In effect, this is a usual psychical phenomenon. Some people are made to live an outward life, others to live within themselves. I myself have a short and quickly exhausted power of attention to the outside world, and as soon as it has reached its limit, I suffer in my whole body and my whole mind an intolerable distress.
The result is that I attach myself, that I attached myself strongly to inanimate things that assume for me the importance of living creatures, and that my house has become, had become a world where I lived a solitary and active life, surrounded by things, furniture, intimate trifles, as sympathetic to my eyes as faces. I had filled it with them little by little. I had decorated it so, and I felt myself housed, content, satisfied, as happy as in the arms of a loving woman whose familiar caress was become a calm and pleasant need.
I had had this house built in a beautiful garden which shut it off from the roads, and at the gate of a town where I could, when occasion arose, find the social resources to which, at odd moments, I felt impelled. All my servants slept in a distant building at the end of the kitchen garden, which was surrounded by a great wall. The sombre folding down of the nights, in the silence of my habitation, lost, hidden, drowned under the leaves of great trees, was so tranquillising, so pleasant to me, that every evening I delayed going to bed for several hours, to enjoy it the longer.
That particular day, Sigurd had been played at the local theatre. It was the first time I had heard this beautiful fairy-like musical drama, and it had given me the greatest pleasure.
I walked home, at a brisk pace, my head full of sounding rhythms, my eyes filled with visions of loveliness. It was dark, dark, so unfathomably dark that I could hardly make out the high road and several times almost went headlong into the ditch. From the toll gate to my house is about two-thirds of a mile, perhaps a little more, maybe about twenty minutes’ slow walking. It was one o’clock in the morning, one or half past; the sky was growing faintly light in front of me, and a slip of a moon rose, the wan slip of the moon’s last quarter. The crescent moon of the first quarter, that rises at four or five o’clock in the evening, is brilliant, gay, gleaming like silver, but the moon that rises after midnight is tawny, sad and sinister: it is a real Witches’ Sabbath of a moon. Every walker by night must have made this observation. The moon of the first quarter, be it thin as a thread, sends out a small joyous light that fills the heart with gladness and flings clear shadows over the earth; the moon of the last quarter scarcely spreads a dying light, so wan that it hardly casts any shadow at all.
I saw from some way off the sombre mass of my garden, and, sprung from I know not where, there came to me a certain uneasiness at the idea of entering it. I slackened my step. It was very mild. The heavy weight of trees wore the aspect of a tomb where my house was buried.
I opened my gateway and made my way down the long avenue of sycamore-trees, which led to the house, arched and vaulted overhead like a high tunnel, crossing shadowy groves and winding round lawns where under the paling shadows clumps of flowers jewelled the ground with oval stains of indeterminate hues.
As I approached the house, a strange uneasiness took possession of me. I halted. There was no sound. There was not a breath of air in the leaves. “What’s the matter with me?” I thought. For ten years I had entered in like manner without feeling the faintest shadow of disquietude. I was not afraid. I have never been afraid at night. The sight of a man, a marauder, a thief, would have filled me with fury, and I would have leaped on him without a moment’s hesitation. I was armed, moreover. I had my revolver. But I did not touch it, for I wished to master this sense of terror that was stirring in me.
What was it? A presentiment? The mysterious presentiment that takes possession of one’s senses when they are on the verge of seeing the inexplicable? Perhaps? Who knows?
With every step I advanced, I felt my skin creep, and when I was standing under the wall of my vast house, with its closed shutters, I felt the need of waiting a few moments before opening the door and going inside. So I sat down on a bench under the windows of my drawing room. I remained there, a little shaken, my head leaning against the wall, my eyes open on the shadows of the trees. During these first instants, I noticed nothing unusual round me. I felt a sort of droning sound in my ears, but that often happened to me. It sometimes seems to me that I hear trains passing, that I hear clocks striking, that I hear the footsteps of a crowd.
Then shortly, these droning sounds became more distinct, more differentiated, more recognisable. I had been mistaken. It was not the usual throbbing sound of my pulse that filled my ears with these clamourings, but a very peculiar, though very confused noise that came, no doubt about it, from the interior of my house.
I made it out through the wall, this continuous noise, which was rather a disturbance than a noise, a confused movement of a crowd of things, as if all my furniture was being pushed, moved out of its place and gently dragged about.
Oh, for an appreciable time longer I doubted the evidence of my ears. But when I had pressed myself against a shutter the better
