wish to spend this sequence of precious and unrepeatable sensations we call a day languishing in the dungeons of Messrs. Kneebone and Kneebone, or whatever they are called, pining for adventure while your life goes drifting away, along with the desks and the uncounted dirty ledgers, toward the grave?”
“Not particularly,” I conceded, “but I have rent to pay, and lately I’ve developed some expensive habits like eating. So I’m afraid,” I finished checking my pocket watch, “I must push off, or the desks and ledgers will be drifting toward the grave with my replacement at the helm.”
“Yes, and we must leave too, Diane,” said Hallam, glancing across her to the woman in the corner who had so aroused my interest. “Our young friend has reminded us of our duty. Rose and I have a hard day too. It is our plan to walk away the morning, giving common people a chance to look at us and dream. Then a good lunch with fine wine in a little restaurant I know, and a trip to my bookbinders, where my volumes of Swinburne await me clad in a new raiment of leather, scarlet as the tongue of Sin.” He sighed deeply. “And if we have the strength after such a day of toil, a whole decanter of cognac remains at home to be disposed of unaided. I hardly think we shall have the energy left to invoke Ashtoreth tonight!” Bending forward he kissed Diane’s hand and whispered, “Goodbye for now, my sweet Pierrot.”
Diane simpered and let go of his hand with reluctance.
“Call in on us some time, Lenihan,” he added to me, holding out an expensive-looking calling card. The address was 13 Tamar Gardens, Hampstead.
A couple of days later I took the umpteenth look at that black and gold card, pondered again the weird charm of Rose Seaford, for such apparently was her name, and decided to take Hallam up on his invitation. The evening wind was blowing fine rain down the streets, and my asthma had been playing up a little, but I had just bought a rather snappy trilby which, I thought, gave me a touch of style, so I said “what the hell” and took a taxi.
Tamar Gardens sounded very plush. It turned out to be a rather rundown block of flats. Somewhat disillusioned, I rang the bell and waited; and waited. Just when I was about to give up and go home, Rose Seaford opened the door and stepped out, wearing a voluminous black raincoat and a black slouch hat. Drawing me in out of the lamplight, she whispered fearfully, “Did you see anyone watching the flat?”
I shrugged in confusion. “I need your help,” she said, peering over my shoulder. Then she put her finger to her lips and pointed to a solitary walker who came into view, and glanced in our direction as he went by. I was beginning to enjoy my close proximity to Rose in the shadowy doorway, but she pushed me out into the rain, whispering, “We’ve got to keep him in sight, but don’t let him see us.”
So I found myself tailing a complete stranger through the strengthening rain, ducking into doorways now and then, and worrying as I did so about the condition of my drooping, saturated hat. Soon the whole thing became rather exciting. My inborn flair for detection, nurtured on Dupin and Holmes, got the better of me. Whenever the man passed under a street-lamp I scrutinized him. It was strange, I reflected; he looked like a man walking home in the rain! He paddled along with his hands thrust into the pockets of his sodden overcoat, apart from the moments when a stronger gust came, lashing along the street, and he clutched desperately at his trilby. I found myself wondering ruefully whether it was a new one. We followed him for miles before losing him in a positive warren of alleys. Rose hovered for a moment, seemingly quite rattled, then said, “We’ve got to get there first.”
“Where?” I cried, but she was already off with a brisk step. Then followed the most exhausting hour I have ever experienced. Rose might have been frail of form, but she set a fast pace and held it up hill and down dale.
I was soon trailing behind with a stitch, my breath steaming out into the chill drizzle. When she was obliged to wait until I caught up, the stream of invective to which she subjected me would have staggered a stevedore. I would never have guessed how rich and fruity her language could be. Eventually we came onto a steep lane where the gutters were awash, causing our sodden shoes to slip on the smooth flagstones. Beside a set of high, barred gates set in a towering wall we stopped, and I realized that we were in Swains Lane, at the old gates of Highgate Cemetery. The place should have been locked up at such an hour, but inexplicably, Rose must have known that the lock had not been turned for she threw her weight against the wet iron bars, and with a deep and ominous groan, the gates rolled back on their rusty hinges.
Here, let me confess, I loitered somewhat. Highgate Cemetery is ruinous, overgrown, shadow-haunted and choked to overflowing with more than four thousand corpses. An unwholesome necropolis of crumbling tombs, it has never figured highly in my list of daytime haunts. By night, “a blended scene of moles, fanes, arches, domes and palaces, where, with his brother Horror, Ruin sits,” it was the last place on earth I would have chosen to pursue some nameless and doubtless unpleasant errand.
Rose, though, was striding off along a gloomy, rain-washed path hemmed in by ivied slabs, stone crosses and contorted, leafless trees. An owl actually had the audacity to hoot. I stuck close and whistled carelessly as we descended some ruined steps and followed the path to a tall gate built on the design of an Egyptian temple, as if a normal gateway were not sepulchral enough. Here Rose turned and gripped my arm.
“Wait here,” she said firmly. “And no talking to strangers.”
Then she turned and disappeared up the path by which she had come.
My initial desire was to follow her, but I set my back against the wall on one side of the gate and tried to think beautiful thoughts. Although I had become oblivious to the rain, the wind seemed suddenly to penetrate my drenched mackintosh, cutting me to the bone. I began to shiver. My imagination was playing up too. There I was, trying desperately to keep my mind on something sensible and healthy, and all the while my inner eye was plagued by images of death and decay. Every novel, every theory I had ever read concerning the horrors that reach from beyond the grave unwound before me. I was scaring myself stiff.
In annoyance as much as anything, I began to pace up and down the path along which Rose had departed, that is, first away from, and then toward, the Egyptian gate. It was while turning away from it for the tenth time that I heard a distinct slow scuffing of feet walking out of the darkness toward my back! There could be no mistake. I was being approached out of the dark central labyrinth of the cemetery.
I must have aged visibly at that moment. It was my first taste of supernatural fear, and it robbed me of all volition. All I could do was to stand paralyzed as the steps drew nearer. My heart lurched violently as fingers tightened on my shoulder, then a voice close to my ear whispered, “It’s only me.”
I have never struck a woman, but it was a close thing at that moment.
“What in God’s name are you playing at?” I gasped, too shaken up to shout. Rose set off along the path.
“Nothing in
“What are we doing here, Rose?” I asked, recovering a little composure as I caught up with her.
“That,” she replied wittily, “would be telling.”
Not much more than an hour later we were in Hallam’s front room drying out, and I had still received no satisfactory explanation for the adventure. The room was not what I had expected of Hallam. There were no vast cases of old tomes, no Gothic trappings and no luxurious furniture. The place had a spartan, Oriental look to it, with acres of bare floor scattered with cushions, a folded screen, and two glass cabinets of simple but sound workmanship which contained small ornaments and perhaps a dozen volumes with fine but hardly extravagant bindings. A few silken banners hanging on the walls showed brilliantly colored images of fierce Tibetan gods, and a crystal ball supported on the coils of a magnificent gilt dragon sat on a low cabinet. There was, too, a small but exquisitely detailed statue of some female deity of the East, not Kali, who has many arms and blue skin, but a being with a normal quota of limbs and skin the color of flame, her voluptuous body twisted into a dancing posture. She wore a grisly torque of human skulls.
I was squatting, a little self-consciously, in a silk kimono sipping a glass of cognac. Rose was reclining on the opposite side of the fireplace, her eyes on the vortex of steam that was swirling above our drying clothes. Hallam had just entered wearing a robe of black velvet and was pacing back and forth before the fire like a caged tiger, gesticulating grandly and chuckling, as though he were as high as a kite.
“Rose is right, of course,” he decided. “It is better that you don’t know her purposes tonight. There are some things,” he concluded darkly, “which man ought not to know.”
He took the decanter from the low cabinet and refilled my glass with cognac. “In any case,” he continued on a lighter note, “you have had an intense experience, which is surely our purpose in being here if we have one at all. To be where the vital forces of life unite most intensely. For an hour or so you did have a quickening sense of life.”
