ebonised and gold grand piano, and banks of pot flowers in Benares brass bowls, up a pale oak staircase to a spacious landing, where there was a green velvet settee trimmed with silver. The blinds were down, and the light lay in parallel lines on the floors.
He showed me my room, saying cheerfully: “You may be a little tired. One often is without knowing it after a run through traffic. Don’t come down till you feel quite restored. We shall all be in the garden.”
My room was rather close, and smelt of perfumed soap. I threw up the window at once, but it opened so close to the floor and worked so clumsily that I came within an ace of pitching out, where I should certainly have ruined a rather lop-sided laburnum below. As I set about washing off the journey’s dust, I began to feel a little tired. But, I reflected, I had not come down here in this weather and among these new surroundings to be depressed, so I began to whistle.
And it was just then that I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was the foreunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated.
Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard a click in my brain like the click in the ear when one descends in a diving bell, and I knew that the pressures were equalised within and without, and that, for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew also that at any moment the darkness might come down anew; and while I dwelt on this speculation precisely as a man torments a raging tooth with his tongue, it ebbed away into the little grey shadow on the brain of its first coming, and once more I heard my brain, which knew what would recur, telegraph to every quarter for help, release, or diversion.
The door opened, and M’Leod reappeared. I thanked him politely, saying I was charmed with my room, anxious to meet Mrs M’Leod, much refreshed with my wash, and so on and so forth. Beyond a little stickiness at the corners of my mouth, it seemed to me that I was managing my words admirably, the while that I myself cowered at the bottom of unclimbable pits. M’Leod laid his hand on my shoulder, and said: “You’ve got it now already, ain’t it?”
“Yes,” I answered, “it’s making me sick!”
“It will pass off when you come outside. I give you my word it will then pass off. Come!”
I shambled out behind him, and wiped my forehead in the hall.
“You mustn’t mind,” he said. “I expect the run tired you. My good lady is sitting there under the copper beech.”
She was a fat woman in an apricot-coloured gown, with a heavily powdered face, against which her black long-lashed eyes showed like currants in dough. I was introduced to many fine ladies and gentlemen of those parts. Magnificently appointed landaus and covered motors swept in and out of the drive, and the air was gay with the merry outcries of the tennis players.
As twilight drew on they all went away, and I was left alone with Mr and Mrs M’Leod, while tall men-servants and maid-servants took away the tennis and tea things. Miss M’Leod had walked a little down the drive with a light-haired young man, who apparently knew everything about every South American railway stock. He had told me at tea that these were the days of financial specialisation.
“I think it went off beautifully, my dear,” said Mr M’Leod to his wife; and to me: “You feel all right now, ain’t it? Of course you do.”
Mrs M’Leod surged across the gravel. Her husband skipped nimbly before her into the south verandah, turned a switch, and all Holmescroft was flooded with light.
“You can do that from your room also,” he said as they went in. “There is something in money, ain’t it?”
Miss M’Leod came up behind me in the dusk. “We have not yet been introduced,” she said, “but I suppose you are staying the night?”
“Your father was kind enough to ask me,” I replied.
She nodded. “Yes,
“I don’t know what to think,” I replied. “I never felt anything like it. Does it happen often?”
“Yes, sometimes. It comes and goes.”
“Pleasant!” I said, as we walked up and down the gravel at the lawn edge. “What has been your experience of it?”
“That is difficult to say, but – sometimes that – that depression is like as it were” – she gesticulated in most un-English fashion – “a light. Yes, like a light turned into a room – only a light of blackness, do you understand? – into a happy room. For sometimes we are so happy, all we three, – so very happy. Then this blackness, it is turned on us just like – ah, I know what I mean now – like the head-lamp of a motor, and we are eclipsed. And there is another thing –”
The dressing gong roared, and we entered the over-lighted hall. My dressing was a brisk athletic performance, varied with outbursts of song – careful attention paid to articulation and expression. But nothing happened. As I hurried downstairs, I thanked Heaven that nothing had happened.
Dinner was served breakfast fashion; the dishes were placed on the sideboard over heaters, and we helped ourselves.
“We always do this when we are alone, so we talk better,” said Mr M’Leod.
“And we are always alone,” said the daughter.
“Cheer up, Thea. It will all come right,” he insisted.
“No, papa.” She shook her dark head. “Nothing is right while
“It is nothing that we ourselves have ever done in our lives – that I will swear to you,” said Mrs M’Leod suddenly. “And we have changed our servants several times. So we know it is not
“Never mind. Let us enjoy ourselves while we can,” said Mr M’Leod, opening the champagne.
But we did not enjoy ourselves. The talk failed. There were long silences.
“I beg your pardon,” I said, for I thought some one at my elbow was about to speak.
“Ah! That is the other thing!” said Miss M’Leod. Her mother groaned.
We were silent again, and, in a few seconds it must have been, a live grief beyond words – not ghostly dread or horror, but aching, helpless grief – overwhelmed us, each, I felt, according to his or her nature, and held steady like the beam of a burning-glass. Behind that pain I was conscious there was a desire on somebody’s part to explain something on which some tremendously important issue hung.
Meantime I rolled bread pills and remembered my sins; M’Leod considered his own reflection in a spoon; his wife seemed to be praying, and the girl fidgeted desperately with hands and feet, till the darkness passed on – as though the malignant rays of a burning glass had been shifted from us.
“There,” said Miss M’Leod, half rising. “Now you see what makes a happy home. Oh, sell it – sell it, father mine, and let us go away!”
“But I’ve spent thousands on it. You shall go to Harrogate next week, Thea dear.”
“I’m only just back from hotels. I am
“Cheer up, Thea. It is over. You know it does not often come here twice in the same night. I think we shall dare now to be comfortable.”
He lifted a dish-cover, and helped his wife and daughter. His face was lined and fallen like an old man’s after debauch, but his hand did not shake, and his voice was clear. As he worked to restore us by speech and action, he reminded me of a grey-muzzled collie herding demoralized sheep.
After dinner we sat round the dining-room fire – the drawing-room might have been under the Shadow for aught we knew – talking with the intimacy of gipsies by the wayside, or of wounded comparing notes after a skirmish. By eleven o’clock the three between them had given me every name and detail they could recall that in
