September 2, 2025 • 23 mins
Discover the enchanting world of Day And Night Stories, featuring fifteen captivating short tales by Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (1869 ‚ì 1951). Renowned as one of the most prolific ghost story writers, Blackwoods work blends the supernatural with the ethereal, inviting readers into a realm of wonder and intrigue. A journalist and broadcasting narrator, he has been acclaimed for his consistently exceptional storytelling, with literary critic S. T. Joshi noting that his contributions stand among the finest in the genre. Immerse yourself in these timeless narratives that explore the mysteries of life and the unknown.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Story seven of Day and Night Stories by Algernon Blackwood.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story seven
The occupant of the room. He arrived late at night
by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped. After the toilsome
ascent of three slow hours, the village, a single mass
(00:22):
of shadow was already asleep. Only in front of the
little hotel was their noise and light and bustle. For
a moment, the horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the
road and disappeared into the stable of their own accord.
Their hornes is trailing in the dust, and the lumbering
diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it
(00:44):
the body of a great yellow sided beetle with broken legs.
In spite of his physical weariness, the schoolmaster, reveling in
the first hours of his teing Guinea holiday, felt exhilarated,
for the high alpine valley was marblessly still. Stars twinkled
over the torn ridges of the Dn du Medie, where
(01:05):
spectral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink,
and the keen air smelt of pine forest dew soaked
pastures and freshly saw on wood. He took it all
in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few
minutes while the other three passengers gave directions about their
luggage and went to their rooms. Then he turned and
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walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the hall,
only just able to resist stopping to examine the big
mountain map that hung upon the wall by the door,
And with a sudden, disagreeable shock, he came down from
the ideal to the actual. For at the inn, the
only inn, there was no vacant room, even the available
(01:51):
sofas were occupied. How stupid he had been not to write.
Yet it had been impossible, he remembered, for he had
come to the decision suddenly that morning in Geneva, enticed
by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain.
They talked endlessly, this gold braided porter and the hard
(02:11):
faced old woman. Her face was hard, he noticed, gesticulating
all the time and pointing all about the village with
suggestions that he ill understood, for his French was limited
and their patois was fearful. There he might find a
room or there, But we are alas full more full
(02:33):
than we care about tomorrow. Perhaps, if so and so
give up their rooms, And then, with much shrugging of shoulders,
the hard faced old woman stared at the gold braided porter,
and the porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster. At length, however,
by some process of hope, he did not himself understand, and,
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following directions given by the old woman that were utterly unintelligible,
he went out into the street and walked towards a
dark group of houses she had pointed out to him.
He only knew that he meant to thunder at a
door and ask for a room. He was too weary
to think out details. The porter half made to go
with him, but turned back at the last moment to
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speak with the old woman. The houses sketched themselves dimly
in the general blackness. The air was cold, the whole
valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water.
He was thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be
very far away, and that he might even spend the
night wandering in the woods, when there was a sharp
noise behind him, and he turned to see a figure
(03:38):
hurrying after him. It was the Porter, running and in
the little hall of the inn. There began again a confused,
three cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and whispered asides
in patois, between the woman and the porter, the net
result of which was that, if monsieur did not object,
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there was a room after all on the first floor.
Only it was in a sense engaged, that is to say,
but the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely
into the puzzle that had somehow provided it. So suddenly
the ethics of hotel keeping had nothing to do with him.
(04:21):
If the woman offered him quarters, it was not for
him to argue with her whether the said quarters were
legitimately hers to offer. But the porter, evidently a little thrilled,
accompanied the guest up to the room and supplied in
a mixture of French and English details omitted by the
landlady and inturne. The schoolmaster soon shared the thrill with him,
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and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible tragedy.
All who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high
mountain valleys, where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of
the attractions, will understand a certain fame element of high
alarm that goes with the picture. One looks up at
the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks involuntarily of the men
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who find their pleasure for days and nights together, scaling
perilous summits among the clouds and conquering inch by inch
the icy peaks that forever shake their dark terror in
the sky. The atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible
horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable
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from any imaginative contemplation of the scene, and the idea,
in turn, gleaned from the half frightened porter lost nothing
by his ignorance of the language. This englishwoman, the real
occupant of the room, had insisted on going without a guide.
She had left just before daybreak, two days before the
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porter had seen her start, and she had not returned.
The route was difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for
a skilled climber, even a solitary one, and the englishwoman
was an experienced mountaineer. Also, she was self willed, careless
of advice, bored by warnings, self confident to a degree.
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Queer moreover, for she kept entirely to herself, and sometimes
remained in her room with locked doors, admitting no one
for days together. A crank evidently of the first water.
This much minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter's talk
while his luggage was brought in and the room set
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to rights. Further too, that the search party had gone
out and might of course return at any moment, in
which case, thus the room was empty yet still hers.
If Monsieur did not object, if the risk he ran
of having to turn out suddenly in the night, It
was the loquacious porter who furnished the details that made
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the transaction questionable, and in turne dismissed the loquacious porter
as soon as possible, and prepared to get into the
hastily arranged bed and snatch all the hours of sleep
he could before he was turned out. At first, it
must be admitted, he felt uncomfortable, distinctly uncomfortable. He was
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in some one else's room. He had really no right
to be there. It was in the nature of an
unwarrantable intrusion. And while he unpacked, he kept looking over
his shoulder, as though some one were watching him from
the corners. In a moment, it seemed he would hear
a step in the passage, a knock would come at
the door, the door would open, and there he would
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see this vigorous englishwoman looking him up and down with anger.
Worse still, he could hear her voice asking him what
he was doing in her room. Her bedroom. Of course,
he had an adequate explanation, but still, then, reflecting that
he was already half undressed, the humoro it flashed for
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a second across his mind, and he laughed quietly, and
at once after that laughter, under his breath came the
sudden sense of tragedy he had felt before, perhaps even
while he smiled. Her body lay broken and cold upon
those awful heights, the wind of snow playing over her hair,
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her glazed eyes staring sightless up at the stars. It
made him shudder. The sense of this woman, whom he
had never seen, whose name even he did not know,
became extraordinarily real. Almost he could imagine that she was
somewhere in the room with him, hidden, observing all he did.
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He opened the door softly to put his boots outside,
and when he closed it again, he turned the key.
Then he finished unpacking and distributed his few things about
the room. It was soon done, for in the first place,
he had only a small gladstone and a knapsack, and secondly,
the only place where he could spread his clothes was
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the sofa. There was no chest of drawers, and the cupboard,
an unusually large and solid one, was locked. The englishwoman's
things had evidently been hastily put away in it. The
only sign of her recent presence was a bunch of
faded alpin rosen standing in a glass jar upon the
wash hand stand. This and a certain faint perfume were
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all that remained. In spite, however, of these very slight evidences,
the whole room was pervaded with a curious sense of
occupancy that he found exceedingly distasteful. One moment, the atmosphere
seemed suddenly charged with a just left feeling. The next
it was a queer awareness of still here that made
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him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him. Altogether, the
room inspired him with a singular aversion, and the strength
of this aversion seemed the only excuse for his tossing
the feet flowers out of the window and then hanging
his macintosh upon the cupboard door in such a way
as to screen it as much as possible from view.
(10:09):
For the sight of that big, ugly cupboard filled with
the clothing of a woman who might then be beyond
any further need of covering. Thus his imagination insisted on
picturing it. Touched in him a startled sense of the
incongruous that did not stop there, but crept through his
mind gradually till it merged somehow into a sense of
(10:31):
a rather grotesque horror. At any rate, the sight of
that cupboard was offensive, and he covered it almost instinctively,
Then turning out the electric light, he got into bed,
But the instant the room was dark, he realized that
it was more than he could stand. For With the
blackness there came a sudden rush of cold that he
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found it hard to explain. And the odd thing was
that when he lit the candle beside his bed, he
noticed that his hand trembled. This, of course, was too much.
His imagination was taking liberties and must be called to heal.
Yet the way he called it to order was significant,
and its very deliberateness betrayed a mind that has already
(11:18):
admitted fear, and fear once in is difficult to dislodge.
He lay there upon his elbow in bed and carefully
took note of all the objects in the room, with
the intention, as it were, of taking an inventory of
everything his senses perceived, then drawing a line, adding them
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up finally and saying, with decision, that's all the room contains.
I've counted every single thing. There is nothing more. Now
I may sleep in peace. And it was during this
absurd process of enumerating the furniture of the room that
the dreadful sense of distressing lassitude came over him that
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made it differentfficult even to finish counting. It came swiftly,
yet with an amazing kind of violence that overwhelmed him,
softly and easily, with a sensation of enervating weariness hard
to describe, and its first effect was to banish fear.
He no longer possessed enough energy to feel really afraid
(12:20):
or nervous. The cold remained, but the alarm vanished, and
into every corner of his usually vigorous personality crept the
insidious poison of a muscular fatigue at first that in
a few seconds it seemed, translated itself into spiritual inertia,
a sudden consciousness of the foolishness, the crass futility of life,
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of effort, of fighting of all that makes life worth living,
shot into every fiber of his being and left him
utterly weak. A spirit of black pessimism that was not
even vigorous enough to assert itself in aid the secret
chambers of his heart. Every picture that presented itself to
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his mind came dressed in gray shadows, those board and
the sweating horses toiling up the ascent to nothing. That
hard faced landlady, taking so much trouble to let her
desire for gain conquer her sense of morality for a
few francs, that gold braided porter, so talkative, fussy, energetic,
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and so anxious to tell all he knew what was
the use of them all? And for himself? What in
the world was the good of all the labor and
drudgery he went through in that preparatory school where he
was junior master. What could it lead to? Wherein lay
the value of so much uncertain toil, When the ultimate
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secrets of life were hidden and no one knew the
final goal. How foolish was effort, discipline, work, How vain
was pleasure? How trivial the noblest life? With a fearful
jump that nearly upset the candle minturn pulled himself together.
Such vicious thoughts were usually so remote from his normal
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character that the sudden, vile invasion produced a swift reaction,
yet only for a moment. Instantly, again, the black depression
descended upon him like a wave. His work it could
lead to nothing but the dreary labor of a small headmastership,
after all, seemed as vain and foolish as his holiday
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in the Alps. What an idiot he had been to
be sure to come out with a knapsack merely to
work himself into a state of exhaustion, climbing over toilsome
mountains that led to nowhere, resulting in nothing. A dreariness
of the grave possessed him. Life was a ghastly fraud, religion,
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childish humbug. Everything was merely a trap, a trap of death,
a colored toy that nature used as a decoy, But
a decoy for what? For nothing? There was no meaning
in anything. The only real thing was death, and the
happiest people were those who found it soonest. Then why
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wait for it to come? He sprang out of bed,
thoroughly frightened. This was horrible. Surely mere physical fatigue could
not produce a world so black, an outlook so dismal,
a cowardice that struck with such sudden hopelessness at the
very roots of life. For normally he was cheerful and strong,
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full of the tides of healthy living. And this appalling
lassitude swept the very basis of his personality into nothingness
and the desire for death. It was like the development
of a secondary personality. He had read, of course, how
certain persons who suffered shocks developed thereafter entirely different characteristics, memory, tastes,
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and so forth. It had all rather frightened him. Though
scientific men vouched for it, it was hardly to be believed.
Yet here was a similar thing taking place in his
own consciousness. He was beyond question, experiencing all the mental
variations of someone else. It was unmoral, it was awful,
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it was well after all. At the same time, it
was uncommonly interesting. And this interest he began to feel,
was the first sign of his returning normal self, For
to feel interest is to live and to love life.
He sprang into the middle of the room, then switched
on the electric light, and the first thing that struck
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his eye was the big cupboard hullo there's that beastly cupboard,
he exclaimed to himself, involuntarily yet aloud. It held all
the clothes, the swinging skirts and coats and summer blouses
of the dead woman. For he knew now, somehow or
other that she was dead. At that moment, through the
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open windows rushed the sound of falling water, bringing with
it a vivid realization of the desolate, snow swept heights.
He saw her, positively, saw her lying where she had fallen,
the frost upon her cheeks, the snow dust eddying about
her hair and eyes, her broken limbs pushing against the
(17:29):
lumps of ice. For a moment, the sense of spiritual lassitude,
of the emptiness of life vanished before this picture of
broken effort, of a small human force battling pluckily yet
in vain against the impersonal and pitiless potencies of inanimate nature.
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And he found himself again his normal self. Then instantly
returned again that terrible sense of cold nothingness, emptiness, And
he found himself standing opposite the big cupboard where her
clothes were. He wanted to see those clothes, things she
had used and worn. Quite close he stood, almost touching it.
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The next second he had touched it, his knuckles struck
upon the wood. Why he knocked is hard to say.
It was an instinctive movement, Probably something in his deepest
self dictated it ordered it. He knocked at the door,
and the dull sound upon the wood into the stillness
of that room brought horror. Why it should have done so,
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he found it hard to explain to himself as why
he should have felt impelled to knock. The fact remains
that when he heard the faint reverberation inside the cupboard,
it brought with it so vivid a realization of the
woman's presence that he stood there, shivering upon the floor
with a dreadful sense of anticipation. He almost expected to
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hear an answering knock from within, the rustling of the
hanging skirts perhaps, or worse still, to see the locked
door slowly opened towards him. And from that moment he
declares that in some way or other, he must have
partially lost control of himself, or at least of his
better judgment, for he became possessed by such an overmastering
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desire to tear open that cupboard door and see the
close within that he tried every key in the room
in the vain effort to unlock it, and then, finally,
before he quite realized what he was doing, rang the bell.
But having rung the bell for no obvious or intelligent reason,
at two o'clock in the morning, he then stood waiting
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in the middle of the floor for the servant to
come conscious, for the first time that something outside his
ordinary self had pushed him towards the act. It was
almost like an internal voice that directed him. And thus,
when at last steps came down the passage and he
faced the cross and sleepy chambermaid, amazed at being summoned
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at such an hour, he found no difficulty in the
matter of what he should say, for the same power
that insisted he should open the cupboard door also impelled
him to utter words over which he apparently had no control.
It's not you I rang for, he said, with decision
and impatience. I want a man, wake the porter and
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send him up to me at once. Hurry, I tell you, hurry.
And when the girl had gone frightened at his earnestness,
in turn realized that the words surprised himself as much
as they surprised her. Until they were out of his mouth,
he had not known what exactly he was saying, But
now he understood that some force foreign to his own
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personality was using his mind and organs. The black depression
that had possessed him a few moments before was also
part of it. The powerful mood of this vanished woman
had somehow momentarily taken possession of him, communicated possibly by
the atmosphere of things in the room still belonging to her.
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But even now, when the porter, without coat or collar
stood beside him in the room, he did not understand
why he insisted, with a positive fury, admitting no denial,
that the key of that cupboard must be found, and
the door instantly opened. The scene was a curious one.
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After some perplexed whispering with the chambermaid at the end
of the passage, the porter managed to find and produce
the key in question. Neither he nor the girl knew
clearly what this excited englishman was up to, or why
he was so passionately intent upon opening the cupboard at
two o'clock in the morning. They watched him with an
(21:53):
air of wondering what was going to happen next, But
something of his curious earnestness, even of his late fear
communicated itself to them, and the sound of the key
grating in the lock made them both jump. They held
their breath as the creaking door swung slowly open. All
heard the clatter of that other key as it fell
(22:15):
against the wooden floor within. The cupboard had been locked
from the inside. But it was the scared housemaid, from
her position in the corridor, who first saw, and with
a wild scream, fell crashing against the banisters. The porter
made no attempt to save her. The schoolmaster and himself
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made a simultaneous rush towards the door. Now wide open,
They too had seen there were no clothes, skirts, or
blouses on the pegs, but all by itself. From an
iron hook in the center, they saw the body of
the englishwoman hanging by the neck, the head bent horribly forwards,
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the tongue protruding, jarred by the movement of unlocking. The
body swung slowly round to face them. Pinned upon the
inside of the door was a hotel envelope with the
following words penciled and straggling, writing tired, unhappy, hopelessly depressed.
I cannot face life any longer. All is black. I
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must put an end to it. I meant to do
it on the mountains, but was afraid. I slipped back
to my room unobserved. This way is easiest and best.
End of story seven.
Story seven of Day and Night Stories by Algernon Blackwood.
This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Story seven
The occupant of the room. He arrived late at night
by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped. After the toilsome
ascent of three slow hours, the village, a single mass
(00:22):
of shadow was already asleep. Only in front of the
little hotel was their noise and light and bustle. For
a moment, the horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the
road and disappeared into the stable of their own accord.
Their hornes is trailing in the dust, and the lumbering
diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it
(00:44):
the body of a great yellow sided beetle with broken legs.
In spite of his physical weariness, the schoolmaster, reveling in
the first hours of his teing Guinea holiday, felt exhilarated,
for the high alpine valley was marblessly still. Stars twinkled
over the torn ridges of the Dn du Medie, where
(01:05):
spectral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink,
and the keen air smelt of pine forest dew soaked
pastures and freshly saw on wood. He took it all
in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few
minutes while the other three passengers gave directions about their
luggage and went to their rooms. Then he turned and
(01:28):
walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the hall,
only just able to resist stopping to examine the big
mountain map that hung upon the wall by the door,
And with a sudden, disagreeable shock, he came down from
the ideal to the actual. For at the inn, the
only inn, there was no vacant room, even the available
(01:51):
sofas were occupied. How stupid he had been not to write.
Yet it had been impossible, he remembered, for he had
come to the decision suddenly that morning in Geneva, enticed
by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain.
They talked endlessly, this gold braided porter and the hard
(02:11):
faced old woman. Her face was hard, he noticed, gesticulating
all the time and pointing all about the village with
suggestions that he ill understood, for his French was limited
and their patois was fearful. There he might find a
room or there, But we are alas full more full
(02:33):
than we care about tomorrow. Perhaps, if so and so
give up their rooms, And then, with much shrugging of shoulders,
the hard faced old woman stared at the gold braided porter,
and the porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster. At length, however,
by some process of hope, he did not himself understand, and,
(02:53):
following directions given by the old woman that were utterly unintelligible,
he went out into the street and walked towards a
dark group of houses she had pointed out to him.
He only knew that he meant to thunder at a
door and ask for a room. He was too weary
to think out details. The porter half made to go
with him, but turned back at the last moment to
(03:16):
speak with the old woman. The houses sketched themselves dimly
in the general blackness. The air was cold, the whole
valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water.
He was thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be
very far away, and that he might even spend the
night wandering in the woods, when there was a sharp
noise behind him, and he turned to see a figure
(03:38):
hurrying after him. It was the Porter, running and in
the little hall of the inn. There began again a confused,
three cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and whispered asides
in patois, between the woman and the porter, the net
result of which was that, if monsieur did not object,
(03:59):
there was a room after all on the first floor.
Only it was in a sense engaged, that is to say,
but the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely
into the puzzle that had somehow provided it. So suddenly
the ethics of hotel keeping had nothing to do with him.
(04:21):
If the woman offered him quarters, it was not for
him to argue with her whether the said quarters were
legitimately hers to offer. But the porter, evidently a little thrilled,
accompanied the guest up to the room and supplied in
a mixture of French and English details omitted by the
landlady and inturne. The schoolmaster soon shared the thrill with him,
(04:45):
and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible tragedy.
All who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high
mountain valleys, where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of
the attractions, will understand a certain fame element of high
alarm that goes with the picture. One looks up at
the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks involuntarily of the men
(05:08):
who find their pleasure for days and nights together, scaling
perilous summits among the clouds and conquering inch by inch
the icy peaks that forever shake their dark terror in
the sky. The atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible
horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable
(05:29):
from any imaginative contemplation of the scene, and the idea,
in turn, gleaned from the half frightened porter lost nothing
by his ignorance of the language. This englishwoman, the real
occupant of the room, had insisted on going without a guide.
She had left just before daybreak, two days before the
(05:50):
porter had seen her start, and she had not returned.
The route was difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for
a skilled climber, even a solitary one, and the englishwoman
was an experienced mountaineer. Also, she was self willed, careless
of advice, bored by warnings, self confident to a degree.
(06:13):
Queer moreover, for she kept entirely to herself, and sometimes
remained in her room with locked doors, admitting no one
for days together. A crank evidently of the first water.
This much minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter's talk
while his luggage was brought in and the room set
(06:34):
to rights. Further too, that the search party had gone
out and might of course return at any moment, in
which case, thus the room was empty yet still hers.
If Monsieur did not object, if the risk he ran
of having to turn out suddenly in the night, It
was the loquacious porter who furnished the details that made
(06:56):
the transaction questionable, and in turne dismissed the loquacious porter
as soon as possible, and prepared to get into the
hastily arranged bed and snatch all the hours of sleep
he could before he was turned out. At first, it
must be admitted, he felt uncomfortable, distinctly uncomfortable. He was
(07:17):
in some one else's room. He had really no right
to be there. It was in the nature of an
unwarrantable intrusion. And while he unpacked, he kept looking over
his shoulder, as though some one were watching him from
the corners. In a moment, it seemed he would hear
a step in the passage, a knock would come at
the door, the door would open, and there he would
(07:40):
see this vigorous englishwoman looking him up and down with anger.
Worse still, he could hear her voice asking him what
he was doing in her room. Her bedroom. Of course,
he had an adequate explanation, but still, then, reflecting that
he was already half undressed, the humoro it flashed for
(08:01):
a second across his mind, and he laughed quietly, and
at once after that laughter, under his breath came the
sudden sense of tragedy he had felt before, perhaps even
while he smiled. Her body lay broken and cold upon
those awful heights, the wind of snow playing over her hair,
(08:21):
her glazed eyes staring sightless up at the stars. It
made him shudder. The sense of this woman, whom he
had never seen, whose name even he did not know,
became extraordinarily real. Almost he could imagine that she was
somewhere in the room with him, hidden, observing all he did.
(08:41):
He opened the door softly to put his boots outside,
and when he closed it again, he turned the key.
Then he finished unpacking and distributed his few things about
the room. It was soon done, for in the first place,
he had only a small gladstone and a knapsack, and secondly,
the only place where he could spread his clothes was
(09:02):
the sofa. There was no chest of drawers, and the cupboard,
an unusually large and solid one, was locked. The englishwoman's
things had evidently been hastily put away in it. The
only sign of her recent presence was a bunch of
faded alpin rosen standing in a glass jar upon the
wash hand stand. This and a certain faint perfume were
(09:25):
all that remained. In spite, however, of these very slight evidences,
the whole room was pervaded with a curious sense of
occupancy that he found exceedingly distasteful. One moment, the atmosphere
seemed suddenly charged with a just left feeling. The next
it was a queer awareness of still here that made
(09:47):
him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him. Altogether, the
room inspired him with a singular aversion, and the strength
of this aversion seemed the only excuse for his tossing
the feet flowers out of the window and then hanging
his macintosh upon the cupboard door in such a way
as to screen it as much as possible from view.
(10:09):
For the sight of that big, ugly cupboard filled with
the clothing of a woman who might then be beyond
any further need of covering. Thus his imagination insisted on
picturing it. Touched in him a startled sense of the
incongruous that did not stop there, but crept through his
mind gradually till it merged somehow into a sense of
(10:31):
a rather grotesque horror. At any rate, the sight of
that cupboard was offensive, and he covered it almost instinctively,
Then turning out the electric light, he got into bed,
But the instant the room was dark, he realized that
it was more than he could stand. For With the
blackness there came a sudden rush of cold that he
(10:53):
found it hard to explain. And the odd thing was
that when he lit the candle beside his bed, he
noticed that his hand trembled. This, of course, was too much.
His imagination was taking liberties and must be called to heal.
Yet the way he called it to order was significant,
and its very deliberateness betrayed a mind that has already
(11:18):
admitted fear, and fear once in is difficult to dislodge.
He lay there upon his elbow in bed and carefully
took note of all the objects in the room, with
the intention, as it were, of taking an inventory of
everything his senses perceived, then drawing a line, adding them
(11:38):
up finally and saying, with decision, that's all the room contains.
I've counted every single thing. There is nothing more. Now
I may sleep in peace. And it was during this
absurd process of enumerating the furniture of the room that
the dreadful sense of distressing lassitude came over him that
(11:59):
made it differentfficult even to finish counting. It came swiftly,
yet with an amazing kind of violence that overwhelmed him,
softly and easily, with a sensation of enervating weariness hard
to describe, and its first effect was to banish fear.
He no longer possessed enough energy to feel really afraid
(12:20):
or nervous. The cold remained, but the alarm vanished, and
into every corner of his usually vigorous personality crept the
insidious poison of a muscular fatigue at first that in
a few seconds it seemed, translated itself into spiritual inertia,
a sudden consciousness of the foolishness, the crass futility of life,
(12:44):
of effort, of fighting of all that makes life worth living,
shot into every fiber of his being and left him
utterly weak. A spirit of black pessimism that was not
even vigorous enough to assert itself in aid the secret
chambers of his heart. Every picture that presented itself to
(13:05):
his mind came dressed in gray shadows, those board and
the sweating horses toiling up the ascent to nothing. That
hard faced landlady, taking so much trouble to let her
desire for gain conquer her sense of morality for a
few francs, that gold braided porter, so talkative, fussy, energetic,
(13:27):
and so anxious to tell all he knew what was
the use of them all? And for himself? What in
the world was the good of all the labor and
drudgery he went through in that preparatory school where he
was junior master. What could it lead to? Wherein lay
the value of so much uncertain toil, When the ultimate
(13:48):
secrets of life were hidden and no one knew the
final goal. How foolish was effort, discipline, work, How vain
was pleasure? How trivial the noblest life? With a fearful
jump that nearly upset the candle minturn pulled himself together.
Such vicious thoughts were usually so remote from his normal
(14:10):
character that the sudden, vile invasion produced a swift reaction,
yet only for a moment. Instantly, again, the black depression
descended upon him like a wave. His work it could
lead to nothing but the dreary labor of a small headmastership,
after all, seemed as vain and foolish as his holiday
(14:31):
in the Alps. What an idiot he had been to
be sure to come out with a knapsack merely to
work himself into a state of exhaustion, climbing over toilsome
mountains that led to nowhere, resulting in nothing. A dreariness
of the grave possessed him. Life was a ghastly fraud, religion,
(14:52):
childish humbug. Everything was merely a trap, a trap of death,
a colored toy that nature used as a decoy, But
a decoy for what? For nothing? There was no meaning
in anything. The only real thing was death, and the
happiest people were those who found it soonest. Then why
(15:15):
wait for it to come? He sprang out of bed,
thoroughly frightened. This was horrible. Surely mere physical fatigue could
not produce a world so black, an outlook so dismal,
a cowardice that struck with such sudden hopelessness at the
very roots of life. For normally he was cheerful and strong,
(15:36):
full of the tides of healthy living. And this appalling
lassitude swept the very basis of his personality into nothingness
and the desire for death. It was like the development
of a secondary personality. He had read, of course, how
certain persons who suffered shocks developed thereafter entirely different characteristics, memory, tastes,
(15:59):
and so forth. It had all rather frightened him. Though
scientific men vouched for it, it was hardly to be believed.
Yet here was a similar thing taking place in his
own consciousness. He was beyond question, experiencing all the mental
variations of someone else. It was unmoral, it was awful,
(16:21):
it was well after all. At the same time, it
was uncommonly interesting. And this interest he began to feel,
was the first sign of his returning normal self, For
to feel interest is to live and to love life.
He sprang into the middle of the room, then switched
on the electric light, and the first thing that struck
(16:44):
his eye was the big cupboard hullo there's that beastly cupboard,
he exclaimed to himself, involuntarily yet aloud. It held all
the clothes, the swinging skirts and coats and summer blouses
of the dead woman. For he knew now, somehow or
other that she was dead. At that moment, through the
(17:07):
open windows rushed the sound of falling water, bringing with
it a vivid realization of the desolate, snow swept heights.
He saw her, positively, saw her lying where she had fallen,
the frost upon her cheeks, the snow dust eddying about
her hair and eyes, her broken limbs pushing against the
(17:29):
lumps of ice. For a moment, the sense of spiritual lassitude,
of the emptiness of life vanished before this picture of
broken effort, of a small human force battling pluckily yet
in vain against the impersonal and pitiless potencies of inanimate nature.
(17:50):
And he found himself again his normal self. Then instantly
returned again that terrible sense of cold nothingness, emptiness, And
he found himself standing opposite the big cupboard where her
clothes were. He wanted to see those clothes, things she
had used and worn. Quite close he stood, almost touching it.
(18:14):
The next second he had touched it, his knuckles struck
upon the wood. Why he knocked is hard to say.
It was an instinctive movement, Probably something in his deepest
self dictated it ordered it. He knocked at the door,
and the dull sound upon the wood into the stillness
of that room brought horror. Why it should have done so,
(18:38):
he found it hard to explain to himself as why
he should have felt impelled to knock. The fact remains
that when he heard the faint reverberation inside the cupboard,
it brought with it so vivid a realization of the
woman's presence that he stood there, shivering upon the floor
with a dreadful sense of anticipation. He almost expected to
(19:00):
hear an answering knock from within, the rustling of the
hanging skirts perhaps, or worse still, to see the locked
door slowly opened towards him. And from that moment he
declares that in some way or other, he must have
partially lost control of himself, or at least of his
better judgment, for he became possessed by such an overmastering
(19:23):
desire to tear open that cupboard door and see the
close within that he tried every key in the room
in the vain effort to unlock it, and then, finally,
before he quite realized what he was doing, rang the bell.
But having rung the bell for no obvious or intelligent reason,
at two o'clock in the morning, he then stood waiting
(19:45):
in the middle of the floor for the servant to
come conscious, for the first time that something outside his
ordinary self had pushed him towards the act. It was
almost like an internal voice that directed him. And thus,
when at last steps came down the passage and he
faced the cross and sleepy chambermaid, amazed at being summoned
(20:06):
at such an hour, he found no difficulty in the
matter of what he should say, for the same power
that insisted he should open the cupboard door also impelled
him to utter words over which he apparently had no control.
It's not you I rang for, he said, with decision
and impatience. I want a man, wake the porter and
(20:29):
send him up to me at once. Hurry, I tell you, hurry.
And when the girl had gone frightened at his earnestness,
in turn realized that the words surprised himself as much
as they surprised her. Until they were out of his mouth,
he had not known what exactly he was saying, But
now he understood that some force foreign to his own
(20:50):
personality was using his mind and organs. The black depression
that had possessed him a few moments before was also
part of it. The powerful mood of this vanished woman
had somehow momentarily taken possession of him, communicated possibly by
the atmosphere of things in the room still belonging to her.
(21:13):
But even now, when the porter, without coat or collar
stood beside him in the room, he did not understand
why he insisted, with a positive fury, admitting no denial,
that the key of that cupboard must be found, and
the door instantly opened. The scene was a curious one.
(21:33):
After some perplexed whispering with the chambermaid at the end
of the passage, the porter managed to find and produce
the key in question. Neither he nor the girl knew
clearly what this excited englishman was up to, or why
he was so passionately intent upon opening the cupboard at
two o'clock in the morning. They watched him with an
(21:53):
air of wondering what was going to happen next, But
something of his curious earnestness, even of his late fear
communicated itself to them, and the sound of the key
grating in the lock made them both jump. They held
their breath as the creaking door swung slowly open. All
heard the clatter of that other key as it fell
(22:15):
against the wooden floor within. The cupboard had been locked
from the inside. But it was the scared housemaid, from
her position in the corridor, who first saw, and with
a wild scream, fell crashing against the banisters. The porter
made no attempt to save her. The schoolmaster and himself
(22:37):
made a simultaneous rush towards the door. Now wide open,
They too had seen there were no clothes, skirts, or
blouses on the pegs, but all by itself. From an
iron hook in the center, they saw the body of
the englishwoman hanging by the neck, the head bent horribly forwards,
(22:59):
the tongue protruding, jarred by the movement of unlocking. The
body swung slowly round to face them. Pinned upon the
inside of the door was a hotel envelope with the
following words penciled and straggling, writing tired, unhappy, hopelessly depressed.
I cannot face life any longer. All is black. I
(23:22):
must put an end to it. I meant to do
it on the mountains, but was afraid. I slipped back
to my room unobserved. This way is easiest and best.
End of story seven.
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