THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Page 21

  ‘I clutched the lintel of the window to steady myself as it wailed echoing round the house—then, as a shuffling noise aroused me, turned, to face something almost as ghastly as the Cry. From the window Kinnersley was crawling, beastwise, on his hands and knees, towards the veranda steps! As he crawled he made dreadful whimpering noises in his throat, and his eyes—well, I can’t describe them. But they were phosphorescent as a wolf’s in the dark, and the look in them was not that of a man. The manhood had gone from him, and I shrank away from him as he dragged himself past me, with a shudder that shook me to the very soul. As he passed I caught a whiff of a curious odour that I remembered now had struck me when I met him first, but now it was intensified, unmistakable. The rank, harsh smell of a pariah dog.

  ‘Knowing what I do now of the man’s life, I realise this probably more than anything else must have been the very expression of his innermost self—brute beast as he must have been, yet I could not but feel pity for him as I watched—watched and shivered, yet knew some power outside myself forbade me to move a muscle to save him. As the Cry wailed, rising and falling in horrible piercing cadences about the house, painfully, one by one, like a lame crawling animal, he shuffled down the steps to the ground, and with, it seemed, some vague shamed remembrance of the man he had once been, made a feeble effort at rising and facing the silent group—but vainly!

  ‘The Cry had stilled now, yet the deathly silence that followed it seemed to my straining ears almost more terrifying, as, craning from my hiding-place, I watched the central figure, the witch-doctor, slowly stretching out a skinny arm, swing something from it in the crouching man’s face—a long string of beads, it seemed, with a tiny shining thing weighting one end, a shiny something that glittered in the moonlight as it swung! It hit Kinnersley full in the face—and lo, with a broken, dreadful cry, he cowered upon the ground, scrabbling in the dirt with imploring hands, gibbering horrible incoherencies that even while I listened, ran into more horrible guttural sounds that were not words at all—he had gone already too far back for human speech! As he crouched, abject, quivering before the inexorable dark figures, I moved suddenly forward, driven by some vague impulse to do something.

  ‘Whatever the man had done, it stuck in my gorge to see a white man cringing before these jungle savages; but as I moved into sight at the head of the moonlit steps, in my horror and pity for their broken victim for a moment I took my eyes from the group, and when I looked again they were gone, vanished into the dark fastness of the bush like the wild things that they were—only on the ground still grovelled and whimpered That which had been a man!

  ‘Shuddering with repulsion, yet driven by sheer pity, I leapt down to the ground and hurried towards him . . . when from the bush near by there rose again that horrible Cry, and with it, like a flash, Kinnersley rose too, and faced me, crouched upon his haunches like a dog about to spring, his eyes gleaming like red lamps, savage, horrible! I don’t know why the danger of approaching him somehow never struck me, but I could not quite grasp even yet that the soul of the man was now finally withdrawn from him, and that which faced me was something for which, thank God, we have no name.

  ‘I ran towards him, calling his name hoarsely, urgently.

  ‘“Kinnersley, Kinnersley!”

  ‘He came—but not as comes a man to a friend. He came at me with one spring, snorting, red eyes ablaze, and before I knew it I was fighting for my life on the ground, with Kinnersley’s hot breath in my face, his jaws champing and slavering, blood-mad and strong as a lion!

  ‘As I fought I dimly realised that infernal Cry was still howling about us, louder, more piercing than ever, with a ghastly ringing triumph in it . . . with a gasping groan I collapsed as Kinnersley’s teeth met in my upraised hand—met, and bit down to the bone. . . . But with the shock of agonising pain came a sharp report, and I knew no more.

  * * * * *

  ‘There isn’t much more to tell. It was Mrs Kinnersley who, awakened by the Cry, had stolen after us, a hastily seized revolver in her hand. She had seen the end of the scene I had witnessed, and tells me she shrieked to me not to go down to meet Kinnersley—her quick woman’s mind had leapt to the horrible truth before my blundering intuition had grasped it. She had shot to save me—and shot to kill, knowing instantly that for his own sake now it was better to kill quickly and kindly the raging wild thing that had once been Kinnersley, a man like other men.

  ‘She cauterised my wound at once, and so, I am convinced, saved my life a second time. . . .

  ‘We found the strange thing that had been flung in Kinnersley’s face twined about his wrist afterwards, and it gave a hint of what had set the men of Pemba so terribly against him. It was a native woman’s bead necklace—but hung on one end was Kinnersley’s signet-ring, tied there with a piece of office twine. . . . Mrs Kinnersley told me afterwards that she had suspected for long that he had had a native mistress before she came out. He used to let little things fall, talk in his sleep, and she found one or two native ornaments, a woman’s embroidered sari and so on, hidden in various corners of the little house. Evidently, putting two and two together, Kinnersley had sent his native mistress packing when he got tired of her, and she had gone back to her own people vowing vengeance—for she loved Kinnersley, after the manner of women, despite his drunken brutalities.

  ‘Unfortunately for Kinnersley, he did not see fit to accompany her dismissal with a handsome present, and her father, being the head-man of his tribe, chose to take this slighting as an insult . . . and set in motion their pet charm, spell—whatever you like to call it. Anyway, there it is—and you’ll find, anywhere you go, if you mention Pemba to any fellow who’s been there he’ll dodge the subject of the Dogs. . . . They are a sore point with a good many people. You see, Hugh Kinnersley’s not the only man who got—caught—by the Dogs of Pemba. Ugh, it’s a horrible thought! Let’s forget it—hand out another peg, Colefax.’

  ‘But Mrs Kinnersley—poor little soul?’ Colefax, at the sentimental age, was always interested in women. ‘What became of her?’

  Old Garnett’s face crinkled into half-amused, half-tender lines.

  ‘Mrs Kinnersley? Well, well—come to dinner one night before you sail, Colefax, and I’ll introduce you to her—the biggest compliment I can pay you—since Mrs Kinnersley has been Mrs Garnett, bless her, since we left Pemba to find a parson together.’

  October

  The Dreamer’s Tale

  The Strange Case of Miss Cox

  Miss Catherine Cox sat on a bench in the sunshine in Kensington Gardens, and stared before her. The afternoon was bright and sunny, the first after a long spell of rainy weather, and Miss Cox basked thankfully in the unaccustomed luxury of warmth; albeit her incurable instincts of gentility warned her that the welcome sunshine that was making it possible to sit thus in comfort was at the selfsame time showing up with cruel clarity the patches and darns on her black serge skirt, the piteous thinness of her jacket, and the fact that her carefully washed grey gloves were not even cheap kid, but cotton, blatant and unmistakable. Miss Cox eyed them wistfully.

  Things would not, she felt, be so bad if she could only afford a new hat and a pair of real suède gloves—nice gloves were the hallmark of a lady, or so her dear mother always used to say! But even then, her clothes were lamentably shabby. True, Cousin Harriet had intimated that she might shortly be sending a bundle of cast-off garments to her poor relation, but alas, the prospect did nothing to elevate Miss Cox’s spirits; depressed them rather, since Cousin Harriet was a large and bouncing widow whose taste in clothes was flamboyant rather than ladylike, and sensitive little Miss Cox winced as she wondered what might emerge from the bundle this time.

  Last time it had been that dreadful magenta-satin coat, a green georgette négligé, and a hat of gold tissue with paste flowers. Garments that had provided Miss Cox with a welcome opportunity of showing the charwoman who ‘came in to ’elp as a favour’ at Ramsay House Private Hotel, Lancaster Gate, that a true gen
tlewoman knows how to recognise good service, no matter how straitened her circumstances may be.

  Miss Cox would have shuddered at the thought of describing herself as ‘poor’. In common with most of her pathetic sisterhood, when the unrefined subject of money cropped up in conversation, she alluded gracefully to her ‘means not being what they might’, or to ‘having, alas, to manage on a very small income, owing to family misfortunes’. To describe oneself, tout court, as ‘poor’ would have made Miss Cox shudder to the very backbone of her half-starved little body. But disguise it never so gracefully, Miss Cox was poor—poor with that most tragic poverty of all, the helpless, defenceless poverty of the shabby-genteel—the piteous poverty of the gentlewoman never brought up to soil her white hands with honest labour.

  Not that Miss Cox would not have worked most willingly, had she only known how; but a capacity for arranging flowers, doing a little trivial painting and embroidery, playing the piano, again trivially, and with the ‘piece’ carefully propped up before her, does not warrant one’s applying for any situation that Miss Cox had ever heard of; even if she had had the temerity to walk into a Labour Exchange, which she certainly had not. Therefore, like others of her calibre, tragic survivals of the cruel Victorian age that educated women for one profession only—that of marriage—she painfully filled her empty existence with foolish little tasks: the cleaning and tidying of her gloomy, low-roofed bed-sitting-room; the mending of garments almost beyond the magic of her industrious needle and thread; the reading and re-reading of her tiny hoard of old-fashioned books. These things, with church twice o’ Sundays, a walk taken ‘for the benefit of her health’ once a day, and occasionally—oh, so occasionally!—the festivity of tea with kindly, vulgar Cousin Harriet at Lyons’ Corner House, or, more rarely, with one of her few women friends, poor and lonely and courageous as herself, made up her life—a life of loneliness so grim and terrifying that the mind shudders even to think of it. A life common enough, God knows, since their numbers are legion, these poor ladies—yet harder on Miss Cox than on most, for Miss Cox was a woman made for love.

  Once—it seemed long ago, when one looked at the faded, wistful little face under the prim black, velvet hat, pinched and dusty as its owner—but once, Miss Cox had been as young as the best, and prettier than most. Fair and pink-and-white and laughing, a dimpled girl-thing made for kissing—at least so one young man had thought, so sincerely that when he was killed in an ambush laid for his landing-party in the Andamans, they found a photograph signed ‘Kitty’ tucked inside his waistcoat pocket. . . .

  It had been with many a secret qualm that eighteen-year-old Kitty Cox had stolen that same photograph from the family album in response to young Lieutenant Wilson’s pleadings, as it was with many a secret tear that she heard of his death; but in those days for a declaration of love between man and maid to be made before Papa’s sanction had been obtained or even requested, was an unthinkable thing, a piece of immodesty on one side and of effrontery on the other that would have raised a fine storm in the Cox household. Besides, ‘A penniless officer, my dear—ridiculous! Impossible!’ So little kitty Cox held her tongue and said nothing, and ultimately, since Time heals all sorrows, forgot—or nearly . . . but, it seemed, not quite.

  For it was odd that this afternoon, for the first time for many years, Miss Cox stared before her and thought of her long-dead lover, of his youth and gaiety and good looks; of her own dreams and hopes, long forgotten. . . . She awoke from her reverie with a jerk as a whining voice spoke at her side. A shabby, shambling old man holding a bunch of balloons was standing before her, his black shadow blotting out the yellow glory of the sunshine. An incredibly dirty old man, in a long coat green with age and a battered brown trilby hat—yet the tangle of balloons he held shone like floating jewels against the blue. Ruddy orange, green clear as a piece of priceless jade, crocus-purple, crimson, blood-scarlet, lemon-yellow and silvery mauve . . . like delicate living things they jostled and bobbed against each other in the stirring of the soft spring wind, straining at the strings, all impatient to be gone, a fleet of fairy airships unwillingly held to anchor! Miss Cox caught her breath on a sudden little gasp of wondering delight, and the old man smiled at her, his eyes two blue sparks in his brown and wrinkled face.

  ‘Buy a balloon, lidy? On’y sixpence each!’

  His voice was the whining voice of the professional beggar. Miss Cox hesitated, on the verge of eager assent, but common sense spoke in time, and her thin little hands closed together tightly upon her shabby black leather purse. Sixpence? Tomorrow her meagre weekly allowance was due, but for tonight she only had these six pennies, having rashly spent two pence for the green iron chair she sat upon. Sixpence, however, would just buy a dinner of sorts—it was not the first time Miss Cox had had to dine off sixpence.

  There was a little shop she knew. . . . Threepence bought a plate of good thick soup with a dumpling in it; two pence more, bread and an infinitesimal portion of cheese; and a penny, a cup of coffee—bad coffee, but plenty of it; and Miss Cox would rather not dine at all than forgo her coffee. She drank coffee after dinner from the same instinct that leads a man to continue to dress for dinner out in the Bush—from a vague feeling that it helped her self-respect as a gentlewoman. She shook her head and glanced resolutely away from the vendor of balloons and his glorious freight of temptation, now pulling hard at their moorings, yearning to be up and away into the waiting blue.

  ‘No. I don’t want to buy—go away.’

  Her tone was firm, but inwardly she was faltering, desperate with a sudden insane desire for a balloon—the topmost, she rather thought, the huge gleaming, silvery-green beauty that swam against the sky like a fantastic fish afloat in a fairy sea . . . but she drove back the impulse fiercely, horrified at herself. She was crazy! Waste precious pennies on a child’s toy? The sudden heat must have affected her head! Terrible; she must be very careful . . . she shook her head again energetically, but the man still lingered, playing idly with his balloons whilst he watched her.

  ‘No? They’re new—beauties. Big ’uns—watch ’em in the sun, eh? Fairy boats, I call ’em. . . . Watch!’

  He dandled them temptingly up and down in the sunlight. Miss Cox turned away, biting her lip. How she wanted one! Somehow it seemed that more than anything in the world she wanted a coloured balloon, to see it float up, up and away into the watching sky till it melted and became one with it, fading away like a delicately coloured dream. . . . She shook her head again, and shut her eyes as she heard the man’s reply—an odd reply, rather, or so she thought afterwards.

  ‘No? You’d better! Better while you’ve the chance; ’tisn’t every day you get it. . . .’

  His feet crunched on the gravel path as he sauntered away. Miss Cox shut her eyes against the temptation to call him back, then opened them quickly at a sound, a quick patter of running feet coming down the path. As Miss Cox opened her eyes she saw a child come flying past, trip on a loose stone and fall flat, with a sudden wail of pain and fear. Miss Cox sprang from her seat and caught up the small creature. It was evidently one of those parties of slum-bred children that occasionally, in the care of a few older brothers or sisters, leave their native courts and alleys for an afternoon among the blessed green of one of London’s myriad great gardens miscalled ‘the Parks’. Not a pretty child—a sharp-featured London gamin, with a freckled nose and wild elflocks of bright red hair above a dirty green-plaid flannel frock, with dusty brown cotton socks and cracked shoes. . . . Yet it was a child, and hurt and sobbing; and love-hungry little Miss Cox hushed and comforted and petted till the weeping stopped and the mite stared up at her, puzzled, suspicious, but consoled.

  ‘There, there!’ purred Miss Cox, wiping the scraped little red knee with her carefully washed cambric handkerchief. ‘Now it’s all right, darling . . . but tell me, how did you come to run so fast?’

  The imp jerked a grubby thumb after the balloon-seller, now strolling some distance away down the Broad Walk, his
wares bobbing and gleaming over his shoulder.

  ‘Wan’ed a ball!’ he mumbled. ‘Never see a boo’ful ball like that—an’ I falled and hurt meself!’

  The piteous underlip began to roll outwards again, but Miss Cox sprang to her feet with a sudden resolve. ‘Never see a ball like that!’ Ah, but that was too piteous. A beauty-starved shadow who for one day had escaped from the City’s murk and squalor—what did it matter if she went without dinner for once? The doctors all advised fasting at times. . . . And besides, she had a few Osborne biscuits still in a tin at home. . . . At least, she hoped so! In any case . . . The vendor of balloons turned with a jerk as a breathless voice called to him.

  ‘Hi! . . . Wait a moment, please! I have changed my mind! Will you give me one of your best balloons?’

  * * * * *

  The grubby little figure raced away in the sunshine clinging fast to the string of his chosen glory, its ruddy globe soaring and dancing just above his equally ruddy head. Watching, little Miss Cox smiled happily to herself, relieved, content, then turned and caught her breath in surprise, to find the balloon-seller still at her side—the balloon-seller whom she had imagined shambling away five minutes ago in search of another customer! Behind his battered hat and streaming wild hair the magical fleet still strained at anchor, but he was holding out a long brown hand on which lay a huge and marvellous globe of sunny yellow . . . in the sun his eyes looked blue as stars, amazingly, marvellously blue, as they stared straight into hers.

  ‘Take your balloon! You’ve bought it!’ What did he mean, and why did she feel, suddenly and oddly, that there was something altogether curious and unusual about him? She drew back a little, but his voice was soothing, charming, the professional beggar’s whine strangely vanished—and oh, how the yellow balloon gleamed, dancing and quivering, in the sunshine!