A Little Treachery

1

Catherine Hare came downstairs while it was still dark on an April morning, when there was a loud crying of birds from the woods. She went down the stairs very quietly, as she had done several times during the night, until she was in the little kitchen and before the door opening out of it into the other room in the basement, which they had called the garden room; the only comparatively quiet place in the house, so that she had put up a bed there. Now a fearful silence welled from that room. It was not sleep which so held its breath. No one slept. No one was dead.

But, after all, she could not face it, and turning at the foot of the basement stairs, which had led her straight down into the kitchen, she crept up again. She had not the courage, her utmost effort could not nerve her, to pursue to its end the impulse which had brought her to that point.

When she regained the top floor, she stood on a landing not more than three feet square. Two doors facing each other opened off this, and a vague lightening of the air, hardly to be called light yet, a mere thinning of opacity, showed the staircase to some extent, a precipitous little staircase between walls. The right-angled turn at its lower end was also visible, for it led directly into the room, the middle room on the road level, and there was a window just inside. This, with undrawn curtains, also admitted the nascent light. In that room was the front door. The cottage stood on the main road, without garden or railing, so that one stepped directly on to the pavement, and in spite of the hour some heavy vehicle now and again shook its ancient, odd, misshapen little frame, lights swivelled across the ceilings and walls, and she was obliged to strain her ears against these mechanical sounds and wait tensely for them to subside. Her senses were all stretched. She was conscious of that faint, ancient smell, vague and at the same time a little repellent, the origin of which they had never traced; ‘old Flytton’s pipe,’ they had jokingly called it in the early days. But of course it was due to dampness in one form or another – damp out of the hill in the side of which the lowest floor of the little house was embedded, which crept and crept through the soft old bricks and the big, crumbling blocks of barstone, climbed and delved and mouldered the timbers, preparing them for the worm, for the powdery draperies of the fungus, disastrously pervading the whole of its substance; damp which no fires could counteract.

But, above all, she was listening. The birds sang louder, many new voices came in with their own lays to swell the wild jubilate, so that she, who had delighted in this piping up of the sun, thinking it the loveliest sound on earth, and had thirsted for so many years of town life to hear it, was pierced by a fleeting presentiment that she would never again hear it without horror.

The cottage, the whole building of three floors, was little more than ten feet from front to back, the depth of each small room. Its structure was curious, highly individual; and therefore it was easily thought of as a whole, as an organism. She felt it like that – acutely at this moment. Looking down into the dark, she felt the little, deep house beneath her, with its two cramped, breakneck staircases, as a fact of great weight, heavy significance. She thought of it as a thing which had played a dreadful part, a thing which could fitly be placed in one of those police museums where they show murderers’ weapons.

Her awakening had been a sudden one. She had been sleeping heavily, in emotional exhaustion, and she had been roused in an odd manner; in fact, by a human voice. The house being so close upon the pavement, occasionally in the dead of the night the voices of belated passers-by would suddenly burst in on them through an open window with startling effect; sometimes as mere sound, the cause of the awakening, sometimes an intelligible word or two reaching them. Tonight, still half asleep, she had heard someone on the pavement say, in a low, bass, vigorous voice: ‘Come on, no pity, brothers; get your whips!’

The voice had been real enough, no doubt; but the words, which her waking judgment saw to be impossible, and in fact at once recognized for words recently read and noted with fear and trembling because their frightful aptness was suddenly perceived, were of course only the syllables which her brain, involved in woeful dream, had matched to certain sounds. She had heard the walkers’ feet on the pavement – they were already out of sight.

Now, while she stood on the landing, it was first very still, and then a few lorries thundered past. And the house trembled.

Surely there was some sound down there? A faint creaking, perhaps some stuff brushing against a wall, or the slight jar of a cupboard door giving against a loose latch, shaken ever so little by a tread? She listened, paralysed, forgetting almost to breathe, in stifling anguish. Yet why ‘by a tread’? Vibration was always at its destructive work among these old bricks and timbers. The little house was being shaken to death by this continuous vibration caused by the heavy traffic, which in the day-time was unceasing, with which its builders of more than three hundred years ago had never reckoned. When the lorries had passed, there was another long, monstrously heavy silence.

Then down below on the garden floor a clock could be heard striking with a deep, pleasant tone. The notes welled up, full and round, through the silence, like a voice raised naturally, the voice of someone whose presence was known to her, as if a familiar companion down there had called up the stairs to her some commonplace remark; some safe, comforting commonplace.

And a dreadful bewilderment came over her. For, ‘There’s the clock,’ her thought ran, childishly, meaning: ‘The clock we have heard together from childhood. A voice which we two have known all our lives. Then how can all this be?’ And she seized upon the childish argument; the terrible constriction slackened for an instant. There was something which was as it had always been. Then the rest, too –? But the feeble fallacy gaped wide.

In the dark and the terrible silence down in that room, was one with whom she had lived all her life; who had always sustained, helped and protected her with an unfailing kindness, almost angelic; who had been overjoyed at the safeguarded future for her which this little house had promised; who had planned it all for her with tenderest care; one who had been passionately grateful to heaven for what had seemed a blessing.

She turned back into her room, turned with a blundering movement as if dizzy, flung back with a frantic hand the half-drawn curtain, ready to cry out for help to any living creature. Looking over the flight of steps leading down to the back of the cottages, she could see far down the road. It was empty. As usual, as always, there was no help anywhere. But her thoughts were all disordered, they seemed deranged, she could not think to any purpose. When she turned her head to the left, she had a sidelong view which disclosed a landscape of garden plots, hillside and wood lying under the paling sky in the first faint light. White gleams showed a big expanse of water at a little distance; she saw one of the swans gliding slowly over the lake. The water, and the progress of this silent creature, which seemed to move in its sleep, amidst the thick shades of the encompassing bushes looked infinitely calm and like something very remote or happening in another world; a world suddenly lost for ever.

She did no more than glance at the scene. Her heart died within her. She dropped the curtain and threw herself face down on the bed. She was no longer a vessel of straining senses; physical alertness had dropped from her. She had fallen below despair, almost to insensibility. Only she pressed her hands over her ears to shut out the joyful songs of the birds.

Almost at once, though, her consciousness was as it were kicked to its feet, shaken free of these merciful fumes and forced to resume a fearful march. The despair in which she had originally closed her eyes an hour or so before, rather than her power to combat it, seemed to have been revivified by sleep; and at the centre of her being a small, writhing creature, terrified past reasoning, once more sent up its senseless wail.

A broken, trembling and child-like creature it was which humbly pleaded: ‘It is impossible. Lord, to do this to us twice in a lifetime!’