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Thing from the Lake, The

<h2>CHAPTER X</h2> <div class="blockquot">"Plato expresses four kinds of Mania—Firstly, the musical; secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and fourthly, that which belongs to Love."—Preface to Zanoni. </div> For myself, I have always found that excitement stimulates imagination. There are others, I know, who can do no creative work except when all within and without is lulled and calm. Perhaps I have too much calm as an ordinary thing! That evening, when I went to my room, lighted my lamps and closed my door, I stood alone for awhile breathing the mingled sweetness of the country air and the pomander ball. In that interval, there came to me, complete and whole as a gift thrust into my hand, the melody which an enthusiastic publisher since assured me has reached every ear in America. As to that extravagant statement, I can only measure by the preposterous amount of money the melody has brought me. Perhaps there is a magic about it. For myself, I cannot hear it—ground on a street-organ, given on the stage, played on a phonograph record or delicately rendered by an orchestra—without feeling again the exaltation and enchantment of that night. I flung myself down at my writing-table, tossing my former work right and left to make room for this. If it should escape before I could set it down! If the least of those airy cadences should be lost! At three o'clock in the morning I came back to realization of time and place. The composition was finished; it stood up before me like a flower raised over-night. Eight hours had passed since I sat down to the work, after dinner. I was tired. As I began to draw into a pile the sheets of paper I had covered with notes, weariness gripped me like a hand. Eight hours? If I had shoveled in a ditch twice that long I could have felt no more exhausted. Yielding to drained fatigue of mind and body, I dropped my head upon the arms I folded upon the table. My hot, strained eyes closed with relief, my stiff fingers relaxed. Rest and content flowed over me; my work was done, and good. Rest passed into sleep, no doubt. The sleep could not have been long, for not many hours remained before dawn. When I started awake and lifted my head, I found the room in darkness. A perfume was in the air, and the sense of a presence scarcely more tangible than the perfume. Even in the first dazed moment, I knew my lady had come again. "Do not rise!" her murmuring voice cautioned me. "Unless you wish me to go?" "No!" "I am here because I promised to come. It was not wise of you to ask that of me." "Then I prefer folly to wisdom," I answered, steadying myself to full wakefulness. "Or, rather, I am not sure that you can decide for me which is which!" "Why? After all, why? Just—curiosity?" "You, who speak so learnedly of magic and sorcery," I retorted, smiling under cover of the darkness, "have you never heard of the white magic conjured by a tress of hair, a perfume ball, and a voice sweeter than the perfume? An image of wax does not melt before a witch's fire so easily as a man before these things." "My hair pleased you?" she questioned naïvely. "Or so easily as a woman melts before admiration!" I supplemented. "I am delighted to prove you human, mystic lady. Please me? Could anyone fail to be pleased with that most magnificent braid? But how can either you or I forgive the cruelty that took it from its owner? Why did you cut it off?" "So little of it! And I did not know you, then." "Little? That braid?" "It reached below my knee, now it is but little less," she answered with indifference. "We all have such hair." I gasped. My imagination painted the picture of all that shining richness enwrapping a slim young body. It was fantastic beyond belief to sit there at my desk, beneath my fingers the tools of sober, workaday life, and stare into the dark room that held the reality of my vision. She was there, but I could not rise and find her. She was opposite my eyes, but my promise forbade me to touch the lamp and see her. "Who are 'we'?" I slowly followed her last sentence. A sigh answered me. On the silence, a memory floated to me of the story she had told while I held her prisoner that first night: "The woman sits in her low chair. The fire-shine is bright in her eyes and in her hair. On either side, her hair flows down to the floor." Yes, by legend young witches had such hair; sylphs, undines and all of the airy race of Lilith. I thrust absurdities away from me and offered a quotation to fill the pause: <div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> "'I met a lady in the meads' 'Full beautiful; a faery's child.' 'Her hair was long, her foot was light,' 'And her eyes were wild.'" </div> </div> She did not laugh, or put away the suggestion. When I had decided that she did not mean to reply, and was seeking my mind for new speech to detain her with me, she finally spoke what seemed another quotation: "'A spirit—one of the invisible inhabitants of this planet, neither departed souls nor angels; concerning whom Josephus and Michael Psellus of Constantinople may be consulted. They are very numerous, and there is no climate or element without one or more.' Have you read the writings of the learned Jew or of the Platonist, you who are so very bold?" "Neither," I meekly admitted. "But neither ancient gentleman could convince me that you are unhuman." Her answer was just audible: "Not I—but, It!" Now I was silenced, for dreadful and uncanny was that whisper in the dark to a man who had met here in this room What I had met. "Tell me more of this Thing without a name," I urged, mastering my reluctance to evoke even the idea of what the blood curdled to recall. "Why does It hate me?" "What can I tell you? Even in your world, does not evil hate good as naturally as good recoils from evil? But this One has another cause also!" She hesitated. "And you yourself? How have you challenged and mocked It this very night? Here, where It glooms, you have dared bring the high joy of the artist who creates? Oh, brave, brave!—he who could await alone the visit of the Unspeakable, in the chamber into which the Loathsome Eyes have looked, and write the music of hope and beauty!" I started, with a hot rush of surprise and pleasure. She had heard my work. She approved it. More than that, not to her was I the lame fellow who ought to get a better man to drive his car! "Nor should you, who have two worlds of your own," she added in a lower tone, "doubt the existence of many both dark and bright. Go, then, out of this haunted place where a human madness broke through the Barrier. Be satisfied with the victories you have had. Let the visits of the Dark One fade into mere nightmare; and know I am no more a living woman than Franchina Descartes." "Who was she?" "Have you not read that early in the seventeenth century there appeared in Paris the philosopher Descartes, accompanied by the figure of a beautiful woman? She moved, spoke, and seemed life itself; but Descartes declared she was an automaton, a masterpiece of mechanism he himself had made. Yet many refused to believe his story, declaring he had by sorcery compelled a spirit to serve him in this form. He called her Franchina, his daughter." "And the truth?" "I have told you all the record tells. She was soon lost. Descartes took her with him upon a journey by sea; when, a storm arising, the superstitious captain of the vessel threw the magic beauty into the Mediterranean." "Thank you. But, are you fairy or automaton?" "Do not laugh," she exclaimed with sudden passion. "You know I would say that I have no part in the world of men and women. Not through me shall the ancient dread seize a new life. A little time, now, then the doors will close upon me as the sea closed over Franchina. I will not take with me the memory of a wrong done to you. I shall never come to this house after tonight. If you would give me a happiness, promise me you will leave, too." I had known we should come to this point. After a moment, I spoke as quietly as I could: "Tell me your name." She had not expected that question. I think she might have withheld the answer, given time to reflect. But as it was, she replied docilely as a bidden child: "Desire Michell." The name fell quaintly on both hearing and fancy, with a rustle of early New England tradition. Desire! I repeated it inwardly with satisfaction before I answered her. "Thank you. Now, I, Roger Locke, do promise you, Desire Michell, that I will not leave this house until these matters are plainer to my understanding, whether you go or stay. But if you go and come no more, then I surely shall stay until I find a way to trace you or until the Thing kills me." "No!" "Yes." There was a pause. Then, to my utter dismay, I heard her sobbing through the dark. "Why do you tempt me?" she reproached. "Is it not hard enough, my duty? For me it is such pleasure to be here—to leave for a while the loneliness and chill of my narrow place! But you, so rich in all things, free and happy—how should it matter to you if a voice in the dark speaks or is silent? Let me go." Wonder and exulting sense of power filled me. "I can keep you, then?" I asked. "I am—so weak." "Desire Michell, I am as alone as you can be, in my real life. I have gone apart from much that occupies men and women; gaining and losing in different ways. One of the gains is freedom to dispose of myself without grief or loss to anyone, except the perfunctory regret of friends. Will you believe there is no risk that I would not take for a few hours with you? Even with your voice in the dark? Come to me as you can, let us take what time we may, and the chances be mine." "But that is folly! You do not know. To protect you I must go." "I refuse the protection. Stay! If there is sorrow in knowing you, I accept it. I understand nothing. I only beg you not to turn me back to the commonplace emptiness of life before I found you. Indeed, I will not be sent away." "If I yield, you will reproach me some day." "Never." "It could only be like this—that we should speak a few times before the gates close upon me." "What gates?" "I cannot tell you." "Very well," I took what the moment would grant me. "That is a bargain. Yet, what safety lies in secrecy between us? If we are to help each other, as I hope, would not plain openness be best? You will tell me no more about yourself? Very well. Tell me something more about the enemy in the dark whom I am to meet. You have hinted that It has a special motive for fixing hate upon me beyond mere malignance toward mankind. What is that motive?" "Ask me not," she faintly refused me. "I do ask you. My ignorance of everything concerned is a heavy drawback in this combat. Arm me with a little understanding. What moves It against me?" The pause following was filled with a sense of difficulty and recoil, her struggle against some terrible reluctance. So painful was that effort, somehow clearly communicated to me, that I was about to devour my curiosity and withdraw the question when her whisper just reached my hearing: "Jealousy!" "Jealousy? Of what? For whom?" "For—me." The monstrous implication sank slowly into my understanding; then brought me erect, gripping the edge of the table lest I forget restraint and move toward her. "By what right?" I cried. "By what claim? Desire Michell, what has the Horror to do with you?" The vehemence and heat of my cry struck a shock through the hushed room distinct as the shattering of crystal. There was no answer, no movement; no rebuke of my movement. I was alone. With that confession she had fled. My cry had been louder than I knew. Presently I heard a door open. Steps sounded along the hall from the rooms on the opposite side of the house. Someone knocked hesitatingly. "Are you all right, Mr. Locke?" Vere's voice came through the panels. I crossed to the door and opened it. He stood at the threshold, an electric torch in his hand. "We thought you called," he apologized. "I thought maybe you were sick, or wanted something; and no light showed around your door." I found the wall switch and turned on the lamps. As on the last occasion, she had switched the lights off there, beyond my reach unless I broke my promise not to move about the room while she remained my guest. "Come in," I invited him. "Much obliged to you and Phillida for looking me up! I had been working late and dropped asleep in my chair, with a nightmare as the result." It was pleasant to have his normal presence, prosaic in bathrobe and pajamas, in my cheerfully lighted room. His dark eyes glanced toward the music-scrawled papers scattered about, then returned to meet my eyes smilingly. "We heard some of that work," he admitted. "Phil and I—well, I guess we were guilty of sitting on the stairs to hear you play it over. I never listened to a tune that took hold of me, kind of, like that one. We'd certainly prize hearing all of it together, sometime, if you didn't mind." The warmth of achievement flowed again in me. I crossed to the piano to assemble the finished sheets, answering him with one of those expressions of thanks artists use to cloak modestly their sleek inward vanity. I was really grateful for this first criticism that soothed me back to the reality of my own world. Across the top of the uppermost sheet of music, in small, square script quaint as the pomander, was written a quotation strange to me: "We walk upon the shadows of hills across a level thrown, and pant like climbers." I did not know that I had read the words aloud until Vere answered them. "So we do! I guess there is more panting over shadows and less real mountain-climbing done by us humans than most folks would believe. Most roads turn off to easy ways before we reach the hills we make such a fuss about. Who wrote that, Mr. Locke?" "I don't know," I replied vaguely, intent upon Desire Michell's meaning in leaving this to me. He nodded, and turned leisurely to go. "Kind of seems to me as if he must have felt like you did when you wrote that piece tonight," he observed diffidently. "As if trouble did not amount to much, taken right. I'll get back to Phil, now. She might be anxious." Could that be what Desire had meant me to understand? Was there indeed some quality of courage——? That is why my most successful composition from the standpoint of money and popularity went to the publisher under the title, "Shadows of Hills." Of course no one connected the allusion. The general interpretation was best expressed by the cover design of the first printing: a sketch of a mountain-shaded lake on which floated a canoe containing two young persons. I was well pleased to have it so. But—in what land unknown to man towered the vast mountains in whose shadow I panted and strove? Or was my foot indeed upon the mountain itself? I did not know. I do not know, now. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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