Complete Short Stories (3 page)

So they laughed.

Then he got up and brought her breakfast.

At about half past eleven, she said: ‘Go out now for a walk, my dear, and bring home something for me to think about: and be back in time for dinner at one o’clock.’

It was a hot morning in the middle of May, and he
went out through the wood and struck the coast road, which after half a mile led into Lampton.

(‘Do you know Lampton well?’ asked Crossley. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I am only here for the holidays, staying with friends.’)

He went a hundred yards along the coast road, but then turned off and went across the links: thinking of Rachel and watching the blue butterflies and looking at the heath roses and thyme,
and thinking of her again, and how strange it was that they could be so near to each other; and then taking a pinch of gorse flower and smelling it, and considering the smell and thinking, ‘If she should die, what would become of me?’ and taking a
slate from the low wall and skimming it across the pond and thinking, ‘I am a clumsy fellow to be her husband’; and walking towards the sand hills,
and then edging away again, perhaps half in fear of meeting the person of their dream, and at last making a half circle towards the old church beyond Lampton, at the foot of the mountain.

The morning service was over and the people were out by the cromlechs behind the church, walking in twos and threes, as the custom was, on the smooth turf. The squire was talking in a loud voice about King Charles,
the Martyr: ‘A great man, a very great man, but betrayed by those he loved best,’ and the doctor was arguing about organ music with the rector. There was a group of children playing ball. ‘Throw it here, Elsie! No, to me, Elsie, Elsie, Elsie!’ Then the rector appeared and pocketed the ball and said that it was Sunday; they should have remembered. When he was gone they made faces after him.

Presently
a stranger came up and asked permission to sit down beside Richard; they began to talk. The stranger had been to the church service and wished to discuss the sermon. The text had been the immortality of the soul: the last of a series of sermons that had begun at Easter. He said that he could not grant the preacher’s premiss that
the soul is continually resident in the body
. Why should this be
so? What duty did the soul perform in the daily routine task of the body? The soul was neither the brain, nor the lungs, nor the stomach, nor the heart, nor the mind, nor the imagination. Surely it was a thing apart? Was it not indeed less likely to be resident in the body than outside the body? He had no proof one way or the other, but he would say: Birth and death are so odd a mystery that the principle
of life may well lie outside the body which is the visible evidence of living. ‘We cannot,’ he said, ‘even tell to a nicety what are the moments of birth and death. Why, in Japan, where I have travelled, they reckon a man to be already one year old when he is born; and lately in Italy a dead man – but come and walk on the sand hills and let me tell you my conclusions. I find it easier to
talk when I am walking.’

Richard was frightened to hear this, and to see the man wipe his forehead with a black silk handkerchief. He stuttered out something. At this moment the children, who had crept up behind the cromlech, suddenly, at an agreed signal, shouted loud in the ears of the two men; and stood laughing. The stranger was startled into anger; he opened his mouth as if he were about
to curse them, and bared his teeth to the gums. Three of the children screamed and ran off. But the one whom they called Elsie fell down in her fright and lay sobbing. The doctor, who was near, tried to comfort her. ‘He has a face like a devil,’ they heard the child say.

The stranger smiled good-naturedly: ‘And a devil I was not so very long ago. That was in Northern Australia, where I lived
with the black fellows for twenty years. “Devil” is the nearest English word for the position that they gave me in their tribe; and they also gave me an eighteenth-century
British naval uniform to wear as my ceremonial dress. Come and walk with me in the sand hills and let me tell you the whole story. I have a passion for walking in the sand hills: that is why I came to this town… My name is Charles.’

Richard said: ‘Thank you, but I must hurry home to my dinner.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Charles, ‘dinner can wait. Or, if you wish, I can come to dinner with you. By the way, I have had nothing to eat since Friday. I am without money.’

Richard felt uneasy. He was afraid of Charles, and did not wish to bring him home to dinner because of the dream and the sand hills and the handkerchief: yet on the other
hand the man was intelligent and quiet and decently dressed and had eaten nothing since Friday; if Rachel knew that he had refused him a meal, she would renew her taunts. When Rachel was out of sorts, her favourite complaint was that he was overcareful about money; though when she was at peace with him, she owned that he was the most generous man she knew, and that she did not mean what she said;
when she was angry with him again, out came the taunt of stinginess: ‘Tenpence-halfpenny,’ she would say, ‘tenpence-halfpenny and threepence of that in stamps’; his ears would burn and he would want to hit her. So he said now: ‘By all means come along to dinner, but that little girl is still sobbing for fear of you. You ought to do something about it.’

Charles beckoned her to him and said a single
soft word; it was an Australian magic word, he afterwards told Richard, meaning
Milk:
immediately Elsie was comforted and came to sit on Charles’s knee and played with the buttons of his waistcoat for awhile until Charles sent her away.

‘You have strange powers, Mr Charles,’ Richard said.

Charles answered: ‘I am fond of children, but the shout startled me; I am pleased that I did not do what,
for a moment, I was tempted to do.’

‘What was that?’ asked Richard.

‘I might have shouted myself,’ said Charles.

‘Why,’ said Richard, ‘They would have liked that better. It would have been a great game for them. They probably expected it of you.’

‘If I had shouted,’ said Charles, ‘my shout would have either killed them outright or sent them mad. Probably it would have killed them, for they
were standing close.’

Richard smiled a little foolishly. He did not know whether or not he was expected to laugh, for Charles spoke so gravely and carefully. So he said: ‘Indeed, what sort of shout would that be? Let me hear you shout.’

‘It is not only children who would be hurt by my shout,’ Charles said. ‘Men can be sent raving mad by it; the strongest, even, would be flung to the ground.
It is a magic shout that I learned from the chief devil of the Northern Territory. I took eighteen years to perfect it, and yet I have used it, in all, no more than five times.’

Richard was so confused in his mind with the dream and the handkerchief
and the word spoken to Elsie that he did not know what to say, so he muttered: ‘I’ll give you fifty pounds now to clear the cromlechs with a shout.’

‘I see that you do not believe me,’ Charles said. ‘Perhaps you have never before heard of the terror shout?’

Richard considered and said: ‘Well, I have read of the hero shout which the ancient Irish warriors used, that would drive armies backwards; and did not Hector, the Trojan, have a terrible shout? And there were sudden shouts in the woods of Greece. They were ascribed to the god Pan and
would infect men with a madness of fear; from this legend indeed the word “panic” has come into the English language. And I remember another shout in the
Mabinogion,
in the story of Lludd and Llevelys. It was a shriek that was heard on every May Eve and went through all hearts and so scared them that the men lost their hue and their strength and the women their children, and the youths and maidens
their senses, and the animals and trees, the earth and the waters were left barren. But it was caused by a dragon.’

‘It must have been a British magician of the dragon clan,’ said Charles. ‘I belonged to the Kangaroos. Yes, that tallies. The effect is not exactly given, but near enough.’

They reached the house at one o’clock, and Rachel was at the door, the dinner ready. ‘Rachel,’ said Richard,
‘here is Mr Charles to dinner; Mr Charles is a great traveller.’

Rachel passed her hand over her eyes as if to dispel a cloud, but it may have been the sudden sunlight. Charles took her hand and kissed it, which surprised her. Rachel was graceful, small, with eyes unusually blue for the blackness of her hair, delicate in her movements, and with a voice rather low-pitched; she had a freakish sense
of humour.

(‘You would like Rachel,’ said Crossley, ‘she visits me here sometimes.’)

Of Charles it would be difficult to say one thing or another: he was of middle age, and tall; his hair grey; his face never still for a moment; his eyes large and bright, sometimes yellow; sometimes brown, sometimes grey; his voice changed its tone and accent with the subject; his hands were brown and hairy
at the back, his nails well cared for. Of Richard it is enough to say that he was a musician, not a strong man but a lucky one. Luck was his strength.

After dinner Charles and Richard washed the dishes together, and Richard suddenly asked Charles if he would let him hear the shout: for he thought that he could not have peace of mind until he had heard it. So horrible a thing was, surely, worse
to think about than to hear: for now he believed in the shout.

Charles stopped washing up; mop in hand. ‘As you wish,’ said he, ‘but I have warned you what a shout it is. And if I shout it must be in a lonely
place where nobody else can hear; and I shall not shout in the second degree, the degree which kills certainly, but in the first, which terrifies only, and when you want me to stop put your
hands to your ears.’

‘Agreed,’ said Richard.

‘I have never yet shouted to satisfy an idle curiosity,’ said Charles, ‘but only when in danger of my life from enemies, black or white, and once when I was alone in the desert without food or drink. Then I was forced to shout, for food.’

Richard thought: ‘Well, at least I am a lucky man, and my luck will be good enough even for this.’

‘I am not
afraid,’ he told Charles.

‘We will walk out on the sand hills tomorrow early,’ Charles said, ‘when nobody is stirring; and I will shout. You say you are not afraid.’

But Richard was very much afraid, and what made his fear worse was that somehow he could not talk to Rachel and tell her of it: he knew that if he told her she would either forbid him to go or she would come with him. If she forbade
him to go, the fear of the shout and the sense of cowardice would hang over him ever afterwards; but if she came with him, either the shout would be nothing and she would have a new taunt for his credulity and Charles would laugh with her, or if it were something, she might well be driven mad. So he said nothing.

Charles was invited to sleep at the cottage for the night, and they stayed up late
talking.

Rachel told Richard when they were in bed that she liked Charles and that he certainly was a man who had seen many things, though a fool and a big baby. Then Rachel talked a great deal of nonsense, for she had had two glasses of wine, which she seldom drank, and she said: ‘Oh, my dearest, I forgot to tell you. When I put on my buckled shoes this morning while you were away I found a
buckle missing. I must have noticed that it was lost before I went to sleep last night and yet not fixed the loss firmly in my mind, so that it came out as a discovery in my dream; but I have a feeling, in fact I am certain, that Mr Charles has that buckle in his pocket; and I am sure that he is the man whom we met in our dream. But I don’t care, not I.’

Richard grew more and more afraid, and
he dared not tell of the black silk handkerchief, or of Charles’s invitations to him to walk in the sand hills. And what was worse, Charles had used only a white handkerchief while he was in the house, so that he could not be sure whether he had seen it after all. Turning his head away, he said lamely: ‘Well, Charles knows a lot of things. I am going for a walk with him early tomorrow if you don’t
mind; an early walk is what I need.’

‘Oh, I’ll come too,’ she said.

Richard could not think how to refuse her; he knew that he had made a mistake in telling her of the walk. But he said: ‘Charles will be very glad.
At six o’clock then.’

At six o’clock he got up, but Rachel after the wine was too sleepy to come with them. She kissed him goodbye and off he went with Charles.

Richard had had
a bad night. In his dreams nothing was in human terms, but confused and fearful, and he had felt himself more distant from Rachel than he had ever felt since their marriage, and the fear of the shout was gnawing at him. He was also hungry and cold. There was a stiff wind blowing towards the sea from the mountains and a few splashes of rain. Charles spoke hardly a word, but chewed a stalk of grass
and walked fast.

Richard felt giddy, and said to Charles: ‘Wait a moment, I have a stitch in my side.’ So they stopped, and Richard asked, gasping: ‘What sort of shout is it? Is it loud, or shrill? How is it produced? How can it madden a man?’

Charles was silent, so Richard went on with a foolish smile: ‘Sound, though, is a curious thing. I remember once, when I was at Cambridge, that a King’s
College man had his turn of reading the evening lesson. He had not spoken ten words before there was a groaning and ringing and creaking, and pieces of wood and dust fell from the roof; for his voice was exactly attuned to that of the building, so that he had to stop, else the roof might have fallen; as you can break a wine glass by playing its note on a violin.’

Charles consented to answer:
‘My shout is not a matter of tone or vibration but something not to be explained. It is a shout of pure evil, and there is no fixed place for it on the scale. It may take any note. It is pure terror, and if it were not for a certain intention of mine, which I need not tell you, I would refuse to shout for you.’

Richard had a great gift of fear, and this new account of the shout disturbed him
more and more; he wished himself at home in bed, and Charles two continents away. But he was fascinated. They were crossing the links now and going through the bent grass that pricked through his stockings and soaked them.