THE NIGHT OF CREATIONPART 1: THE DISCUSSION
THE DISCUSSION had threatened while they were still at dinner. Leslie Vernon had begun it: and there had been a hardness and a determination in his expression that had sharpened the suggestion of fanaticism in his clever face. Little Harrison, already looking a trifle flushed and dishevelled, had only managed to avoid the direct issue by talking rapidly, and with something more than his usual brilliance, about the true inwardness of the Russian Revolution; a subject upon which he had recently acquired some very special information. Even Lady Ulrica More, who was manifestly prepared to encourage Vernon, had been borne down and fairly talked into silence.
The other guests of the week-end party, although they had shown no signs of disapproving Vernon’s choice of topic when he had irrelevantly introduced it, had accepted their cue with a tactful readiness. Little Harrison was their host, and if he wished, as he obviously did, to avoid this topic of Psychical Research, it was their duty to support him. Moreover, Mrs. Harrison had cut in almost at once, with that bird-like flustered air of hers, to the effect that spiritualism was almost “worse than religion with some people” and never led to anything but recriminations. Vernon had smiled with a fine effect of self-control when she had said that, but before he could defend himself, Harrison at the other end of the table had got under way with an anecdote of Lenin’s pre-revolution career in Switzerland.
And directly dinner was finished, he had suggested that they should take their coffee and liqueurs on the lawn under the cedar. There was excuse enough—it was a wonderfulnight—but Greatorex, the leader-writer, who had acquired a habit of always looking for secret motives, was probably right in calling the move to the garden “a clever dodge.”
“Dodge?” enquired young Fell listlessly. He had sat through dinner with a melancholy air of wondering how people could be interested in spirits whether of the dead or of the Russians; but Greatorex had been too much engrossed in drawing his own inferences to take any notice of Fell’s distraction.
“Rather,” he said, taking Fell’s arm. “Gives Harrison the chance of slipping off when he can’t stand it any longer. In a room, it’s a bit pointed to get up and go away, but out here Vernon’ll probably find himself addressing Harrison’s empty chair.”
Fell sighed. “What’s he want—Vernon, I mean?” he asked indifferently.
Greatorex was willing enough to explain. “He wants to bring Harrison to book,” he said, leading his companion down towards the sunk fence out of earshot of the rest of the party. “You see, Vernon has been tremendously interested in that book of Schrenck-Notsing’s. You’ve seen it, I expect? It’s all about materialisations. Extraordinary stuff. They did get amazing results. The book’s full of photographs of the materialisations. Licked Crookes’sKatie Kinginto a cocked hat. Well, Vernon’s been writing about it all over the place. Says it proves that there is a form of matter unknown to science, and that until the sceptics have disproved that, they had better shut up about the problem of immortality and so on. And then Harrison came out with a leader in the Supplement, pooh-poohing the whole affair. Clever stuff, of course, but not very sound on the logical side.”
“And Vernon wants to pin him down, I suppose?” Fell commented tepidly.
“He wants to have a straight argument,” Greatorex said, and then sinking his voice to a confidential note, he continued, “And if you ask me, Fell, Harrison’safraidof spiritualism. I’veseen him tackled before, and he loses his temper. He doesn’t want to listen! You know the look that comes into a fellow’s face when he’s shutting his mind against you—a sort of resolution and concentration as if he’d got his eye on his own ideal somewhere in the middle distance, and did not mean to look away from it....” He paused in the very heart of his account of Harrison’s perversity, suddenly struck by the application of his description to the present expression on Fell’s face. “Pretty much the look you’re wearing now, in fact,” he concluded drily. “Sorry if I’ve been boring you.”
Fell came back to a realisation of his lapse with a slight start. “No, no, rather not, Greatorex,” he said. “I mean it wasn’t that; the truth is I’m rather worried. I was thinking....” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the sunset, and added, “That, somehow, made me feel as if....”
Greatorex thrust his hands into the pockets of his dinner-jacket and turned round to observe the phenomenon that had distracted Fell’s attention. For a moment his prominent nose and rather small head came out as an emphatic silhouette against the afterglow in the North-West; and to Fell, already deep in the languors of sentiment, presented an air of picturesque romance.
Since Fell had come out from the high-lights and conventional influences of the house, his determination had begun to give way. In the atmosphere of the dining-room, he had felt certain that he would be right in doing what he had come down here expressly to do. Phyllis was no wife for a Civil Servant in his position. He had seen the consequences of such marriages in the Service. They kept a man back. If he married her, he would lose just that extra fillip of influence which would make the difference between special appointments and the common routine of promotion that would leave him no better prospect than an ultimate income of at best ten or twelve hundred pounds a year. One could not expect Lady Ulrica, for example, to continue the patronage she seemed, at present, sowilling to lend him, if he made a marriage of that kind. He had seen it all so clearly while they were at dinner, and although his heart had failed him at the thought of his coming interview with Phyllis—she was so sweet and so gentle and she loved him with such an amazing singleness and rapture—he had been sure that he must give her up before his honour was entangled.
But now all the prestige of social success, everything that was represented by the fashion he had just left, was dwindling and fading; the effect of it falling away so that it seemed to him garish and unreal—as the lights and distractions of the town may seem to a man who sets his face eagerly towards the joy of his quiet home. The rest and immensity of nature was an enduring reality with which his love was in perfect accord. He and Phyllis had their place in it. If he could step down, now, to the sombre yews at the lake’s edge and take her in his arms, as he had done a month ago, his last doubts would vanish on the instant. They would be one with the greatness of earth, and able to look down with contempt from their perfect enthronement, at the frivolous and ephemeral superficiality of conventional life....
The sound of Greatorex’s voice seemed to take up the thread of his dreams.
“’Course, you’re a poet, Fell,” Greatorex said. “You feel an evening like this, I suppose? Means something quite tremendous to you?”
“You see,” Fell began, trembling on the verge of confession; “there is a reason why, more particularly, to-night....”
Greatorex turned round and looked at him. “I shouldn’t,” he said. “You’ll be sorry afterwards. Better not tell me. I know I look romantic, but I’m not. Harrison says I ought to have been a pirate. He’s wrong, I ought to have been a barrister. I’ll tell you, now, just what I’ve been thinking while I’ve been looking at all this view that makes you feel so sentimental. I’ve been thinking that I wouldn’t like to have a lake sonear the house—unhealthy. And I don’t care for all those black yews, either. Melancholy, mournful, things.”
Fell shuddered. “Theyaremournful,” he agreed, “but they’re in keeping.”
“Too much,” Greatorex said. “I don’t know whether it’s your sentimental influence or not, Fell; but, damn it, this place makesmefeel superstitious, to-night. It’s so infernally quiet and brooding, as if it were hatching some nasty mischief.”
“Or some wonderful miracle?” Fell suggested.
“We probably mean the same thing,” Greatorex said. “I’ve got a trick of using prose words to get attention. ‘Wonderful miracle,’ you know, would be either a cliché or bombast in a leader.”
Fell did not appear to hear this explanation. He was looking out over the swell of Orton Park that was separated from Harrison’s garden by the width of the lake. The afterglow was slowly dying and the greens of turf and wood were deepening and hardening into dark masses little softer than the funereal shadows of the clustered yews. The detail that had recently started into almost excessive prominence under the level light of the setting sun, was taking refuge in the temporary darkness before it emerged again altered in shape and colour to greet the mysteries of the moon. Only the lake still shone faintly, reflecting a last glimmer of brightness in the Northern sky. Near the island, a streamer of indigo ripples splayed out to mark the course of some belated water-bird, hurrying back to the cover of the reeds; and in the hush of the coming night Fell could almost believe that he heard the delicate clash and whisper of infinitely tiny waves breaking in hasty processional upon the sandy foreshore.
“’Straordinarily peaceful,” murmured Greatorex. “Suppose we ought to be joining the others?”
“Yes, I suppose we ought,” Fell agreed tamely. What else was there to do? He could not go down to the village of Long Orton now, and beseech Phyllis to come out and walk withhim by the lake. And without her, all the glory of this amazing night was wasted.
Nor was the full promise of the night yet revealed to him; for it was not until with a reluctant sigh he had turned to follow Greatorex back to the nearly invisible group under the cedar, that he saw the Hunter’s moon, a great disc of ruddy copper, resting as it seemed on the very edge of the eastern horizon.
He lingered, gazing, for a few seconds, half resolved even now to escape the banalities of polite conversation on the lawn and go up to the village. This was such a rare night for the silences of love; serene, brooding and mystical. Yet the automaton in him, the formalised, cultured habit of the Civil Servant, moved him relentlessly back towards the decencies of polite society and the patronage of Lady Ulrica More.
As he silently approached the group on the lawn he heard the clear, musical voice of Leslie Vernon.
“At least you might let one state a case, Harrison,” he was saying.
They had already passed the stage of skirmishing for position, when Greatorex rejoined them. Something had apparently happened to Harrison since he came out into the garden. He had lost that effect of impatience which had underlain all his talk of Russia, when, as though afraid of silence, he had been talking, a trifle desperately, against some latent opposition.
Now, comfortably relaxed in the depth of a well-designed basket chair, and little more of him visible than the gleam of his shirt front, the pale blur of his face and the occasional glow of his cigarette end, he had an air of being tolerantly complacent. It seemed that he was willing to listen, however condescendingly, to Vernon’s attack.
“Look here, Harrison,” Vernon had begun. “Why won’t you talk this out?”
“Nothing fresh to say,” Harrison had replied.
“ButIhave,” Vernon continued; and then Lady Ulrica definitely put her weight into the scale by saying, “How fascinating! Something really new in the way of evidence?”
“Or only a réchauffé?” Harrison interpolated.
“At least you might let one state a case,” Vernon said as Greatorex joined the other four and sat down with a grunt beside his wife.
“We saw you gesticulating picturesquely against the sunset, G.,” Harrison remarked, as though he would even now create a diversion and defer the discussion indefinitely.
Greatorex snorted; quite conscious of the fact that in Harrison’s presence he always played up in manner to that part of the buccaneer which had been thrust upon him, although he disclaimed it in speech.
“Been discussing the effects of sunset on temperament,” he said.
“But did you see theMoon?” asked Mrs. Harrison, rather in the tone of one who introduces a delightful piece of scandal.
“Afraid I missed that,” Greatorex said. “But I expect Fell has found it. He’s probably worshipping now.”
“Oh! but you ought,” Mrs. Harrison asserted, still intent no doubt, on keeping away from the subject of spiritualism, for her husband’s sake. “It was like a rather badly done stage moon balanced on the scenery. Sha’n’t we all go and worship with Mr. Fell?”
No one moved, however; and the excuse of joining Fell was spoilt by his arrival at the cedar.
“Do help yourself to coffee and anything you want, Mr. Fell,” Mrs. Harrison said. “If you can see, that is.” She was certainly doing her best to keep the conversation at the right after-dinner level. She was so far successful that for a minute or two little spurts of irrelevant talk continued to start up and die away again, like the uncertain catspaws of wind before a flat calm.
It was Harrison himself who at last anticipated the inevitable. He must have felt, as everyone had—including his plucky but finally despairing wife—that it was inevitable. There was something that urged them, something more than that quiet determination of Vernon’s, although his very silence conveyed a perpetual sense of remonstrance. But this other, greater influence was with them as an almost palpable presence. It was like a force exhausting them and drawing them into a common focus.
None of them was more keenly aware of it than Fell, though he attributed the weakness that was overcoming him to a particular source. For here, with the arm of his chair almost touching that of Lady Ulrica’s, he was planning an interview with Phyllis that held no least hint of the renunciation of love. He was giving way freely and without reserve to his dream. Moreover, he had a curious sense of instant accomplishment, as if at that very moment his spirit and the spirit of Phyllis had touched and coalesced. He was drifting into far heights of remote and supernal ecstasy, when the thin, high voice of Harrison recalled him to earth; and he started as though, on the verge of sleep, he had been brutally jarred and awakened by the violent slamming of a door.
“Hm! hm! Well, Vernon,” Harrison said. “We’re all waiting for that statement of your case.”
Vernon’s chair creaked slightly as if he had suddenly leaned forward.
This moment of their beginning, when by some undivinable act of common consent all oppositions had been temporarily relinquished and they were agreed at least to listen, was, also, the moment of greatest darkness. Presently the moon transmuted from copper to brass would rise above the house and give validity and form to all that was now being created in the profundity of the night. But when Vernon began to speak, he was hidden from them; they realised him only as a voice, that issued with a steady and increasing definition outof the silence and the shadows.
He talked well, pleading without passion for an unprejudiced examination of all the new “facts” in psychical research. He had a scholarly knowledge of his subject and gave his instances and authorities, building up as it seemed to Lady Ulrica, to Fell, and even to Greatorex, a case that it would be very hard to knock down.
Not once did Harrison interrupt him, and during Vernon’s occasional pauses the immense stillness of the night seemed to close in upon the little group under the cedar with a sudden intensity. The slender stream of his steady speech was like a little candle, burning delicately in the darkness, and when it was extinguished, his listeners were freshly aware of themselves and their surroundings. In those moments of almost painful silence, they sought to recover their consciousness of the familiar world by restless movements and faint articulations. Chairs creaked, someone sighed, and once Greatorex rather brutally coughed.
Nearly at the end of his long speech, however, Vernon’s tone became more emotional. He was talking, then, of materialisations and of the strange and as yet unrecognised form of matter—provisionally known as the ectoplasm or teleplasm—that issues from the body of the medium, is manifested in visible forms that can be successfully photographed, and can handle material objects.
“I claim that the existence of this matter is proved,” Vernon concluded. “Given favourable conditions, the medium can build up a form, visible, tangible, ponderable and capable of simulating every appearance of material reality. I don’t say that this amazing phenomenon proves the immortality of the soul, but I do say that until you produce another hypothesis to cover the immense accumulation of tested facts, you have no right to pronounce any opinion in psychical research.”
By this time the moon, now pale as scoured brass, had topped the trees behind the house, and was sending out paleand slender shafts of light to pierce here and there the overshadowing gloom of the wide cedar: one shaft had dappled the statuesque bare shoulder of Lady Ulrica, and another had slanted down upon the smooth fair hair of Leslie Vernon. And by such reflections and by other sources of faint diffusion, the heavy brooding darkness that had so far enveloped the group on the lawn, had been definitely lifted. Dimly they could see each other, either as shadows against the increasing brightness beyond, or as weakly illuminated figures picked out, maybe, by a brilliant little spark of moonshine that had pierced its way through some common opening in the many-storied foliage above.
And although there had come no least stir of wind to break the intense calm, the releasing effect of the light was manifest upon the spirits of the party. As Vernon ceased speaking everyone suddenly wanted to talk. A little fusillade of chatter broke out, which only gave way when Greatorex was heard saying: “If he believe not Stainton Moses and the Lodges, neither will he believe though one rose from the dead.”
Mrs. Harrison laughed brightly. “We must remember that,” she said.
“But it’s not a question of rising from the dead at all, Mr. Greatorex,” Lady Ulrica put in. She had no sense of humour.
Vernon apparently felt that all the effect of his long argument was being foolishly dissipated by this absurd interruption. “Well, Harrison, what’s your answer to my case?” he asked in a slightly raised voice.
Harrison began to stammer, a sure sign that his temper was at last beginning to conquer him. “I—I can’t see, even if we admit the validity of these materialisations,” he said, “that you—you are any nearer to proving your general case, Vernon. I’ve been into the whole question very thoroughly and—and impartially, and I can only say that I see no reason whatever to assume that we have ever received any communication from the spirits of the dead. I think that that is the real point underdiscussion, and I can’t see that you’ve done much to support your contention. What d’you say, G.?”
Greatorex grunted. A beam of moonlight had just caught the most salient of his features, and at the moment his face appeared to be all nose.
“You won’t accept my explanation of the facts, Harrison?” Vernon persisted.
“I—I don’t see why I should,” Harrison replied. “I don’t see the necessity for it. I—I’m not convinced, by any means, of the validity of your examples. At present, I am content to go on with the enquiry without formulating any theory. I contend that the evidence up to the present time is insufficient to theorise upon.”
“Ah! well, there’s a lot more coming,” Vernon replied, and for the first time a real note of passion crept into his voice. “Don’t you realise that all these developments taken together are just the first stages of the knowledge that is coming to us? They are symptoms, that’s all, of the new trend in the evolution of mankind; of the coming of the new age—the age of the Spirit. The days of materialism are nearly spent, and the next generation will smile at our feeble tentatives.
“Do you ask me how I know? Well, I can’t tell you in terms that you can understand. The best part of my knowledge is intuitional, but intuition, even mysticism, must no longer be divorced from science and intellect. That, I feel, is the essential synthesis of the new doctrine. We are going to produce our material proofs; in the future religion and science will become one.”
“My own opinion, precisely,” said Lady Ulrica.
But Vernon’s homily had proved a little too much for Harrison. He tried to speak and could not control the pitch of his voice, which soared ineffectively to a falsetto squeak.
“Er—er—I—I ...” he began, and had to get to his feet before he could attain coherence. Then he started again with “No, no! It’s incredible nonsense that—the kind of religionforeshadowed by spiritualism—could ever appeal to sensible men and women. Are we to be expected to listen to the drivelling platitudes of some supposed spirit communicating through an illiterate old woman with the further interposition of a ‘control,’ speaking pigeon English and imitating the worst sophistications of a spoilt child? No, no, positively I can’t take that kind of nonsense seriously. I—I have no sort of desire to imitate the credulity of Lodge, Barrett and Crookes—no sort of desire. I—I—it’s absurd. I’ve no patience even to talk about it. Who is coming to look at the moon?” And without waiting to receive any response to his invitation, he turned his back on the cedar and strode out, a perturbed and impatient little figure, into the light of the open garden.
The other six followed him in a straggling procession.
Emma Harrison was obviously relieved that the discussion was at an end. “I said it would only end in recriminations,” she explained to Greatorex, who looked about seven feet high in contrast with her diminutive slenderness. “Charles never can keep his temper about that subject. And I did think it was very splendid of him to keep it as long as he did. We can’t do with all that nonsense. Can you, Mr. Greatorex?”
Mrs. Harrison dropped her voice to an indiscreet confidence. “I always think that our poor dear Lady Ulrica,” she whispered, “is so very much the type from which mediums are made. You know, stout, placid, and not too clever.”
“Queer thing why mediums should generally be so stupid,” commented Greatorex, tactfully avoiding any overt agreement with his hostess’s description of Lady Ulrica.
For a few minutes the party drifted about the lawn in couples, with the exception of Harrison, who maintaining a little distance from the others was pacing restlessly up and down, either working off his spleen or thinking out some really telling retort that should settle Vernon’s business once and for all.
The moon was now high in the heavens, but it had sufferedanother transmutation. A faint screen of misty cirrus had crept over the sky, and the brass was toned down almost to the whiteness of silver. And with this change, the light in the garden had become more diffused. The shadows had lost their hardness, the high-lights their accentuation.
And by degrees, some sense of a peculiar quality in the night began to affect every member of the little party on the lawn. They began by almost imperceptible changes in their movements to drift together into a little knot, like the swimming bubbles in a cup. The area of their promenade diminished until even Harrison himself had come into the focus; and yet when they had again drawn into a group they had nothing to say to one another. It is true that they were still conscious of a slight social constraint, due to what had amounted to a quarrel between the host and one of his guests. But there was something in their attitude and their common movement towards each other that suggested some deeper cause for their momentary awkwardness. It was as if each of them was aware of some sudden fear, and hesitated to speak lest the shameful fact should be revealed.
It was Mrs. Harrison who first broke a silence that was becoming altogether too insistent—even the soft hush of their feet upon the grass had ceased. She laughed artificially, with a touch as it seemed of bravado, a laugh that might have disguised a shudder.
“I don’t know how it seems to you,” she said in a high strained voice, “but it strikes me that it’s actually getting a little chilly.”
“Yes, yes. It is, Emma,” her husband replied with an effect of relief. “I—I think we’d better go in. We get a cold air off the lake, now and again,” he explained to the company at large.
“Precious little air, Harrison,” muttered Greatorex. “I’ve never known a stiller night.”
“Haze come over the moon,” commented Fell, staring upinto the sky.
“It has certainly turned colder,” remarked Lady Ulrica with a shiver; “much colder.”
Harrison cleared his throat and made his usual effort to get his pitch. “Hm! Hm! Perhaps we’re going to get some phenomena,” he said with a slightly cracked laugh. “Always the first warning, isn’t it, Vernon, a draught of cold air?”
“Always,” Lady Ulrica said solemnly, before Vernon could reply.
Harrison was about to speak again when Greatorex cut in. “I say,” he said, in a voice that held a just perceptible note of excitement, “is that one of your maids down there by the lake? Girl in white; moving about by the yews?”
“Whatdoyou mean?” Mrs. Harrison replied, speaking with a little flurry of haste. “It must be after eleven, and the maids are in bed long ago, I hope.”
“Someone down there, anyway,” Greatorex asserted.
“Hm, hm! G.’s quite right, my dear,” Harrison said. “I—I think we ought to investigate this in the cause of common morality.”
“Charles? It may be one of the village girls,” his wife suggested.
“In which case she has no business in our paddock at midnight,” Harrison replied, and as he spoke he began to walk with an air of mechanical determination towards the steps in the sunk fence that led to the meadow.
“Shall we all go?” Greatorex asked, but Mrs. Harrison manifestly hesitated.
“I don’t know. Do you think, perhaps....” she began.
Greatorex, however, had not waited for her permission, and in half a dozen strides he too had reached the meadow. Vernon, Lady Ulrica and Mrs. Greatorex followed him with an effect of yielding to a sudden impulse, and Emma found herself alone on the lawn with Robert Fell.
“Well, if they’re all going,” she said with a little hystericallaugh, “I suppose we may as well go, too.”
“I don’t know. Yes. Do you think we ought?” Fell replied in a strangely agitated voice.
Mrs. Harrison turned to look at him with a little start of surprise. “Surely you’re not afraid?” she asked, unconsciously revealing the cause of her own reluctance.
“Afraid?” he echoed, entirely misunderstanding her true intention. “Afraid of what?”
“Well—ghosts!” she said.
“But you don’t really imagine, Mrs. Harrison....” Fell began.
“Not for one moment,” she said with determination. She was disturbed and a trifle shocked by the marks of his agitation, which had nevertheless stiffened her own courage. She was prepared now to demonstrate how little she cared for an unexpected coldness in the air, or for white figures moving about at the most unlikely hours on the borders of the lake.
Already the shadows of the other five were stringing out across the meadow, all of them clearly visible in the milky light of the thinly veiled moon. They were moving very deliberately; but a certain deliberation of approach was only decent if they expected to disturb a tryst.
“Well, aren’t you coming, Mr. Fell?” Emma asked sharply.
He sighed and then, “Yes, I’ll come,” he said, in the tone of one who finally commits himself.