The Greater Trumps (24 page)

“It's those damned figures,” Mr. Coningsby thought. “I expect they shake everything, all that gyrating nonsense. Good God, it's getting thicker.” He turned, ran through the outer door, and shouted as loudly as he could, “Fire! Fire!”

As he opened his mouth for the third shout, he stopped on the “F——” For there came from below a sudden crash, a crash that was answered from different parts of the house by a noise of smashing and splintering, and then the wind was howling louder and nearer than before. “Great Christ!” Mr. Coningsby cried out, in mere ingenuity of perplexed anxiety, “what the devil's that?” He had guessed even as he spoke; the doors and windows were giving way before the blizzard. “The snow's getting in and the fire's getting out,” he thought, distractedly staring back over his shoulder. “O my Father in heaven, what a Christmas!”

Downstairs, Aaron and Ralph were still gazing at one another in the dining-room when the crash came. At the noise of it they both exclaimed, but Ralph was the first in the hall. He saw there how the front door had given way under the tireless assaults of the storm, which, as if imbued with a conscious knowledge of its aim, had been driving like a battering-ram at the house since the return of Sybil and her brother. It might have been pursuing and hunting him down; the loosened leaves of invocation might have been infused—beyond any intention—with Henry's purpose, and the vague shapes whom Lothair Coningsby had thought he saw in the snow-swept roads might have been hammering with a more terrible intensity at the door which had closed behind him. At last those crashing buffets had torn lock and bolt from the doorpost; the door was flung back, and the invading masses of snow and wind swept in. The floor of the hall was covered before anyone could speak; the wind—if it were not rather the dance of searching shapes—swept into every corner. A picture or two on the walls were torn off and flung down lest they concealed the fugitive; tables were tossed about; an umbrella stand was kicked to the extreme end of the hall. A howl of disappointment went up, and the snow drove over the first few stairs, as if the pursuit was determined never to stop until its prey had been discovered.

Ralph gaped for a moment, then plunged for the door. “Come on!” he yelled. “Call everyone! Come and shut it.” He pulled it a little forward and was thrown back again along with it. “Come on!” he cried stentorianly to Aaron. “No time to waste! Call the others!”

But Aaron was stupefied. The comfortable reassurances in which he had clothed himself were torn away by the same giant hands that were wrecking his house. This was no unexpected winter storm, but supernaturally contrived death, and, whatever scope it had, this place was its center. If it were to sweep, eschatological and ultimate, over the world, that destruction was but an accident. The elementals, summoned from their symbols, were still half obedient to the will that had called them. His brain called to him to give him their desire, to take the stranger and throw him out beyond the threshold, that he might there be beaten and stunned and crushed and stifled and buried, a sacrifice now not to magical knowledge but to the very hope of life. And again his brain answered and told him that he could not, that the storm itself had brought to the stranger a friend and to himself two enemies. There was no one in the house but Henry who would do his bidding, and even if Henry could be found in the darkness where he had hidden himself, what could he and Henry do against Coningsby and his son? A more sinister thought leaped in his mind—what if Henry himself could be made the offering? might not these raging powers be satisfied with the body of the sorcerer who had invoked them? might not Coningsby and his son and he himself manage to make that offering? At least then Aaron Lee would be alive, and now nothing in the whole universe mattered but the safety of Aaron Lee. He looked wildly round, and then Ralph left the door and ran back to him, seizing his arm, and crying, “Call someone! We've got to shut the door and barricade it—then the windows! Hello, everybody!
Hello!
Come here! you're wanted!
Come
—
here
—
everyone!
”

The servants—which meant two maids and the cook—had come already, bursting into the hall from their own quarters and screaming that the back doors were broken down. One of the maids was hysterical with the continued roar of the blizzard and was screaming and howling continuously. The other, almost equally alarmed, was quieter, and it was on her that Ralph fixed.

“Hello!” he said, “come along! Look here, we've got to try and get the door held. We'll get a good big table and barge it to with that behind it, and someone else can get some rope or something. The dining-room table's best, don't you think? It's the biggest thing I've seen.” He had her by the arm and was rushing her to the dining-room. “O lor', won't anything keep that gramophoning misery behind us quiet? No, don't go back, for God's sake. Here—now smash everything off it—that's right! Oh don't stop to pick them up, girl!—What's your name? what? Amabel?—all right, Amabel, just pitch them off, so! Now this way—that's it! careful! careful! blast that leg!—sideways, I think—so; yes, so—gently; don't get flustered. Hark at the polish!” as the table-top screeched against the doorpost. They tottered out with it.

“Can I help, Ralph?” his aunt's voice said behind him. Sybil had been half upstairs when the door had given way, and she had come quickly back to the hall, but her arrival had been unnoticed in the feminine rush that had preceded it.

“Hello!” said Ralph breathlessly, as they fought to get the table long-side on to the storm; it was only the accident of a recess that had enabled them to get it out of the dining-room at all, and at the moment it was being driven steadily toward the stairs, with Ralph and Amabel holding on to it at each end, like the two victims who were dragged prisoners to the power of Set in the Tarot paintings. Sybil caught Amabel's end, and her extra weight brought the other round. Ralph was suddenly spun round in a quarter of a circle, and then they were all pushing towards the door. Ralph, over his shoulder, yelled at Aaron, the cook, and the hysterical maid, “Cord! Miles of cords!”

“Wouldn't it be easier to close the door first, Ralph?” Sybil said, looking back at him.

“Be
better
” Ralph said, “but easier? You try it.”

Sybil looked at Amabel. “Can you hold it?” she said. “I think if we shut the wind out first …” She let go of the table, went down the hall, took hold of the door, and pushed it gradually shut. “There,” she said, “that's what I meant. Don't you think that's simpler, Ralph?”

“Much,” said Ralph, a little astonished either at his aunt's suggestion or at her expert dealing with the door, he wasn't sure which; but he assumed there must have been a momentary lull. He and Amabel rushed the heavy table up and were just setting it with its broad top against the door as Ralph said, “Now we've only got to fix——” when another voice joined in. From high above them—“Fire!” called Mr. Coningsby. “Fire!”

The hall broke into chaos. Amabel, startled, let go her end of the table, which crashed to the ground only an inch from Sybil's foot. The hysterical maid broke into a noise like a whole zoölogical garden at once. The cook, who had been going steadily, and rather heavily, towards the stairs, stopped, turned to Aaron, and said, “Mr. Lee, sir, did you hear that?” Aaron ran to the stairs, and, checking at the bottom, cried out some incoherent question. Ralph said, in a penetrating shout, “What? What?” then in a much quieter voice he added, “Well, if it's fire, it's not much use barricading the door, is it? Look here, let's wedge it with that chair just for a moment till——”

“Fire!” Mr. Coningsby called out again.

“Go and see, Ralph,” Sybil said. “It may be a mistake.”

“Probably is,” Ralph answered. “Right ho, but let's just push that chair in here. Amabel bright-eyes, give it over here, will you? And then go and smother that foghorn. There, so. Another shove, aunt. So!”

Somehow the table and the heavy hall chair were wedged across the door. Ralph, letting go, looked at his barricade doubtfully. “It won't hold for more than a second,” he said, “but—I'll pop up and see what's biting him now. If there's really anything, I'll tell you.”

He shot off, and, overtaking Aaron half up the stairs, arrived with him on the landing where his father was restlessly awaiting them.

“It's that old woman,” Mr. Coningsby broke out at once to Aaron. “She's got into your private room, where the marionettes are, and there's a lot of smoke coming out. I don't suppose she's done much damage yet, but you'd better stop her. Come on, Ralph my boy, we may need you; there's a nasty violent ruffian with her, and I'm not strong enough to tackle him alone.”

As they ran down the corridor, Ralph heard another splintering crash from one of the rooms. “Window!” he thought. “This is looking nasty! Lord send it isn't a fire! Eh?”

The last syllable was a bewildered question. They had reached the door of Aaron's room, and there the strange apparition billowed—the golden mist swirled and surged before them. Its movement was not rapid, but it had already completely hidden from their sight the opposite wall, with its inner door, and was rolling gently over the large writing-table. It was exquisitely beautiful, and, though Ralph's first thought was that it certainly wasn't smoke, he couldn't think what it really was. He gaped at it; then he heard Aaron at his side give a piteous little squeal of despair. His father at the same time said, “I can't think why she doesn't come
out
. It's such a funny color.”

“Well,” Ralph said, “no good staring at it, is it? Look here, this is more important than the door; we'd better have a line of people to the—damn it, father, it can't be
smoke!
”

Mr. Coningsby only said, “Then what is it?”

“Well, if she's inside,” Ralph exclaimed, “I'm going in too. Look here, Mr. Lee …”

But Aaron was past speech or attention. He was staring in a paralyzed horror, giving little moans, and occasionally putting up his hands as if to ward off the approaching cloud. From within and from without the dangers surrounded him, and Henry was nowhere about, and he was alone. Within that cloud was Joanna—Joanna alone with the golden images of the dance, Joanna who thought he had kept them from her, who knew herself for the Mother of a mystical vengeance, who went calling day and night on her Divine Son to restore the unity of the god. What was happening? what was coming on him? what threat and fulfillment of threat was at hand?

Ralph thought, “The poor old chap's thoroughly upset; no wonder—it's a hectic day,” and went forward, turning to go round the table.

“Take care, my boy,” Mr. Coningsby said. “I'll come with you—I don't think it can be fire. Only then——What's the matter?”

Ralph, with an expression of increasing amazement, was moving his arms and legs about in front of the mist, rather as if he were posturing for a dance in front of a mirror. He said in a puzzled tone, “I can't get through. It's too thick.”

“Don't be asurd,” his father said. “It's quite obviously not
thick
. It's hardly more than a thin veil—of sorts.” He added the last two words because, as the rolling wonder approached them, it seemed here and there to open into vast depths of itself. Abysses and mountainous heights revealed themselves—masses of clouds were sweeping up. “Veil” perhaps was hardly the word.

Ralph was being driven back before it; he tried to force his hand through it, and he seemed to be feeling a thick treacle—only it wasn't sticky. It wasn't unpleasant; it was merely unpierceable. He gave way a step or two more. “Damned if I understand it,” he said.

Mr. Coningsby put up his own hand rather gingerly. He stretched it out—farther; it seemed to touch the mist, but he felt nothing—Farther, he couldn't see his hand or his wrist, still he felt something—Farther, something that felt exactly like another hand took hold of his lightly. He exclaimed, jerked his hand away, and sprang back. “What was that?” he said sharply.

Aaron was watching with growing horror the steady approach of the mist. But it was not merely the approach that troubled him; it was the change in it. The cloud was taking on form—he could not at first distinguish what the form was, and then at one point he suddenly realized he was looking at a moving hand, blocked out of the golden mist, working at something. It was the size of an ordinary man's hand, and then, while he looked, he missed it somehow, as a stain on a wall will be one minute a cat's head and the next but an irregular mark. But as he lifted his eyes he saw another—more like a slender woman's hand—from the wrist grasping upward at … at yet another hand that reached downward to it; and then those joining fingers had twisted together and became yet a third that moved up and down as if hammering and as it moved was covered and hidden by the back of a fourth.

His gaze swept the gathering cloud; everywhere it was made up of hands, whose shape was formed by it, and yet it was not the mist that formed them, for they were the mist. Everywhere those restless hands billowed forward; of all sizes, in all manner of movement, clasping, holding, striking, fighting, smoothing, climbing, thrusting out, drawing back, joining and disjoining, heaving upward, dragging down, appearing and disappearing, a curtain of activity falling over other activity; hands, and everywhere hands. Here and there the golden shimmer dulled into tints of ordinary flesh, then that was lost again, and the aureate splendor everywhere shone. The hands were working in the stuff, yet the stuff which they wrought was also hands, so that their purpose was foiled and thwarted and the workers became a part of that which was worked upon. Over and below and about the table the swelling and sinking curtain of mystery swept—if it were not rather through it, for it did not seem to divide or separate the movement, and the cloud seemed to break from it on the side nearest Aaron, just as it filled all the air round. The room was hidden behind it, nearer and nearer to the door it came, and the three were driven back before it.