days, unless the body of a stillborn child, immediately on its birth, was embalmed with the full ritual, the swathings, the amulets, the golden mask, all the strange symbolic trappings and ceremonies of a full grown being—the Ka, the soul that it had meant to incarnate, would rise in rage and anger at the neglect of the honours due to it, and turn against the house where it was born and all therein, become the evil demon, the Maleficence haunting the unfortunate being who had dared to do it this wrong. . . .’

  ‘Then you think this was the direct result of Mrs Bond’s insisting on Christian burial—that Takkari and her daughter, urged by who knows what instinctive dread and knowledge, meant to secretly steal away with their dead to the Desert, to bury it there with spices and cerements and ceremony to propitiate the Ka thwarted by death of its incarnation?’

  Hellier’s eyes were alight with interest—Frith nodded.

  ‘Yes. That’s what I do think, frankly. In utter ignorance, blundering and narrow, Mrs Bond forced her weak husband to pit his puny might against a great and ancient Force, and thwarted of its right, the outraged Ka rose against these presumptuous ones . . . and won . . . very dreadfully won. In the morning the grave was found empty; the women had dug up the body of their dead in the night and fled with it to the silence of the Desert, which opened and swallowed them. There, perhaps, they laid it to rest in their own way—in Egypt’s way. At least the Horror, having worked its will upon those poor well-meaning fools, passed away. I spent many nights after that in the house, and it was perfectly normal. Poor Mrs Bond—she has paid bitterly enough for her folly, poor soul. She has never been able to tell me what she felt at that supreme moment of horror, when the Thing rose over her and pressed its cheek to hers, except that it was utterly impalpable, no actual touch at all, but a ghastly coldness that scored and burnt like the searing finger of an icicle . . . then she lost consciousness, thank Heaven. But that terrible moment has left a mark on her that she will never lose. When I picked her up I saw her face was twisted, all wried sideways . . . where the Gilded Mask had touched.’

  September

  My Own Story

  The Fields of Jean-Jacques

  It was fortunate that Hellier—responsible for bringing me first of all to Saunderson’s kindly notice—had warned me that some time, there was no telling when, each member of the Round Table was supposed to contribute to the general entertainment, either story or song or poem—no matter what—so, nervous as I felt at the prospect, I was not altogether unprepared when the moment came, and Saunderson’s bass hailed ‘Laurie’ and demanded tribute in the shape of a story. I grew very red, but fumblingly produced a sheaf of papers from my shabby little dispatch-case, amidst a genial gust of applause—Hellier, being over my shoulder, read out the title. ‘“The Fields of Jean-Jacques”. What is it, kid? Experience—hearsay—or pure fiction, eh?’

  I shook my head firnily.

  ‘Does it matter? I spent last summer in France—and this is the result. I tell you the tale as it was told to me—and the man who told it me swore it was true. At all events, I passed myself by the fields of Jean-Jacques and saw the land he said was once bare and sandy and sterile, blossoming now, the trees bowed down with fruit, the vines laden. But I will read you the story and you must judge for yourselves—the story of the cursed fields of Jean-Jacques Loutrec; and of the lifting of the curse.’

  The Professor was talking, and Réné Baudin, young and eager student, listened reverentially as the great man expounded, waving one hairy hand in the air to emphasise his points as he chewed at his well-worn pipe-stem. Réné lay prone, half-buried in the deep sweet-smelling clover—his thin brown face propped on his hands. The fields were thick with waving young crops, and the gruff talk and laughter of the peasants working amongst them rang out clear in the warm stillness. The wide valley swept up each side to the majestic hills, vine-clad almost to their summits, and the little village in the hollow lay as if cradled in the lush greenness, red roofs and pointed gables emerging from the clustering orchards like rocks from a swirling tide—the Professor paused in his peroration, and flourished a great hand towards the gracious scene.

  ‘Fertility! The chief end and aim of Nature, argue how we will! The fertility of the soil-linked up, always and eternally, in the primitive mind, with the fertility of Man! And after all, fundamentally, the untutored mind may have come nearer to some eternal truth than we know. . . .’

  ‘You mean?’ questioned Réné, his eyes fixed on his master with the passionate devotion of a neophyte.

&nbs
p; ‘Zut! You know the old ceremonies of fertilizing the land—that rite so old and twisted now that one has no hope of even ferreting out its original form . . . yet the essentials remain. The solemn ceremony of laying, as it were, the spell of fertility upon the waiting earth, so that the crops might germinate, the fruit set in the bud, the root form in the earth, what time the fruit of man formed within the womb of woman! In the very ancient days, no husband knew his wife while his crops were being sown; the women kept to themselves awaiting the great day, the day on which, all crops being sown, all preparations made and man and woman purified by fasting, the High Priest and Priestess led the people to the sacred fields, strewing flowers, singing and dancing, and there in the light of the moon enacted in sacred ceremony the Marriage of All Things! That night man met woman again, mating as mate the clean-living beasts of the field—and thus, they thought, the spell of fertility was laid upon the waiting earth, and fine crops, rich and plentiful, assured them. Well . . . it degenerated, as things will, from a fine and free conception, to a mere excuse for wild orgies such as the Saturnalia in Rome. . . . Even, in these days, it survives faintly yet in the procession of the Blessing of the Crops, the village curé with his book and his candle, treading the ploughlands to sprinkle them with holy water. . . .’