Frank Baker Read online

  “Well, lady,” said the old woman, “that’ll make them mad when they see that floating about in the sky. The horrid things they are.” She cocked her little head on one side suddenly and looked at us both. “Your gentleman’s looking very glum and sore,” she said. “You take him off, lady, and have a little fun.”

  She burst into a cackle of laughter and hobbled away.

  “Well,” said Olga, when she had gone, “you heard what she said?”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “But you’re not sure, are you—you’re not sure whether we ought to have a little fun?”

  “What did she mean,” I asked stubbornly, “by a little fun?”

  Olga smiled. “Oh,” she said, “you are a dull boy, but perhaps you are right.”

  We walked away and came down into the vale where there were trees and fewer people.

  “I think you are a flirt,” I said maliciously.

  “I—a flirt?” she cried. “Oh no!” And she pressed her lips tight in anger. “It is just that you are moral,” she said, “that is all.”

  We stood under a hawthorn tree, she with her back to it, leaning against the trunk with her hands behind her. “I am not moral,” I said, and to my dismay I realized that I had almost shouted the words. I was by now entirely beside myself. She stirred me so deeply I could not speak calmly. And it was not her with whom I was angry; it was with the menace that, even as I spoke, rustled above in the dry branches of the tree. Rather than succumb to its deadly influence I worked myself into a fury with Olga. It should be a challenge, I thought; the thing should see that I was alive, that it had no power to assault my spirit. And all the time I was shaking—shaking with fear and dread.

  Suddenly Olga said, “You are not raving at me; you are raving at yourself because you are afraid of yourself.”

  “It is not true,” I said savagely.

  “It is true. You are afraid of yourself.”

  “No—not of myself, Olga——”

  “—of—yourself——”

  In the tree, branches rustled and shook. I broke down.

  “Olga, Olga,” I cried, “don’t you understand? I am marked—like everybody else.”

  I did not look at her nor hear her walk towards me. But I felt my head caught in her hands and pressed against her till I wanted to fall to the ground for shame that I was so weak, and she, in a way that I could not understand, so strong.

  “Oh!” I said, “oh!” and my words died away as she kissed me, and slowly I recovered control of my trembling body.

  With nobody else had I felt so humiliated and glad to be humiliated as in that moment. She was so warm and alive to me; her touch seemed to draw me over to another country.

  “Listen,” she said, “I will tell you something. You do not want to speak about it, nobody does. I know that you are haunted. But you must let me speak, because I was the same as you a few days ago until I found out that it had no power to kill me if I let it come to me, unresisting. Do you remember Paul Weaver?”

  Yes, I remembered him, I said.

  “He resisted it, and he killed himself. He was my lover, and then something went wrong in him; he thought he could be another person. He was gentle and sensitive; he thought he could be a large-­voiced man, loving many women and filling himself with drink. I could not love him any more then. He killed himself because he could not face himself as he really was. When he died, I thought I should die too, for there was nobody else I loved. I saw you, and there was something in your eyes which I knew was true. Only—only it isn’t true until you see yourself.”

  She was struggling to tell me something which was hard to put into words.

  “You are frightened,” she said, “of the bird in that tree—yes? It is so—isn’t it?”

  “It wants to kill me,” I muttered. “I daren’t think of it or even admit its existence. I shall go mad——”

  Again there was that dry, crackling sound from the tree, and I felt I could bear it no longer. I took my stick, ran from Olga and began wildly slashing in the low branches. She ran to me and dragged me away, gripping my arms with a force I did not know she possessed. She was terribly distressed.

  “No, no,” she cried, “oh—why don’t you see? That all you have to do is to let it come to you, to look it in the face and accept it as part of you——”

  “Look it in the face—no, how can I do that?” I said. “How do I know what dreadful thing I shall see?”

  “I was like you,” she said. “For days I was haunted till I thought I should die—oh, it was so terrible. But I knew, I knew, you see, that I should have to acknowledge its claim over me—its right to pursue me, if I wanted to live. It was something I had driven away and it had to come back, thwarted and twisted out of shape, so ugly. Oh, terrible, terrible—I only know you must do the same as I did; that if you try to kill it, you will only kill yourself.”

  Suddenly she let go of my hands and walked away a few yards. When she turned, the moonlight struck on her face, giving her a thin, ghostly appearance.

  “I cannot help you,” she said. Her words seemed to sound from afar off. I felt as though I were choking, struggling to breathe. There was a barrier between us, like a rank mist, which I could not break through. My head swayed; my body did not seem to be in my own control.

  From that distance came her voice, grave and measured. “I can­not help you any more, for nobody can help. It is your own struggle. I have told you—all I can.”

  I tried to move towards her, but I had no power to stir. I tried to speak, but my lips were dumb. Mounting over me from the tree I felt as though a deep cloud of thick blackness enveloped me, that I was being slowly sucked into a world where I should be alone with nothing but myself to know and touch. As through a tiny chink in a dungeon cell, I saw Olga move and walk away. As she walked, the light of the moon seemed to wane, and the living darkness to rise and suffocate me.

  A sense that she was perhaps for ever leaving me, drove me to action, and I called in a throttled voice, “Olga, Olga!”

  The word loosed my limbs and I stumbled over to her, catching at her dress and gasping.

  “You mustn’t go,”I cried. “You mustn’t go——”

  She turned for a second to face me and there seemed to be a hesitant expression about her face.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, my God.” Then she touched my forehead, turned quickly, and disappeared into the darkness.

  I was alone. She had gone and taken with her the light of the moon. I was alone with my Demon in a dead world.

  *

  A moving darkness seemed to have dragged me from the outer world into the coils of itself so that I could hardly breathe or move. My limbs ached, my whole body seemed to be the prey of some obscene atrophy. I felt a surging revulsion against the foul atmo­sphere which engulfed me; the air I breathed was corrupt. Yet I could make no effort to escape. Olga had gone and all the new life that she represented had gone with her. There seemed no life left in anything. The senseless evening heat dried up the blood in my veins till I felt I was no more than a dry leaf clinging to a dead bough. Far away I heard the sound of a dog barking, cars running, some drunkard singing; I thought they were the last sounds I should ever hear, that they belonged to a world which I was leaving.

  I had never before had so appalling a sense of the earth’s boun­daries; there seemed to be no place where I could go to breathe pure air again. I longed for a jet of icy water suddenly to spurt out of the ground; I longed for tongues of flame to lick the dry trees and consume them to ashes; I longed for a fierce wind to lash the brittle leaves to powder and scatter them over the earth. I longed for movement, for anything but this relentless corrosion of life. Streaming out beyond the stars and the moon, I felt there was a sap of life, and that for ever now we should be denied of its vital flow into the encrusted veins of our world.

&nbs
p; In a great wave of passionate despair—identifying the whole misery of the decaying earth with the wretchedness of myself, I raised my head to the sky and cried, “How long, O Lord, how long?”

  There was no answer to this cry; no sign from the deity to whom I still maintained a half-hearted adherence. There was only a thin, squealing sound, melancholy and wintry, like the falling note of a curlew under a low, misty sky. But it was a far more despairing sound than that. Something full of mournfulness, the echo of all those heavy thoughts that oppressed me. Again it cried, the downward, shuddering note of something doomed to die yet wanting to live. It was a cry forced out of a soul that had lost all hope, like the lament of an exile who sees his native shores across a great expanse of water and can never reach them.

  I saw then what I dreaded most to see; a grey bird flying in aim­less circles round the branches of the tree, flying as though dis­turbed out of a long sleep. By the way that it flew I knew that it was blind. Sud­denly I dropped my head away from it, for it had settled on a low branch and was looking at me. It was too much to bear. Because, with misty caverns where eyes should be, it looked down and saw nothing. Its vacant stare denied my existence; I was nothing.

  I heard it fluttering again, lower, nearer my head. The sound of its wings was like the rustling of dead leaves over a stone court­yard. It cried again, so near me, that I thought I had uttered the sound myself. I could not move.

  My stick was in my hand. Olga’s words came back to me: “If you try to kill it, you will only kill yourself.” And why not? I thought suddenly. What was there left to live for? The memory of Olga’s white face broke the darkness. She had told me a truth; she had shown me how to recover my freedom. Then I knew that with all my strength I must guard my hand. With an almost involun­tary movement I threw the stick away, far down the hill. Now I could not strike. But how long could I stay here, waiting?

  Something touched my hair and whistled past me. Then I lost my control, ran blindly, wildly down the tussocky heath, in and out amongst trees, tearing at my collar. Anywhere, anywhere, to escape. I hurled myself down on the grass in a sweat of terror, as though I could burrow into the ground like a mole. Behind, I heard the beating of wings. Pictures flooded my vision: of an old man lying face downwards in the gutter, of a priest lying face downwards at the bottom of an escalator—face downwards, face downwards. Do not look, do not look! screamed my mind; you will die if you look into those sightless eyes; it will tear your face to shreds and leave pits in your forehead so that you too will not be able to see.

  With a superhuman effort I dragged myself to my feet, intending to turn and face it. But the touch of its claws on my shoulders drove me to violence. I struck out with my hands. Then it cried malignantly and came at my face. I held my hands before my face and began to run again—I did not know where. I heard a woman shriek as I tore past her. The horror close behind me, for ever wailing in that lost and malicious note, mounted in my brain till I thought my forehead would burst open. And the thought of my brain bursting out, tempted me to hurl my body against a tree trunk, to smash my face on the rough bark so that I could no longer see nor hear anything. A few yards down the hill I saw the dark shape of a tree. You must gather all your force together, I said, and fling yourself upon that trunk; then all will go, all will be blotted out, you will be released.

  The tree, the tree! I cried. And as it grew nearer I tore my hands down my face as though to blind myself to what I must do. I felt again the touch on my head and threw up my hands to beat it away. And this compelled me to open my eyes; I saw I was within a few inches of the tree.

  The knowledge of physical pain assaulted me. Reason returned. I thought of my face streaming with blood, my features disfigured. The impact might not kill me; I might only suffer terribly.

  With all the force I could summon I swerved aside, stumbled over a gnarled root, lost my balance, and rolled many yards down the incline. I could not rise. I lay on my back, moaning. Suddenly it seemed that the sky and the stars were shrouded by a dense grey pall which drew itself over life like the coverlet drawn over a dead body. I could no longer resist; I had to suffer what was intended.

  The creature, larger now than myself, came upon my face, its wings outstretched till I was choking for breath; its talons pressed into my chin; its eyes—those void chasms—close to mine.

  In one dreadful second, which seemed like all eternity, I saw all that was me, all that had shrivelled to waste in me. Deep in the pits of those two dead eyes I saw the soul that I had driven out from me so long ago. And it was hideous.

  —I cannot tell you more about that. Because to speak of what I saw then is to betray the living Soul which from that moment came to life in me, and still lives. I saw—and this is all I can tell you—I saw the corrupt emanation of the Soul of a man whom, as a great poet had said, “God hath made to mar himself.”

  I saw and I lived. Had I not seen, my Demon would have des­troyed me. But I saw and I lived. Suddenly I realized that there was no longer a grey pall laid out upon me; I was looking up into the shining arch of the clear sky, speckled with a line of stars like dust along a sunbeam in autumn. Slowly coursing through my body I felt that sap of life for which I had cried so desperately. For a while I was content to lie there, rejoicing in the beauty of the world as though I had seen it all for the first time.

  I stood up. My ankles ached, my limbs were bruised, blood was dripping from my chin. But there was so delicate a lightness in my body that I could not think of these small pains. The air was pure again. I breathed in and out slowly, as I had done upon Cader. I saw that I had not to go to a mountain to fill my lungs with life. I was regen­erate, a new being. I was the exile who had found his way back to his native country.

  I knew in a way that I had never before accepted, that I stood alone, that no­body could invade my Soul. Neither could I intrude upon the privacy of any other Soul. I could tell nobody of what had hap­pened to me, though I might warn them—as Olga had—not to resist their Demons. I could save nobody, for nobody had the power to save a man but himself.

  I thought of Olga, and though my instinct was to go at once to her and make her leave the City with me, I knew that the time was not yet ripe for this. Now that I lived as she lived and could never again feel ashamed before her, I felt no impatience for the life that I knew we should find together. An­other figure rose in my mind. I could not leave my mother, I must make another attempt to reason with her.

  So I left the heath; came up again to the pond at the top. The tavern had closed. It was late, and only a few people passed me as I walked towards the station. The heat was intense, yet it did not oppress me; the silence heavy, yet it did not sadden me. I no longer wanted wind or fire or water to force movement out of the earth.

  In the empty carriage of the underground train I found a woman’s bag and the torn pages of a book scattered about. Somebody had sprinkled sawdust on the floor. There was a copy of the evening paper. Details were given of the proposed gas-attack upon the birds in two days’ time. Pro­posed gas-attack—— I laughed. Did nobody know? I went on to read about the Intercession Service which was shortly to be held in the Cathedral. I decided I would go. It should be the last event I would witness before I left London.

  My eyes fell upon the patch of wet sawdust on the floor; on the bag lying idle and unclaimed upon a seat. How sad it looked; how futile.

  I reached home, letting myself in quietly. The house was in darkness, for my mother and Annie had gone to bed. The windows downstairs were closed. I opened them. I went up and paused outside Lillian’s door. A nightlight was burning inside. I wanted to talk to her, and I knew she would not be asleep. I knocked gently.

  “Is that you, son?”

  “Yes, Mother. Can I come in to say good-night?”

  She paused.

  “Yes, come in.”

  *

  The room was dimly lit by a small wax ligh
t on the washing-table. The windows were closed and the cur­tains of heavy black velvet were drawn. It was very hot. On a table by my mother’s bed were bottles of medicine, a wine-glass, and a silver lozenge-box in which she kept sugar for the cup of tea that she made for herself in the early morning. There was also a novel which she had been reading.

  I sat on the edge of her bed and picked up the book.

  “Any good?” I asked her.

  “No, dear. The usual thing. Silly girl runs away from home and has a baby she doesn’t want.”

  I laughed. This was one of popular fiction’s inexhaustible themes. “It’s sure to turn out all right in the end,” I said.

  “No. I looked at the end. It all comes out wrong. She kills her son—throws him over a cliff.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. You shouldn’t read such horrors, Mother. They only upset you.”

  I looked at the tired head caught in tangled grey hair on the pillow. The clothes were drawn close round her neck, her knees were hunched up. She looked so much smaller and frailer than in the day­time. I felt very moved when I saw her lying there. There was something I had to say and I did not know how to say it.

  “You look more comfortable in bed,” I said, avoiding what was in my mind, “than any person I know.”

  “When you were a little thing,” she said, “with long curls, like that picture up there which you hate so, you were lovely in bed asleep. I used to stand over you and wonder that you were mine. I suppose all foolish mothers do.”

  I looked up to the wall above her bed where there was a framed picture of myself as a small child of three, holding toy-bricks, long ringlets falling round my fat, sullen face.

  “I don’t hate the picture,” I said. “I suppose I was better then than I have ever been since.”

  “Oh no, you’re a good boy. Only you’re too much like me and always were. Never know your own mind.”

  I always got irritated when Lillian remarked that I was “too much like her,” as though it were un­fortunate for any one to resemble her.