A Little Treachery

8

The summer broke up early that year and in the autumn there were abnormal rains. They moved about the cottage, bundled in wraps, and chills were apt to seize them as soon as they were away from the fireside; the creeping chills from the damp walls. They developed unwonted aches in the limbs. And they were often surprised, on going out of doors, to discover how mild the day was.

The rain fell steadily, often in alarming torrents. New pools formed in the thickets. Now that the long grass and the weeds were shrivelled and flattened, all the gardens were clearly seen to be veined with ditches, and sometimes in a half light, when the sky was white and cold, the whole bottom of the valley had the appearance of being laced with silver. The little Berle sped fleet and brimming. Everything ran with moisture, everything sweated in the mild air.

The dark, slow days dragged their drenched lengths; sometimes out of the black and shadowy mists of the mornings lovely bird-voices cried, as in spring. At length came a sharper, dryer chill, and the birds were silent. Sometimes there was a sound like a wheel creaking softly through the air; it was a swan flying.

‘Look, Clem, a swan! Listen!’ But Clem did not look round from her seat at the fire.

Catherine’s hands clenched on the sill. She remained peering out of the window she had opened. At their backs, behind the little front door, only a few feet away, the traffic roared and thundered almost without cessation, and scraps of talk between passers-by were audible and loud as if they had been spoken for their own ears. Footsteps stopped and they heard, ‘– and a beautiful view.’ ‘Yes, they’re talking of us,’ said Clem with heavy meaning. ‘Well – admiring the cottage, perhaps?’ Catherine suggested in good faith, for at present the cottage turned a very quaint, pretty and newly furbished face to the road.

Clem laughed. ‘Your home, Cathy. Your lovely little home.’ But what piled and festering bitterness it must be which forced irony from that simple, serious nature!

Catherine fell upon her nascent panic, flung the window wide with a clatter and leaned far out, almost gasping with relief as she drew in the fresh air. The nightmare thoughts began to lose reality, as black, tenuous cloud thins out over the sky till it is all but invisible and the bright heaven shows through. Her eyes rested seeingly upon that wide, darkening, curiously romantic landscape.

Far out over the plots there was a spurt of flame.

‘A bonfire!’ she exclaimed, and clutched ravenously at the idea. She would go straight out and make a fire – a practical, bustling, strenuous employment. ‘Come out with me,’ she said to her sister. ‘Come, Clem, it’ll do you good.’ But she was forced to go out alone.

She went down into the uncleared part where masses of stuff remained to burn and into a small space she dragged and carried armfuls of uprooted weeds and brushwood, and for some while lost herself in this invigorating occupation. She hardly stopped to look about her, yet she somehow absorbed the lovely transformations of the darkness, noting how colours were far from being obscured with the fall of dusk, but seemed to grow newly intense for eyes adjusted to the low visibility. The hollow stems of the huge angelica plants now showed plainly their smothered purple, the brown leaves burned, there were notes of buttercup yellow, the blackness of the soaked bark had a velvet depth, the seeded heads of the rose-bay glimmered in pearly opalescence. She could see the rosy apples hanging on the half-bare boughs; they seemed as if enamelled, impossibly coloured. Then, peering through all this great autumnal wreckage, she had a glimpse of the house; and in this evening light, which seemed slightly rubescent, its ancient bricks of a mild, deep red seemed almost to glow. Seen from this point, it had the oddest aspect, looking like some such building as a mill, tall and narrow, with its three floors and its small irregularly placed windows.

‘Well, it’s certainly a character!’

But, finding a keen pleasure in herself, she felt guilty, as if her pleasure was depraved. For how tensely she was aware that Clem did not share it! Thus it seemed a kind of treachery. Yet ‘After all, we might be happy here’ was her impatient protest; impatient because Clem’s immovable loathing of the place made a constant fret under all her thoughts, driving her heart into the stifling pace of an old illness when she considered it openly; as she did now.

However, she turned to her purpose, struck a match and stood holding it for a moment, shielding it at a few inches from the great heap of combustible stuff, on the groundwork of which, seeing how damp everything was, she had poured paraffin with a reckless hand. In that moment something made her hesitate. It was a mental picture. A pictorial parable was forced upon her attention. That heap would never burn without the match, and would not though it had been saturated to the core with the most inflammable of substances. One would not, of course, be fool enough to mistake the accidental precipitator of a catastrophe for its root cause. Still, the most terrible press of inflammable matter stored up year by year in the mind would lie harmless to the end, indeed, its combustible quality might even be dissipated in the mild air of happiness, as the fearful tide of the blood, forced up by worry and shock, would certainly subside. But if instead of good fortune came the fatal match – indescribably trivial yet fatal – the petty stroke of treachery.

She set light to the great pile.

The fire went well. She poured on more paraffin and more. A fierce, tongued blaze responded, springing out of the heap with a treacherous reach and suddenness, feeding on the oil. But she threw on her damp, earth-caked fuel, and then for some while the smoke poured up, yellow and thick, into the greenish sky.

Meanwhile, warmly wrapped, she went to and fro in the sharp and already dusky air, and raked, slashed, chopped with dogged energy, stifling the question she had recently asked herself as to what was the use of such labours, whether it was really worth while to make such devastation among these strange and wonderful forms. Nothing would ever be found to grow there with such splendid vitality as the natives, the lusty wildlings in their chosen habitat. A shamed regret, a disgust at herself for spoiling a marvellous scene now mingled distinctly with her stubborn purpose. And the thought burst through – for herself, she would prefer it wild. Anarchy? Wildness? Yes, she preferred it! So if she had blindly desired order, it had been for Clem’s sake, impelled by a secret divination of Clem’s obsessive horror. Then she must still quite frantically desire it with her thinking self. She laboured on.

All the sights and sounds of the evening worked soothingly upon her nerves, absorbed in a mild unconsciousness, as a healing process works in the body. So for some little while she achieved a mindless calm, her eyes turned to the earth.

But at length it grew too dark for such activities, and she paused and stood still.

‘No,’ she at once thought with renewed anguish, ‘no reason why we shouldn’t be happy! There’s still time!’

At that instant, something within the bonfire caught, and with a loud, crackling sound a dozen great golden flames shot up from the pile. Instantly, deep night fell all around.

Now the land was all obscure about her and she seemed to stand on a fiery islet situated in a region of intense darkness, a little point of earth all enveloped in this golden light, which seemed wonderfully pure and steady for many minutes together. The edges of the near-by leaves, the twigs, all shone as if streaked with pure gold; long shafts darted into the thicket. She was now in a tense, roused mood.

She had not stopped to consider that a fire, with its dramatic and destructive nature, a fire at night, with its wild and thrilling effects as the surroundings darken, may give a half-sinister stimulation to the nerves and fancy – to that very class of feeling which she had instinctively meant to check when she had sought the open air.

But she was conscious of some element of disorder in her, a kind of pleasure in violence.

No sooner had the flare subsided a little than she recklessly flung on more oil – for no reason but to provide herself with a further thrill. The flames now leapt twelve feet high, rushing straight up into the windless air, each burning with such concentrated fury that it seemed merely to vibrate quietly with its aspiring efforts. It was a foolhardy act. In that overgrown place, one breath of wind would have bent those devouring tongues and turned them upon living fuel. She was forced to retreat. But she was more exultant than apprehensive, as if a little light-headed and lacking in common sense.

Then, from some distance up the garden, she saw the great pyre of rippling, scarlet light as the core of the whole dark scene. She watched till it died down.

At last, lifting her eyes, she was struck by the peculiar formation of this land seen by night. It was all in verticals. It was all pointed, all streaming upwards. The trees by the water at the foot of the garden, the poplars and the willows, stretching their deep black limbs against the misty and rusty darknesses of the hillside, scored it through with upright strokes which seemed hardly to end with their visible height but suggested a passing upwards into the sky where the eye lost them. And this lofty, fantastically elongated character of the landscape gave one a dwarfed feeling; one had a sensation of being buried in some monstrously deep place, of being deep, deep down – ‘buried’, ‘fallen into a pit’, ‘lost’, ‘cut off’, ‘out of mind’, ‘out of hearing’ – the words seemed to press forward rapidly, each presenting itself like a sharp whisper on a note of query – ‘Is it this? This?’ till they ran together into a single phrase, ‘the bottomless pit’, and the motion ceased.

Yet these words seemed still to belong only to poetry, of the solemn, apocalyptical kind, and to be attached naturally, like a caption to a picture, to that obscure view with its visionary character. This detached feeling for gloomy beauty continued while, with raised eyes, she began slowly to make her way down to the subsiding fire.

Suddenly, with the dizzying and limitless astonishment of a nightmare, she perceived that there was a building standing towards the summit of the hill, within the dark woods. She saw it very imperfectly, but what she saw made the blood sing in her head and her knees feel weak. How could there be, in that rustic spot, towering, buttressed walls, topped by arches, colonnade supporting colonnade? And, still above these, vast rotundas, from each of which was lifted up on high a long staff surmounted by a gleaming sign while, against the walls, were great staircases which branched and joined and branched again, and ascended in giant flights, at each turn of which were newels strangely shaped and crowned with finial figures, perhaps winged, though their detail was not to be discerned in that twilit air. Or were they living beings? Of a gigantic size, suggesting acres of walls, of a monstrous, heroic style, vaguely Aztec, Assyrian or Muscovite, shimmering in the dark air as if, having erupted on that bad spot, having been lifted on a convulsion of the earth’s crust to stand under the shocked heavens, it was dripping with the white fires of the regions whence it was spewed up, it hung there as a sign before her eyes, to show whose was the kingdom, under what lordship they had come.

Ah! But now what was this? She could not of course see plainly, it was too dark. Yet surely it was a building well known to her, after all, sickeningly well known, with its big, coarse water-tower? Although enormously enlarged, supplied with fantastic detail, tricked out and overlaid with the dire distortions of nightmare, it was still to be recognized.

There was no possible site for a building of any magnitude on those little hills. Its very proportions were wrong. It was like an object stuck into a picture by an unskilled artist, too large and impossibly placed. All that was wild, fanciful, irreconcilable – everything to proclaim its dream order.

She had been dreaming on her feet.

Yet it might be, she thought, that misled by the dusk and the fragmentary nature of her view she had actually caught a glimpse of some white Palladian mansion, empty and half-ruinous; for although all these months during which they had lived there she had never realized there was any large building on the hill opposite their garden, still it was true that the thinning woods were daily revealing a little more and a little more.

Then, manœuvring for a better view, having retraced her steps, she suddenly discovered that she had quite lost sight of any building of whatever kind; could not, evidently, hit again on that one spot from which it was to be seen.

Either that, or there was nothing there.

But even if there was nothing there, she had no need to think herself hallucinated because, with eyes still affected by the sharp fire at which she had stared so long, she had seen something on the hill, perhaps only some patch of moonstruck cloud behind the wood, shaped by the trees, which had deceived her sight.

Nevertheless, she grew dizzy; and turning thus, shaken and hot in the freezing air, contending with a wildness in the brain, ‘No light in the house!’ she suddenly realized, and a burst of terror near to madness seized her. She stumbled up through the garden, she stormed in, heart thumping to choke her. ‘Clem!’ she cried up desperately through the house in an angry, scolding voice. ‘Why sit here in the dark?’ she cried roughly, bursting into the middle room. Silence. Clem sat with a drooping head. Rage seized on Catherine, hatred. This wanton display of misery, as it seemed to her, as she could not bear to do otherwise than regard it, drove her nearly wild; and hitting out, sparing no one, ‘How dreadful you optimists are when you do collapse!’ she cried with caustic violence, as she flung the curtains along their rods. ‘Your very spines seem to melt!’

She was terrified.

Yet, even now, her terror was really unformulated, in some curious fashion. All the first warnings passed unheeded.

The discovery that there was really a house on the hill strangely weakened the effect on her mind of that moment of secret illumination. That the house was not remotely like the infernal palace of her night vision of course caused her no surprise. It was built of the tawny barstone of the district, was rather large, but of commonplace appearance, and could be seen from their garden quite clearly as soon as the leaves fell.

Catherine took many solitary walks throughout the winter, tramping doggedly, often with her eyes on the ground for a half mile at a time in spite of the novelty of the scenes, feverishly attempting to enjoy what Clem would not share; and during these excursions she discovered that, even after one had made a big circuit to reach the lane on the hill, this was of a kind in which that district abounded, so deeply sunken between retaining walls that nothing of the house could be seen. She turned back. That day, at a bend, she had a glimpse of the valley and a strange, diminished view of their own little dwelling, all fascinatingly minute. Then suddenly she felt a kind of extreme elation (which perhaps merely showed at what a terrible depth her spirit had been floundering), an excited pride in this odd little ancient in their possession. Why the tragedy? Yes, why? An overwhelming tragedy made out of a small material misfortune! What a pair of fools!

The panics, the explicit warnings, all passed unheeded because only the next day up would rocket Clem’s spirits and she would laugh, make jokes about the house and their catastrophe generally, declare that she had quite got over it and was not worrying any more, would run about and fall into friendly chatter with everyone she met. Then suddenly again it was all burnt out; there were suspicious looks, accusations against neighbours, scared creeping about the house and the dreadful silence. Then up again; then down to the depths.

But the pace grew so fast and furious that it could not fail to end in a crash, as anyone must have seen – anyone but Catherine.

For in her mind, through whatever alarms and whatever moments of wild panic, was stubbornly fixed the idea that they, of all people, were safe. Was it not plain to anyone that they had had their share, so many years of suffering, all their youth laid waste, as much as anyone could endure? It was plain! They had worked out their heavy sentence to the last bitter hour. A second visitation of madness need not be thought of – from that, at least, they of all people must be exempt. In plain common sense, all emotional reckonings aside, it would be an impossible chance. This idea had actually come to her many years ago, after their mother’s death, with a sort of blissful certainty, too. Not again.

So she was totally unable to see what was happening before her eyes. Up to the very end, she was incredulous.