THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

She listened with strained ears, as through the now open back-door the strange voice sang to her, but now, it seemed, it sang in a curiously different tone. It sang to her alone. It pleaded . . . gone was the joyous defiance that had hurled itself against her as she stood, her hand through her husband’s arm in the garden but a short half-hour ago! Now it was soft: pleading, beseeching, tender as the voice of a woman. Now it crooned, and wept and implored, begging for sympathy, for understanding. . . . Her eyes wide and frightened, but defiant still, Kitty Bellasis rose to her feet, staring before her at the open door, the portière of which still waved faintly in the draught. A little eddy of wind crept about her, lifted the curls of her hair and laid them down again; stole sighing to the flamelit fireplace, ruffled the flounces of her frock. . . . Something—something appallingly huge and powerful, laid siege to her pity—something ancient, colossal, before whose majesty she blanched and quivered in terror. Something that had laid aside, for love’s sake, all arrogance, all ruthlessness, even all power, for the moment, was pleading with her . . . a vast inchoate Force, a Power before whom her very flesh dwindled and shrank spoke to her, using the voice of the Wind and the Forest! Clutching the edge of the table she swayed, terrified, amazed, on the verge of fainting; listening, hearing, yet knowing all the time that it was with some inner ear that she listened, not with the ears of her body at all. . . . Through the veil of the shouting wind it sang to her, wordless, pleading its cause in a threnody vast and terrifying yet small and sweet as a woman’s voice. Like a giant heartbeat it came to her, through the throbbing of the wind.

  ‘Let go! He is not yours, you know it! You keep him trapped by reason of your love, your body your woman’s spell . . . but he was not yours in the beginning. He was mine, and he is still mine at heart! Let him go . . . and I will be kind. But defy me . . .’

  The unspoken threat throbbed and pulsated silently about her, but still the swaying woman held her ground, though the sweat poured down brow, and she ground her teeth together to anchor her quivering self-control. She spoke at last, hoarsely, a little above a whisper, and as she spoke, it seemed to her that something listened. . . .

  ‘I will not! He is mine, and I will never let him go. Never, never, never! I will die first. . . .’

  It seemed she had scarcely reached the last word when lo, the atmosphere of the room changed, totally and completely! It was suddenly—empty, and most horribly empty—then with a screech that rang most horribly like a howl of wild appalling laughter, the storm was upon them! The clap of banging doors accompanied it, the crash of a breaking window, and the shrieks of the frightened maids as they came running into the hall . . . dazed and shaken, Kitty Bellasis found herself in the hall too, her husband, his hair blown wildly awry, his coat wet with rain and spattered with stray leaves, at her side, panting a little but laughing like a boy.

  ‘My God, what a storm we’re in for!’ He dusted both strong hands together—she noticed they were scratched and dirty. ‘It’s going to be a corker—hark at the wind! Come here. . . .’

  He dragged her unresisting down the passage toward the back door. The back of the house faced directly upon the forest, and the sound of the wind was even stronger here, it seemed. Overhead the storm-clouds scudded helter-skelter, and the wet moon shone in blinks as the purple rags flapped hurrying across its face. Only just beyond the trail walls of the little farm rose the dark sweep of the forest, stretching away to the skyline, and endless vista of tree-tops undulating in waves and humps and hollows like a stretch of dark and restless waters. With the surface now uneasy, rising, falling, it looked uncannily like the sea itself—but like no real sea; it was a black and sinister ghost-sea, a nightmare ocean without glimmer of light or foam or ripple upon its bosom! A wide and terrible plain of heaving darkness, that yet spoke with the voice of the sea itself . . . far out it boomed and thundered, hollow, distant, menacing, but near at hand the rattle of a thousand leaves ruffled by the furious little winds that eddied, like guerrilla soldiers, bout the flanks of the main armies, made a sound like the harsh crash and rattle of the pebbles on a lonely shore, dragged at by the fingers of the maddened waves. Now more than ever it sounded as though Ocean itself, unseen but dreadfully actual, surged threatening, savage, about their very doors, and shivering, the woman turned away. She was very cold.

  ‘Come,’ she said, speaking very low—for of a sudden all Kitty Bellasis’ fierce defiance had left her and only a simple frightened woman caught in a vast web of which she knew neither beginning nor ending, and did not dare to guess, remained. Barring the door with a shiver, she led the way towards the rickety stairs that led upwards to their bedroom.

  ‘Come, darling . . . it’s late. Come—to sleep.’

  Obediently he followed her, and she did not dare to glance behind, fearing to see the glow and radiance in his face as he listened to the shouting of the boisterous wind that now rocked the little house as a ship is rocked in the arms of a storm. She did not dare to look . . . but she knew too well that it was there. . . .

  Only Mr and Mrs Jenks slept in the house, the other maids went down at nights to their homes in the village. The sound of their laughing voices as they struggled through the wind and rain down the garden path rose faintly to Kitty Bellasis’ ears as she lay awake beside her sleeping husband, and on impulse she wished she had suggested that Bess and Ella had stayed for the night in the house. She felt curiously forlorn and alone; as though she longed to draw about her the protective mantle of human companionship, to hide beneath it from some vague alien force, or at least to use it to bolster up her flagging courage . . . for, alone in the darkness, hearing the windows creak and rattle, her husband’s even breathing in the dark beside her, she realised that her courage was slowly slipping from her. She was afraid! She who had never known what fear was, was afraid at last. Afraid of that huge elemental Force that dimly she felt was arrayed against her, to filch from her the thing she held dearest in life . . . was he yet to be drawn away from her, despite her fierce passion for him, her determination to hold him?This stealthy sapping of her courage unnerved her—was this to be the way she was to be defeated? Was this to go on until she grew listless, apathetic, cowed, let him go from sheer lack of energy to keep him back? Clenching her hands under the bedclothes, she told herself fiercely not to be a fool. She had allowed an unlucky concatenation of circumstances to affect her nerves, to influence her strangely . . . her inner obsession about the Sea—a thing perhaps rather exaggerated in itself—had caused her to exaggerate everything connected with it!

  The appearance of old Rigby, with his ceaseless talk of old days and old ways, had helped things on, and the strange voice off the wind—which, of course, could not be anything but quite ordinary wind, only somehow today she could not help hearing in it something she did not seem to have heard before. Absurd, of course, but there it was. Through these simple things, all capable of the most ordinary explanation, she had allowed herself to actually imagine, for those fantastic moments in the drawing-room, to think that the Sea itself was speaking to her—speaking through and with the voice of the wind in the Forest—imploring her to release her lover, to let him return. . . . Now she saw that it was all quite absurd and childish, and she would compose herself to sleep, as Norman had done, bless him. Yet despite her brave words her skin crept and her hands grew clammy, and in her ears still rang the sound of the wind roaring in the forest far out—roaring with the voice of the Sea. . . .

  A gust caught the window—lightly latched as it was of necessity, since for artistic reasons the Bellasis had left the house as much as possible in its original state—and it flew open with a crash that made her jump and quiver like a cornered hare . . . yet it did not wake her husband. The sky was still full of flying clouds, but for the moment the moon sailed clear of them, and in the silver gleam she saw her husband lying, his hands lightly crossed on his breast, his face turned sideways towards the window so that one brown cheek pressed the pillow. His lips were slightly parted as he slept,
and in a moment’s lull in the raging storm she heard a faint sound issuing from them. She bent close and listened, and her cheek blanched . . . for he was singing! Faintly, below his breath, but clearly and regularly, as he used to sing in his midshipman’s days, an old sea-chant.

  ‘As I was a-walking down Paddington Street

  (With a heave ho, blow the man down!)

  A pretty young maiden I chanced for to meet.

  (Give me some time to blow the man down!)’

  She sank back on her pillow, quivering. . . . It was no use. She would never eradicate this love of the Sea—but with all her strength she would resist it! She would never let him go—she would twine her arms about his neck and weep and plead, did he suggest returning, as she had sometimes dreaded he might—but she did not think he would. He had long ago relinquished any effort to make her sympathise or understand his love of the Sea. In anything else she was tolerant, sympathetic, charming, but in this she was fixed; immutable as Time itself. She would never let him go. Sooner death! Sooner death. . . .

  Vaguely she stared out into the darkness of the room. The light had fled, as a veiling of black and angry clouds flung themselves across the moon’s face, and only a glimmer here and there, reflected on small shining surfaces, the mirror, the clock-face, the brass andirons in the ancient fireplace, the glass in the framed photograph of her husband on the mantelpiece lit the sombre darkness . . . yet as she stared, it seemed that the glimmerings moved! That they were not stable, as usual . . . and that there were more of them than there should be, all slipping and changing, melting into each other like ripples of light moving on the surface of a stealthily rising flood . . . she smiled faintly at herself and sighed.

  How horribly nervy she had allowed herself to get tonight, to be sure. The worrying about the sea seemed to have seeped into her very brain, so that she thought she saw it or heard it or sensed it at every turn. . . . Then suddenly she held still, stiff, paralysed, for she knew the truth. The Sea was there—in the room with her! Silently it pressed in, through every nook and cranny, pouring in through the window, rising through the floor, stealing, forcing its way under the cracks of the door . . . as she stared with bulging eyes, lying spellbound beside her sleeping husband, she watched it rise, and knew the exquisite perfection of terror! First a mere film upon the floor, dimly shining as it crawled and slithered, she saw the loose rug rise with the stealthy pressure of the water beneath it, until it lapped the legs of dressing-table, chairs and bed. . . . With distended eyes, utterly unable to move, she watched it rise and rise, stealthy, silent, inexorable, and as it rose it brought with it all the soul of the Sea!

  No mere flood of water, real or imaginary, filled the tiny chamber in the farmhouse on the Dorset downs, but the great illimitable Sea itself, seagreen, luminous, eternal! Tall weeds, purple and olive and bronze, stretched their hungry fingers towards the bed, and tossed their streaming hair, beaded with gleaming crystal bubbles. Anemones, like starry living flowers, massed themselves in the corners, crimson and orange-colour, yellow and mauve, while tiny blue crabs ran busily among them, and rainbow-coloured fish, their fins like trailing lengths of transparent gauze, swam in and out, their solemn unwinking eyes fixed like the glass eyes of automatons!

  It did not seem strange to little Mrs Bellasis, now sunk in some strange sort of trance, to see the moonlight, as the moon sailed out at last, glint on a smooth sheet of water, now level with the bedclothes; it did not seem strange to her to see huge clams open and shut their scalloped mouths where her husband’s shoe-box stood, or even to see, from a forest of giant sponges, a great black conger-eel glide by . . . and now the flood was level with the bed! It was lapping the fingers of her hand, hanging over the edge, but so gently, so softly that she never moved—so gently that at last she even smiled, happily, vaguely, the terror wiped completely from her face, so that it was the vacant, dreaming face of a little child. And the flood rose higher, and the soul of Kitty Bellasis, who had defied the Sea, floated out upon it, tranquilly, peacefully, so that she died without knowing that she died. So that it seemed that the Sea was kind in triumph, after all. . . .

  * * * * *

  The doctor from Titherton—hamlet nearest to Forest Farm—hastily fetched by a white-faced Jenks on the morning following the terrible June storm—that storm that is still talked of in Dorset with bated breath—gave a certificate of death by heart-failure, of course; there was nothing else that he could say, in public at least, about Mrs Bellassis’ strange and sudden death. For many months Norman Bellasis mourned his dominant little wife deeply and sincerely. Yet since a sailor born is a sailor always, in the end he packed his grip, sold the farm to the nearest bidder, and took his way again towards the blue waters that had always held his heart—and only those who know the power the Sea has over her lovers can realise the light that was in his eyes as he turned his back, finally and for ever, upon the land!

  Only one curiously interesting thing remains (and that unknown to the general public) about poor little Mrs Bellasis’ death. A secret that, fortunately, will remain locked for ever in the breast of dour, self-contained Dr McPhail. There are times when he will discuss it—if you are a friend—but only in private even then, and under seal of the strictest confidence. . . .

  ‘Whist, mon!’ (he will say, being a Scot). ‘Wha would ha believed me, if I had tell the truth? Which wis that the puir little body—the de’il knows how—was deid, not o’ hearrt-failure, but o’ droonin’?’

  March

  My Own Tale

  Tinpot Landing

  ‘Why “Tinpot Landing”?’ demanded Tony Kenyon.

  Fat little Hans Vechten shrugged his shoulders, and wiped his perspiring brow for the fifteenth time with a large bandanna handkerchief whose flaring scarlet almost matched his face.

  ‘Why—it’s always been called dat since I remember,’ he said reflectively. ‘Thing it’s begos someone stuck sheeds of tin or zinc round der piles of der house to geep der andts vrom glimbing up. . . . Though even a sdray andt might be welcome as gompany at Tinpot Landing!’

  Tony laughed, and flung his cigarette-stub into the river that creamed its way silkily along the little steamer’s sides.

  ‘You can’t scare me with the “loneliness” bogey’ he said with the lordliness of youth. ‘I’ll find plenty to do! There’s sure to be shooting and fishing—or something—to pass the time.’

  Hans Vechten smiled oddly as he glanced at the pleasant-faced young fellow at his side—Tony Kenyon, new, if not to the Dark Continent, at least to Western Africa; on his way to take up his appointment as agent of the ‘West African Trading Company’ at the loneliest outpost on the Mawa River, and trying hard to hide his inner pride and vainglory at his first really responsible post.

  The little Dutchman liked his young passenger, and felt vaguely somewhat sorry for him. Africa is a hard task-mistress for a child, and this child had only known her when she smiled upon him—there is a vast difference between farming in ‘British East’ within hail of towns and civilisation, and venturing into the lowering dark wastes of the ‘West’!

  Vechten threw out a fat eloquent hand towards the shore, where miles of dark green forest, sombre, impenetrable, heaved and billowed itself into the distance to meet the shimmering steely blue of the horizon; near at hand regiments of lean twisted mangroves, black, olive, purple, stood knee deep in the slimy water to stare, it seemed, at the passing steamer, and on the left side of the river lay a wide expanse of mud-flats, where birds flittered among the reeds, and huge river horses, like fat blue slugs, lay wallowing in the warm shallows. But for the most part sheer forest closed the river in; trees, trees, sinister, huge, ogrelike, hung with twisted creepers, beneath which the atmosphere lay warm and steamy as a huge greenhouse, and the silence could almost be cut with a knife.

  ‘What sord of serious hunting can you do in gountry like dis?’ demanded the Dutchman. ‘Tinpot Landing is chust a clearing on de edge of der river! Noding but swamp and forest besi
de—if I’d been your fader, mein younck friend, I’d have told you to stop near Kenya, where you had all sords of pritty ladies to ride with nows and thens, and peoples to talk to, and an easy life. . . .’

  Tony Kenyon frowned.

  ‘Sanders, the chap who had Tinpot Landing before me, stuck it for four years,’ he remarked, a little nettled, ‘And I only signed on for two!’

  ‘Sanders,’ said Vechten, ‘was older by a long way dan you, also he wass safing money to ged married. Dat’s why he stuck it so long. Id’s good money—hass to be, or der Company wouldn’t ged anyone to apply for der job at all.’

  ‘I know it’ll be lonely-ish,’ allowed the younger man. ‘And if one can’t do much shooting or fishing that’s rather damnable. But I’ve got plenty of books, and so on, and oh—one can always find something to do!’

  He spoke with a breezy confidence that he did not altogether feel—it was certainly annoying to find that the agent of the Company’s headquarters in Lagos had coloured Tinpot Landing in much more favourable terms than it actually deserved.

  ‘What happened to Sanders? Did he get the better job he deserved after his four years?’ he asked idly.

  ‘Sanders? Why, he tied, poor tevil! Didn’t dey tell you?’ Vechten looked faintly surprised. ‘Tied of malaria a few days before he wass due to leave, poor chap. He wass a nice chap. . . . Last time I called at Tinpot Landing dere wass only hiss headboy—a Hausa chap called “Plumjam” for some reason, I don’d know why—carrying on till anoder agent came, and he showed me hiss grave. Plumjam buriet him—behind der bungalow.’

  ‘Br-rh! Hope to God his ghost doesn’t walk!’ laughed Tony. ‘Luckily I’m salted against malaria—should like to see the mosquito who could land me with a bout of fever!’