Chapter 1

THE RETURN OF THE SOUL

By Robert S. Hichens

1896

“I have been here before, But when, or how, I cannot tell!”

Rossetti.

I.

_Tuesday Night, November 3rd_.

Theories! What is the good of theories? They are the scourges that lash
our minds in modern days, lash them into confusion, perplexity, despair.
I have never been troubled by them before. Why should I be troubled by
them now? And the absurdity of Professor Black’s is surely obvious. A
child would laugh at it. Yes, a child! I have never been a diary writer.
I have never been able to understand the amusement of sitting down
late at night and scrawling minutely in some hidden book every paltry
incident of one’s paltry days. People say it is so interesting to read
the entries years afterwards. To read, as a man, the _menu_ that I ate
through as a boy, the love-story that I was actor in, the tragedy that I
brought about, the debt that I have never paid--how could it profit me?
To keep a diary has always seemed to me merely an addition to the ills
of life. Yet now I have a hidden book, like the rest of the world, and I
am scrawling in it to-day. Yes, but for a reason.

I want to make things clear to myself, and I find, as others, that
my mind works more easily with the assistance of the pen. The actual
tracing of words on paper dispels the clouds that cluster round my
thoughts. I shall recall events to set my mind at ease, to prove to
myself how absurd a man who could believe in Professor Black would
be. “Little Dry-as-dust” I used to call him ‘Dry’? He is full of wild
romance, rubbish that a school-girl would be ashamed to believe in. Yet
he is abnormally clever; his record proves that. Still, clever men are
the first to be led astray, they say. It is the searcher who follows the
wandering light. What he says can’t be true. When I have filled these
pages, and read what I have written dispassionately, as one of the
outside public might read, I shall have done, once for all, with the
ridiculous fancies that are beginning to make my life a burden. To put
my thoughts in order will make a music. The evil spirit within me will
sleep, will die. I shall be cured. It must be so--it shall be so.

To go back to the beginning. Ah! what a long time ago that seems! As a
child I was cruel. Most boys are cruel, I think. My school companions
were a merciless set--merciless to one another, to their masters when
they had a chance, to animals, to birds. The desire to torture was
in nearly all of them. They loved to bully, and if they bullied only
mildly, it was from fear, not from love. They did not wish their
boomerang to return and slay them. If a boy were deformed, they twitted
him. If a master were kind, or gentle, or shy, they made his life as
intolerable as they could. If an animal or a bird came into their power,
they had no pity. I was like the rest; indeed, I think that I was worse.
Cruelty is horrible. I have enough imagination to do more than know
that--to feel it.

Some say that it is lack of imagination which makes men and women
brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is
lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well as the
torturer.

As a child I was cruel by nature, by instinct. I was a handsome,
well-bred, gentlemanlike, gentle-looking little brute. My parents adored
me, and I was good to them. They were so kind to me that I was almost
fond of them. Why not? It seemed to me as politic to be fond of them as
of anyone else. I did what I pleased, but I did not always let them
know it; so I pleased them. The wise child will take care to foster
the ignorance of its parents. My people were pretty well off, and I was
their only child; but my chief chances of future pleasure in life were
centred in my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She was immensely
rich, and she lived here. This room in which I am writing now was her
favourite sitting-room. On that hearth, before a log fire, such as is
burning at this moment, used to sit that wonderful cat of hers--that
horrible cat! Why did I ever play my childish cards to win this house,
this place? Sometimes, lately--very lately only--I have wondered, like a
fool perhaps. Yet would Professor Black say so? I remember, as a boy of
sixteen, paying my last visit here to my grandmother. It bored me very
much to come. But she was said to be near death, and death leaves great
houses vacant for others to fill. So when my mother said that I had
better come, and my father added that he thought my grandmother was
fonder of me than of my other relations, I gave up all my boyish plans
for the holidays with apparent willingness. Though almost a child, I was
not short-sighted. I knew every boy had a future as well as a present. I
gave up my plans, and came here with a smile; but in my heart I hated my
grandmother for having power, and so bending me to relinquish pleasure
for boredom. I hated her, and I came to her and kissed her, and saw her
beautiful white Persian cat sitting before the fire in this room, and
thought of the fellow who was my bosom friend, and with whom I longed
to be, shooting, or fishing, or riding. And I looked at the cat again.
I remember it began to purr when I went near to it. It sat quite still,
with its blue eyes fixed upon the fire, but when I approached it I
heard it purr complacently. I longed to kick it. The limitations of its
ridiculous life satisfied it completely. It seemed to reproduce in an
absurd, diminished way my grandmother in her white lace cap, with her
white face and hands. She sat in her chair all day and looked at the
fire. The cat sat on the hearthrug and did the same. The cat seemed to
me the animal personification of the human being who kept me chained
from all the sports and pleasures I had promised myself for the
holidays. When I went near to the cat, and heard it calmly purring at
me, I longed to do it an injury. It seemed to me as if it understood
what my grandmother did not, and was complacently triumphing at my
voluntary imprisonment with age, and laughing to itself at the pains
men--and boys--will undergo for the sake of money. Brute! I did not love
my grandmother, and she had money. I hated the cat utterly. It hadn’t a
_sou!_

This beautiful house is not old. My grandfather built it himself. He had
no love for the life of towns, I believe, but was passionately in touch
with nature, and, when a young man, he set out on a strange tour through
England. His object was to find a perfect view, and in front of that
view he intended to build himself a habitation. For nearly a year, so I
have been told, he wandered through Scotland and England, and at last
he came to this place in Cumberland, to this village, to this very spot.
Here his wanderings ceased. Standing on the terrace--then uncultivated
forest--that runs in front of these windows, he found at last what he
desired. He bought the forest. He bought the windings of the river,
the fields upon its banks, and on the extreme edge of the steep gorge
through which it runs he built the lovely dwelling that to-day is mine.

This place is no ordinary place. It is characteristic in the highest
degree. The house is wonderfully situated, with the ground falling
abruptly in front of it, the river forming almost a horseshoe round it.
The woods are lovely. The garden, curiously, almost wildly, laid out, is
like no other garden I ever saw. And the house, though not old, is full
of little surprises, curiously shaped rooms, remarkable staircases,
quaint recesses. The place is a place to remember. The house is a house
to fix itself in the memory. Nothing that had once lived here could ever
come back and forget that it had been here. Not even an animal--not even
an animal.

I wish I had never gone to that dinnerparty and met the Professor. There
was a horror coming upon me then. He has hastened its steps. He has put
my fears into shape, my vague wondering into words. Why cannot men leave
life alone? Why will they catch it by the throat and wring its secrets
from it? To respect reserve is one of the first instincts of the
gentleman; and life is full of reserve.

It is getting very late. I thought I heard a step in the house just
now. I wonder--I wonder if _she_ is asleep. I wish I knew. Day after
day passed by. My grandmother seemed to be failing, but almost
imperceptibly. She evidently loved to have me near to her. Like most old
dying people, in her mind she frantically clutched at life, that could
give to her nothing more; and I believe she grew to regard me as the
personification of all that was leaving her. My vitality warmed her. She
extended her hands to my flaming hearthfire. She seemed trying to live
in my life, and at length became afraid to let me out of her sight.
One day she said to me, in her quavering, ugly voice--old voices are so
ugly, like hideous echoes:

“Ronald, I could never die while you were in the room. So long as you
are with me, where I can touch you, I shall live.”

And she put out her white, corrugated hand, and fondled my warm boy’s
hand.

How I longed to push her hand away, and get out into the sunlight and
the air, and hear young voices, the voices of the morning, not of the
twilight, and be away from wrinkled Death, that seemed sitting on the
doorstep of that house huddled up like a beggar, waiting for the door to
be opened!

I was bored till I grew malignant. I confess it. And, feeling malignant,
I began to long more and more passionately to vent myself on someone or
something. I looked at the cat, which, as usual, was sitting before the
fire.

Animals have intuitions as keen as those of a woman, keener than those
of a man. They inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them from a
long line of ancestors who have suffered at the hands of cruel men.
They can tell by a look, by a motion, by the tone of a voice, whether
to expect from anyone kindness or malignity. The cat had purred
complacently on the first day of my arrival, and had hunched up her
white, furry back towards my hand, and had smiled with her calm,
light-blue eyes. Now, when I approached her, she seemed to gather
herself together and to make herself small. She shrank from me. There
was--as I fancied--a dawning comprehension, a dawning terror in her blue
eyes. She always sat very close to my grandmother now, as if she sought
protection, and she watched me as if she were watching for an intention
which she apprehended to grow in my mind.

And the intention came.

For, as the days went on, and my grandmother still lived, I began to
grow desperate. My holiday time was over now, but my parents wrote
telling me to stay where I was, and not to think of returning to school.
My grandmother had caused a letter to be sent to them in which she said
that she could not part from me, and added that my parents would never
have cause to regret interrupting my education for a time. “He will be
paid in full for every moment he loses,” she wrote, referring to me.

It seemed a strange taste in her to care so much for a boy, but she had
never loved women, and I was handsome, and she liked handsome faces. The
brutality in my nature was not written upon my features. I had smiling,
frank brown eyes, a lithe young figure, a gay boy’s voice. My movements
were quick, and I have always been told that my gestures were never
awkward, my demeanour was never unfinished, as is the case so often with
lads at school. Outwardly I was attractive; and the old woman, who had
married two husbands merely for their looks, delighted in feeling that
she had the power to retain me by her side at an age when most boys
avoid old people as if they were the pestilence.

And then I pretended to love her, and obeyed all her insufferably
tiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same.
My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my holidays,
was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He wrote to
me furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching me for my
selfishness and lack of affection.

Each time I received one I looked at the cat, and the cat shrank nearer
to my grandmother’s chair.

It never purred now, and nothing would induce it to leave the room where
she sat. One day the servant said to me:

“I believe the poor dumb thing knows my mistress can’t last very much
longer, sir. The way that cat looks up at her goes to my heart. Ah! them
beasts understand things as well as we do, I believe.”

I think the cat understood quite well. It did watch my grandmother in
a very strange way, gazing up into her face, as if to mark the changing
contours, the increasing lines, the down-droop of the features, that
bespoke the gradual soft approach of death. It listened to the sound of
her voice; and as, each day, the voice grew more vague, more weak and
toneless, an anxiety that made me exult dawned and deepened in its blue
eyes. Or so I thought.

I had a great deal of morbid imagination at that age, and loved to weave
a web of fancies, mostly horrible, around almost everything that entered
into my life. It pleased me to believe that the cat understood each new
intention that came into my mind, read me silently from its place
near the fire, tracked my thoughts, and was terror-stricken as they
concentrated themselves round a definite resolve, which hardened and
toughened day by day.

It pleased me to believe, do I say? I did really believe, and do believe
now, that the cat understood all, and grew haggard with fear as my
grandmother failed visibly. For it knew what the end would mean for it.

That first day of my arrival, when I saw my grandmother in her white
cap, with her white face and hands, and the big white cat sitting
near to her, I had thought there was a similarity between them. That
similarity struck me more forcibly, grew upon me, as my time in the
house grew longer, until the latter seemed almost a reproduction of
the former, and after each letter from my friend my hate for the two
increased. But my hate for my grandmother was impotent, and would always
be so. I could never repay her for the _ennui_, the furious, forced
inactivity which made my life a burden, and spurred my bad passions
while they lulled me in a terrible, enforced repose. I could repay her
favourite, the thing she had always cherished, her feline confidant,
who lived in safety under the shadow of her protection. I could wreak my
fury on that when the protection was withdrawn, as it must be at last.
It seemed to my brutal, imaginative, unfinished boy’s mind that the
murder of her pet must hurt and wound my grandmother even after she was
dead. I would make her suffer then, when she was impotent to wreak a
vengeance upon me. I would kill the cat.

The creature knew my resolve the day I made it, and had even, I should
say, anticipated it.

As I sat day after day beside my grandmother’s armchair in the dim room,
with the blinds drawn to shut out the summer sunlight, and talked to her
in a subdued and reverent voice, agreeing with all the old banalities
she uttered, all the preposterous opinions she propounded, all the
commands she laid upon me, I gazed beyond her at the cat, and the
creature was haggard with apprehension.

It knew, as I knew, that its day was coming. Sometimes I bent down and
took it up on my lap to please my grandmother, and praised its beauty
and its gentleness to her And all the time I felt its warm, furry body
trembling with horror between my hands. This pleased me, and I pretended
that I was never happy unless it was on my knees. I kept it there for
hours, stroking it so tenderly, smoothing its thick white coat, which
was always in the most perfect order, talking to it, caressing it.

And sometimes I took its head between my two hands, turned its face to
mine, and stared into its large blue eyes. Then I could read all its
agony, all its torture of apprehension: and in spite of my friend’s
letters, and the dulness of my days, I was almost happy.

The summer was deepening, the glow of the roses flushed the garden ways,
the skies were clear above Scawfell, when the end at last drew near.
My grandmother’s face was now scarcely recognizable. The eyes were sunk
deep in her head. All expression seemed to fade gradually away. Her
cheeks were no longer fine ivory white; a dull, sickening, yellow pallor
overspread them. She seldom looked at me now, but rested entombed in her
great armchair, her shrunken limbs seeming to tend downwards, as if she
were inclined to slide to the floor and die there. Her lips were thin
and dry, and moved perpetually in a silent chattering, as if her mind
were talking and her voice were already dead. The tide of life was
retreating from her body. I could almost see it visibly ebb away. The
failing waves made no sound upon the shore. Death is uncanny, like all
silent things.

Her maid wished her to stay entirely in bed, but she would get up,
muttering that she was well; and the doctor said it was useless to
hinder her. She had no specific disease. Only the years were taking
their last toll of her. So she was placed in her chair each day by the
fire, and sat there till evening, muttering with those dry lips. The
stiff folds of her silken skirts formed an angle, and there the cat
crouched hour after hour, a silent, white, waiting thing.

And the waves ebbed and ebbed away, and I waited too.

One afternoon, as I sat by my grandmother, the servant entered with
a letter for me just arrived by the post. I took it up. It was from
Willoughby, my school-friend. He said the term was over, that he had
left school, and his father had decided to send him out to America to
start in business in New York, instead of entering him at Oxford as he
had hoped. He bade me good-bye, and said he supposed we should not meet
again for years; “but,” he added, “no doubt you won’t care a straw, so
long as you get the confounded money you’re after. You’ve taught me one
of the lessons of life, young Ronald--never to believe in friendship.”

As I read the letter I set my teeth. All that was good in my nature
centred round Willoughby. He was a really fine fellow. I honestly and
truly loved him. His news gave me a bitter shock, and turned my heart to
iron and to fire. Perhaps I should never see him again; even if I did,
time would have changed him, seared him--my friend, in his wonderful
youth, with the morning in his eyes, would be no more. I hated myself in
that moment for having stayed; I hated still more her who had kept me.
For the moment I was carried out of myself. I crushed the letter up in
my burning hand. I turned fiercely round upon that yellow, enigmatic,
dying figure in the great chair. All the fury, locked within my heart
for so long, rose to the surface, and drove self-interest away. I turned
upon my grandmother with blazing eyes and trembling limbs. I opened my
mouth to utter a torrent of reproachful words, when--what was it?--what
slight change had stolen into the wrinkled, yellow face? I bent over
her. The eyes gazed at me, but so horribly! She sat so low in her chair;
she looked so fearful, so very strange. I put my fingers on her eyelids;
I drew them down over the eyeballs: they did not open again. I felt her
withered hands: they were ice. Then I knew, and I felt myself smiling. I
leaned over the dead woman. There, on the far side of her, crouched the
cat. Its white fur was all bristling; its blue eyes were dilated; on its
jaws there were flecks of foam.

I leaned over the dead woman and took it in my arms.

*****

That was nearly twenty years ago, and yet to-night the memory of that
moment, and what followed it, bring a fear to my heart which I must
combat. I have read of men who lived for long spaces of time haunted
by demons created by their imagination, and I have laughed at them and
pitied them. Surely I am not going to join in their folly, in their
madness, led to the gates of terror by my own fancies, half-confirmed,
apparently, by the chance utterances of a conceited Professor--a man of
fads, although a man of science.

That was twenty years ago. After to-night let me forget it. After
to-night, do I say? Hark! the birds are twittering in the dew outside.
The pale, early sun-shafts strike over the moors. And I am tired.
To-morrow night I will finish this wrestle with my own folly; I will
give the _coup de grâce_ to my imagination.. But no more now. My brain
is not calm, and I will not write in excitement.

II.

_Wednesday Night, November 4th_.

Margot has gone to bed at last, and I am alone. This has been a horrible
day--horrible; but I will not dwell upon it.

After the death of my grandmother, I went back to school again. But
Willoughby was gone, and he could not forgive me. He wrote to me once or
twice from New York, and then I ceased to hear from him. He died out of
my life. His affection for me had evidently declined from the day when
he took it into his head that I was only a money-grubber, like the
rest of the world, and that the Jew instinct had developed in me at an
abnormally early age. I let him go. What did it matter? But I was always
glad that I had been cruel on the day my grandmother died. I never
repented of what I did--never. If I had, I might be happier now.

I went back to school. I studied, played, got into mischief and out of
it again, like other boys; but in my life there seemed to be an eternal
coldness, that I alone, perhaps, was conscious of. My deed of cruelty,
of brutal revenge on the thing that had never done me injury, had
seared my soul. I was not sorry, but t could not forget; and sometimes
I thought--how ridiculous it looks written down!--that there was a power
hidden somewhere which could not forget either, and that a penalty might
have to be paid. Because a creature is dumb, must its soul die when it
dies? Is not the soul, perhaps--as _he_ said--a wanderer through many
bodies?

But if I did not kill a soul, as I killed a body, the day my grandmother
died, where is that soul now? That is what I want to arrive at, that is
what I must arrive at, if I am to be happy.

I went back to school, and I passed to Oxford. I tasted the strange,
unique life of a university, narrow, yet pulsating, where the youth,
that is so green and springing, tries to arm itself for the battle with
the weapons forged by the dead and sharpened by the more elderly among
the living. I did well there, and I passed on into the world. And then
at last I began to understand the value of my inheritance; for all that
had been my grandmother’s was now mine. My people wished me to marry,
but I had no desire to fetter myself. So I took the sponge in my strong,
young hands, and tried to squeeze it dry. And I did not know that I was
sad--I did not know it until, at the age of thirty-three, just seventeen
years after my grandmother died, I understood the sort of thing
happiness is. Of course, it was love that brought to me understanding.
I need not explain that. I had often played on love; now love began to
play on me. I trembled at the harmonies his hands evoked.

I met a young girl, very young, just on the verge of life and of
womanhood. She was seventeen when I first saw her, and she was valsing
at a big ball in London--her first ball. She passed me in the crowd
of dancers, and I noticed her. As she was a _debutante_ her dress was
naturally snow-white. There was no touch of colour about it--not a
flower, not a jewel. Her hair was the palest yellow I had almost ever
seen--the colour of an early primrose. Naturally fluffy, it nearly
concealed the white riband that ran through it, and clustered in
tendrils and tiny natural curls upon her neck. Her skin was whiter than
ivory--a clear, luminous white. Her eyes were very large and china-blue
in colour.

This young girl dancing passed and repassed me, and my glance rested
on her idly, even cynically. For she seemed so happy, and at that time
happiness won my languid wonder, if ingenuously exhibited. To be happy
seemed almost to be mindless. But by degrees I found myself watching
this girl, and more closely. Another dance began. She joined it with
another partner. But she seemed just as pleased with him as with her
former one. She would not let him pause to rest; she kept him dancing
all the time, her youth and freshness spoken in that gentle compelling.
I grew interested in her, even acutely so. She seemed to me like the
spirit of youth dancing over the body of Time. I resolved to know her. I
felt weary; I thought she might revive me. The dance drew to an end,
and I approached my hostess, pointed the girl out, and asked for an
introduction. Her name was Margot Magendie, I found, and she was an
heiress as well as a beauty.

I did not care. It was her humanity that drew me, nothing else.

But; strange to say, when the moment for the introduction arrived, and I
stood face to face with Miss Magendie, I felt an extraordinary shrinking
from her. I have never been able to understand it, but my blood ran
cold, and my pulses almost ceased to beat. I would have avoided her; an
instinct within me seemed suddenly to cry out against her. But it was
too late: the introduction was effected; her hand rested on my arm.

I was actually trembling. She did not appear to notice it. The band
played a valse, and the inexplicable horror that had seized me lost
itself in the gay music. It never returned until lately.

I seldom enjoyed a valse more. Our steps suited so perfectly, and her
obvious childish pleasure communicated itself to me. The spirit of youth
in her knocked on my rather jaded heart, and I opened to it. That was
beautiful and strange. I talked with her, and I felt myself younger,
ingenuous rather than cynical, inclined even to a radiant, though
foolish, optimism. She was very natural, very imperfect in worldly
education, full of fragmentary but decisive views on life, quite
unabashed in giving them forth, quite inconsiderate in summoning my
adherence to them.

And then, presently, as we sat in a dim corridor under a rosy hanging
lamp, in saying something she looked, with her great blue eyes, right
into my face. Some very faint recollection awoke and stirred in my mind.

“Surely,” I said hesitatingly--“surely I have seen you before? It seems
to me that I remember your eyes.”

As I spoke I was thinking hard, chasing the vagrant recollection that
eluded me.

She smiled.

“You don’t remember my face?”

“No, not at all.”

“Nor I yours. If we had seen each other, surely we should recollect it.”

Then she blushed, suddenly realizing that her words implied, perhaps,
more than she had meant. I did not pay the obvious compliment.