The Garden at No. 19/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
I GET A FRIGHT
I HAD been in No.20 some three weeks before I saw anything of the dwellers at No. 19. Then one evening as I came into the gate of my little front garden, on my return from the office, the door of No. 19 opened and a slip of a girl came out. I raised my hat, for it seemed only neighborly, and she bowed. We looked at one another curiously as she paused on the step. She looked to me to be about sixteen, and her face attracted me. Her skin was of a warm pallor, almost a golden pallor; and for the first time I understood what Theocritus meant by the epithet "honey-pale." Her features were delicate and clean-cut. Her nose was a little tip-tilted; her lips were full, a little voluptuous, a little sensitive, and very scarlet in her pale face. Her eyes were brown, and too large for her face. A mass of dark hair framed it, very soft hair, drawn together at the back, tied with a piece of ribbon, and falling below her waist. She had something of a shy air, and I had a strong impression that I was looking at a creature of the woodland, a wild creature, akin to the nymphs the Greeks knew. It was an odd impression for a lawyer to have, and I was rather surprised by it.
It seemed to me that a light of recognition gathered in her eyes as she looked at me. Yet I was sure that I had never seen her before. I could not have forgotten her face if I had.
It takes some time to write this down, but I suppose that we did not look at one another for as long as ten seconds; and she went out of her gate and down the street. I turned round and, leaning over my gate, looked after her. I saw that she moved with a light grace quite in keeping with her air of a shy creature of the woodland.
Her face came back to me several times during the evening. Indeed I took my Theocritus from the shelf and read about the honey-pale shepherdess.
I began to take interest in my neighbors. I could not see into the garden of No. 19 from my garden because on the other side of the close-set paling between them was a thick privet hedge over seven feet high, and right down on to the hedge came a thick screen of the lower branches of the row of sycamores which run between the two gardens. I could not even see much of it from the top windows at the back of my house, for besides the sycamore screen along the side it was full of a mass of shrubs grown high and tangled, deodoras and Wellingtonias. In the middle of the tangle rose a little cupola roof some seven feet across. It was gray; and I could not tell whether it was made of marble, or painted wood, or stucco. It stood about twelve feet high. I could not see what it covered.
A few days later I saw another of my neighbors, an old man, sixty years old at least; and his big frame stooped. But I did not think that he was bowed by weakness, for all of his face which was not hidden by his high-growing gray beard was ruddy with a strong glow of health. It might very well have been the face of a sea-captain. I wondered if his stoop had been caused by too much reading like the stoop I was straightening out by lawn tennis. It seemed likely, for he wore the clothes, baggy at the elbows and knees, of a careless student, though I saw that they must have been cut by a good tailor. He passed me in the Walden road without a glance, his brow knitted in a thoughtful frown. I resolved to make his acquaintance, if I could. He looked as if he had interesting things to tell; besides, if I made his acquaintance, I should come to know his daughter—I took her to be his daughter; and that I was growing eager to do.
Several times I met her about Hertford Park, shopping, or on some errand. I always raised my hat to her. Always she bowed; and always the light grace with which she moved awoke afresh my admiration.
One evening I heard her singing in their garden, singing softly to the accompaniment of the clicking whir of a sewing machine as she worked. It was a sweet voice of a delightful tone; and it made me more eager to make her acquaintance. I stopped reading to listen to her. A sense of the loneliness of my life came on me as I listened; and I wished that I could go and talk to her while she worked. I had never known well a girl or a woman, since I had fallen as a boy out of my old world. Into the contracted life of the solitary clerk, nice women rarely enter; and the relation of the adventures of my fellow clerks with shop girls and other of the dollymop type had never tempted me to seek that diversion. The women of the boarding-houses in which I had lived seemed to spend their lives in expeditions to get a glimpse of some royal person, or in attending drapers' sales. I felt that the child next door would be nice and sympathetic to talk to. And then I should watch her face while we talked.
It was some ten days after Vincent had talked to me about the queerness of the Walden road that I had my first experience of it. It was on a Sunday afternoon. The day was still and stifling hot; and it seemed to me best not to go to the tennis club till after tea. I hauled my comfortable easy chair out into the garden, and read that delightful book, "The Plea of Pan."
I had read for half an hour perhaps, when I was disturbed by a flight of shrilly chirping sparrows from the sycamores of No. 19. I looked after them and observed that they flew uncommonly fast and straight for sparrows, as if they had been badly frightened. My eyes were seeking the page again when another movement caught them; and a big rat, a middle-sized rat, and two small rats ran out from under the palings of No. 19, helter skelter across my garden, and disappeared among the plants on the other side of it. I have never seen rats run so fast; and I stared, astonished, at the place where they had vanished.
As I stared I thought I heard an odd, faint, coughing grunt in the garden of No. 19, the grunt of some animal to which I could not put a name. It was a nasty sound.
And then a cold chill ran down my back, the cold chill that sometimes runs down your back late at night when you go upstairs in the dark after reading a gruesome tale. It is a hateful feeling at any time, but in the staring sunshine of that hot afternoon it was beyond words hateful.
I rose from my chair, dropping "The Plea of Pan," and stood shivering in horrid fear—I did not know of what—and a cold sweat broke out on me. I was in a daze of terror; my mind would not work; I tried to grasp what was happening, listening with all my ears.
Then my wits cleared a little; and I heard, or fancied I heard, a movement in the garden of No. 19; a quiet movement, a faint dragging, brushing movement; and I had an impression—it was not as much as a vision—of a hideous, shapeless, sluggish beast, drawing its pendulous belly over turf. It was moving towards the house.
I stood gasping. Then there came a sharp cry from the dining room of No. 19; and the girl's voice, shrill and full of fear, cried, "Uncle! Uncle! There's something horrible in the garden!"
I heard the sound of heavy footsteps, hurrying in the house; they crunched on the gravel of the garden path; stopped short; and a man's voice, deep and angry, rose loud on the air.
I did not know the tongue in which he spoke. It sounded like a barbarous Latin jargon. But he was uttering a remonstrance, or an adjuration, or even an exorcism, in a deep chanting tone which presently sank to the quick muttering of a priest reciting a liturgy. Two words I caught, several times repeated; I am sure that they were in abyssum.
Then the muttering ceased; and I knew that the air had been full of unspeakable horror, and that it was clear again.
"What ever was it?" I cried in a high, shaky voice.
There was a pause; then the man said in a hoarse, rasping voice, "What was what?"
"The beast in your garden."
"There is no beast in my garden."
I lost my temper at the quibble; for my nerves were indeed on edge:—
"Damn you!" I cried. "You've sent it back to the Abyss. See that it stops there, will you!"
"I don't know what you're talking about," said the man.
"Oh, yes, you do. Do you think I couldn't follow any of your bastard Latin? Keep the damned thing in the Abyss!"
"Bastard Latin, eh? You know a good deal for Hertford Park. But I don't think you'd better talk about it. There are lunatic asylums in Christian England," he jeered with a chuckle.
My gust of temper had blown itself out; and my curiosity was awakening. I hesitated; then I said: "What is the date of that Latin?"
"Ah, that's better. That's the true spirit of the scholar," he jeered. "But what's it doing in Hertford Park? Try the twelfth century."
He went into the house; and I heard the glass top of the dining-room door jingle as he shut it behind him.
I stood still for a minute or two, letting my whirling mind grow yet clearer. Then I became aware that a sickly, loathsome smell, a smell I did not know and never wanted to know again, hung on the air of the garden. I turned a little sick; and I was wringing wet with cold sweat.
I walked down to the house; and as I passed the kitchen window Mrs. Ringrose looked out of it, with a half-peeled potato in her hand, and said: "They've bin burning rubbidge again at the top of the road—on a Sunday, too. It ought to be stopped, sir; it ought really."
I went into the house laughing hysterically.