‘We’re packing and going. I needed to know whether we could get out this way. We must shut the door quietly.’
It creaked a bit on its hinges, and he hesitated with it half-shut, uncertain whether to rush the creak or to ease it. Suddenly, something dark and shapeless, with its arm seeming to hold a black vesture over its head, flitted, all sharp angles, like a bat, down the narrow ill-lighted street, the sound of its passage audible to none. It was the first being that either of them had seen in the streets of Holihaven; and Gerald was acutely relieved that he alone had set eyes upon it. With his hand trembling, he shut the door much too sharply.
But no one could possibly have heard, although he stopped for a second outside the Lounge. He could hear Mrs Pascoe now weeping hysterically; and again was glad that Phrynne was a step or two ahead of him. Upstairs the Commandant’s door lay straight before them: they had to pass close beside the Japanese figure, in order to take the passage to the left of it.
But soon they were in their room, with the key turned in the big rim lock.
‘Oh God,’ cried Gerald, sinking on the double bed. ‘It’s pandemonium.’ Not for the first time that evening he was instantly more frightened than ever by the unintended appositeness of his own words.
‘It’s pandemonium all right,’ said Phrynne, almost calmly. ‘And we’re not going out in it.’
He was at a loss to divine how much she knew, guessed, or imagined; and any word of enlightenment from him might be inconceivably dangerous. But he was conscious of the strength of her resistance, and lacked the reserves to battle with it.
She was looking out of the window into the main street. ‘We might will them to stop,’ she suggested wearily.
Gerald was now far less frightened of the bells continuing than of their ceasing. But that they should go on ringing until day broke seemed hopelessly impossible.
Then one peal stopped. There could be no other explanation for the obvious diminution in sound.
‘You see!’ said Phrynne.
Gerald sat up straight on the side of the bed.
Almost at once further sections of sound subsided, quickly one after the other, until only a single peal was left, that which had begun the ringing. Then the single peal tapered off into a single bell. The single bell tolled on its own, disjointedly, five or six or seven times. Then it stopped, and there was nothing.
Gerald’s head was a cave of echoes, mountingly muffled by the noisy current of his blood.
‘Oh goodness,’ said Phrynne, turning from the window and stretching her arms above her head. ‘Let’s go somewhere else tomorrow.’ She began to take off her dress.
Sooner than usual they were in bed, and in one another’s arms. Gerald had carefully not looked out of the window, and neither of them suggested that it should be opened, as they usually did.
‘As it’s a four-poster, shouldn’t we draw the curtains?’ asked Phrynne. ‘And be really snug? After those damned bells?’
‘We should suffocate.’
‘Did they suffocate when everyone had four-posters?’
‘They only drew the curtains when people were likely to pass through the room.’
‘Darling, you’re shivering. I think we should draw them.’
‘Lie still instead and love me.’
But all his nerves were straining out into the silence. There was no sound of any kind, beyond the hotel or within it; not a creaking floorboard or a prowling cat or a distant owl. He had been afraid to look at his watch when the bells stopped, or since; the number of the dark hours before they could leave Holihaven weighed on him. The vision of the Commandant kneeling in the dark window was clear before his eyes, as if the intervening panelled walls were made of stage gauze; and the thing he had seen in the street darted on its angular way back and forth through memory.
Then passion began to open its petals within him, layer upon slow layer; like an illusionist’s red flower which, without soil or sun or sap, grows as it is watched. The languor of tenderness began to fill the musty room with its texture and perfume. The transparent walls became again opaque, the old man’s vaticinations mere obsession. The street must have been empty, as it was now; the eye deceived.
But perhaps rather it was the boundless sequacity of love that deceived, and most of all in the matter of the time which had passed since the bells stopped ringing; for suddenly Phrynne drew very close to him, and he heard steps in the thoroughfare outside, and a voice calling. These were loud steps, audible from afar even through the shut window; and the voice had the possessed stridency of the street evangelist.
‘The dead are awake!’
Not even the thick bucolic accent, the guttural vibrato of emotion, could twist or mask the meaning. At first Gerald lay listening with all his body, and concentrating the more as the noise grew; then he sprang from the bed and ran to the window.
A burly, long-limbed man in a seaman’s jersey was running down the street, coming clearly into view for a second at each lamp, and between them lapsing into a swaying lumpy wraith. As he shouted his joyous message, he crossed from side to side and waved his arms like a negro. By flashes, Gerald could see that his weatherworn face was transfigured.
‘The dead are awake!’
Already, behind him, people were coming out of their houses, and descending from the rooms above shops. There were men, women, and children. Most of them were fully dressed, and must have been waiting in silence and darkness for the call; but a few were dishevelled in night attire or the first garments which had come to hand. Some formed themselves into groups, and advanced arm in arm, as if towards the conclusion of a Blackpool beano. More came singly,
