01 - Return of the Soul by Robert Smythe Hichens

Can the spirit of the deceased return to confront those who caused their demise? What if the one responsible is skeptical of such a possibility, yet finds themselves irresistibly drawn to the very soul that has come back? Return of the Soul is a haunting tale of love and guilt, where a man grapples with the eerie return of a lost soul and the complex emotions that ensue. Join us as we delve into this chilling narrative, expertly narrated by Roger Melin.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter one of the Return of the Soul by Robert S. Hitchins.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Recording by Roger Moline. The Return

(00:24):
of the Soul by Robert S. Hitchins, Chapter one. I
have been here before, but when or how? I cannot
tell Rosetti Tuesday night, November three. Theories. What is the

(00:46):
good of theories? They are the scourges that lash our
minds in modern days, lash them into confusion, perplexity, despair.
I have never been troubled by them before. Why shoul
should I be troubled by them now? And the absurdity
of Professor Blacks is surely obvious. A child would laugh

(01:08):
at it, Yes, a child. I have never been a
diary writer. I have never been able to understand the
amusement of sitting down late at night and scrawling minutely
in some hidden book every paltry incident of one's paltry days.
People say it is so interesting to read the entries

(01:30):
years afterwards, to read as a man, the menu that
I ate through as a boy. The Love Story that
I was actor in the tragedy that I brought about,
the debt that I have never paid. How could it
profit me to keep a diary? Has always seemed to
me merely an addition to the ills of life. Yet

(01:54):
now I have a hidden book like the rest of
the world, and I am scrawling in it to day. Yes,
but for a reason. I want to make things clear
to myself. And I find as others that my mind
works more easily with the assistance of the pen. The
actual tracing of words on paper dispels the clouds that

(02:17):
cluster round my thoughts. I shall recall events to set
my mind at ease, to prove to myself how absurd
a man who could believe in Professor Black would be
little dry as dust. I used to call him dry.
He is full of wild romance, rubbish that a schoolgirl

(02:39):
would be ashamed to believe in. Yet he is abnormally clever.
His record proves that still clever men are the first
to be led astray. They say it is the searcher
who follows the wandering light. What he says can't be true.
When I have filled these pages and read what I

(03:02):
have written dispassionately as one of the outside public might read,
I shall have done once for all with the ridiculous
fancies that are beginning to make my life a burden.
To put my thoughts in order will make a music.
The evil spirit within me will sleep, will die. I

(03:23):
shall be cured. It must be so, It shall be so,
to go back to the beginning. Ah, what a long
time ago that seems. As a child, I was cruel.
Most boys are cruel. I think my school companions were

(03:44):
a merciless set, merciless to one another, to their masters
when they had a chance, to animals, to birds, the
desire to torture was in nearly all of them. They
loved to bully, and if they bullied only mildly, it
was from fear, not from love. They did not wish

(04:05):
their boomerang to return and slay them. If a boy
were deformed, they twitted him. If a master were kind
or gentle, or shy, they made his life as intolerable
as they could. If an animal or a bird came
into their power, they had no pity. I was like

(04:27):
the rest. Indeed, I think that I was worse. Cruelty
is horrible. I have enough imagination to do more than
know that to feel it. Some say that it is
lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May
it not be power of imagination. The interest of torturing

(04:50):
is lessened, is almost lost, if we cannot be the
tortured as well as the torturer. As a child, I
was cruel by nature, by instinct. I was a handsome,
well bred, gentlemanlike gentle looking little brute. My parents adored me,
and I was good to them. They were so kind

(05:12):
to me that I was almost fond of them. Why
not it seemed to me as politic to be fond
of them as of anyone else. I did what I pleased,
but I did not always let them know it. So
I pleased them. The wise child will take care to
foster the ignorance of its parents. My people were pretty

(05:36):
well off, and I was their only child. But my
chief chances of future pleasure in life were centered in
my grandmother, my mother's mother. She was immensely rich, and
she lived here. This room in which I am writing
now was her favorite sitting room. On that hearth before

(05:57):
a log fire, such as is bird at this moment,
used to sit that wonderful cat of hers, that horrible cat.
Why did I ever play my childish cards to win
this house, this place? Sometimes lately, very lately, only I
have wondered like a fool. Perhaps, Yet would Professor Black

(06:22):
say so? I remember, as a boy of sixteen, paying
my last visit here to my grandmother. It bored me
very much to come, but she was said to be
near death, and death leaves great houses vacant for others
to fill. So when my mother said that I had

(06:42):
better come, and my father added that he thought my
grandmother was fonder of me than of my other relations,
I gave up all my boyish plans for the holidays
with apparent willingness. Though almost a child, I was not
short sighted. I knew every boy had a future as

(07:02):
well as a present. I gave up my plans and
came here with a smile. But in my heart I
hated my grandmother for having power and so bending me
to relinquish pleasure for boredom. I hated her, and I
came to her and kissed her, and saw her beautiful
white Persian cat sitting before the fire in this room,

(07:27):
and thought of the fellow who was my bosom friend,
and with whom I longed to be shooting or fishing
or riding, and I looked at the cat again, I
remembered began to purr. When I went near to it,
it sat quite still, with its blue eyes fixed upon
the fire. But when I approached it, I heard it

(07:49):
purr complacently. I longed to kick it. The limitations of
its ridiculous life satisfied it completely. It seemed to reproduce
in an absurd, diminished way. My grandmother, in her white
lace cap, with her white face and hands. She sat

(08:10):
in her chair all day and looked at the fire.
The cat sat on the hearth rug and did the same.
The cat seemed to me the animal personification of the
human being who kept me chained from all the sports
and pleasures I had promised myself for the holidays. When

(08:30):
I went near to the cat and heard it calmly
purring at me, I longed to do it an injury.
It seemed to me as if it understood what my
grandmother did not, and was complacently triumphing at my voluntary
imprisonment with age, and laughing to itself at the pains
men and boys will undergo for the sake of money. Brute.

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I did not love my grandmother, and she had money.
I hated the cat utterly. It hadn't a soul. This
beautiful house is not old. My grandfather built it himself.
He had no love for the life of towns, I believe,
but was passionately in touch with nature. And when a

(09:19):
young man he set out on a strange tour through England.
His object was to find a perfect view, and in
front of that view he intended to build himself a habitation.
For nearly a year, so I have been told, he
wandered through Scotland and England, and at last he came

(09:40):
to this place in Cumberland, to this village, to this
very spot. Here his wandering ceased. Standing on the terrace
then uncultivated forest that runs in front of these windows,
he found at last what he desired. He the forest,

(10:01):
He bought, the windings of the river, the fields upon
its banks, and on the extreme edge of the steep
gorge through which it runs, he built the lovely dwelling
that today is mine. This place is no ordinary place.
It is characteristic in the highest degree. The house is

(10:23):
wonderfully situated, with the ground falling abruptly in front of it,
the river forming almost a horseshoe around it. The woods
are lovely. The garden, curiously, almost wildly laid out, is
like no other garden I ever saw. And the house,
though not old, is full of little surprises, curiously shaped rooms,

(10:48):
remarkable staircases, quaint recesses. The place is a place to remember.
The house is a house to fix itself in the memory.
Nothing that had once lived here could ever come back
and forget that it had been here, not even an animal,
Not even an animal. I wish I had never gone

(11:13):
to that dinner party and met the professor. There was
a horror coming upon me. Then he has hastened its steps.
He has put my fears into shape, my vague wondering
into words. Why cannot men leave life alone? Why will
they catch it by the throat and wring its secrets

(11:35):
from it? To respect? Reserve is one of the first
instincts of the gentleman, and life is full of reserve.
It is getting very late. I thought I heard a
step in the house just now. I wonder, I wonder
if she is asleep. I wish I knew. Day after

(11:59):
day passed by my grandmother seemed to be failing, but
almost imperceptibly, she evidently loved to have me near to her.
Like most old dying people, in her mind, she frantically
clutched at life that could give to her nothing more.
And I believe she grew to regard me as the

(12:21):
personification of all that was leaving her. My vitality warmed her.
She extended her hands to my flaming hearth fire. She
seemed trying to live in my life, and at length
became afraid to let me out of her sight. One
day she said to me, in her quavering, ugly voice,

(12:43):
old voices are so ugly, like hideous echoes, Ronald, I
could never die while you were in the room. So
long as you are with me, where I can touch you,
I shall live. And she put out her white, corrogated
hand and fondled my warm boy's hand. How I longed

(13:05):
to push her hand away and get out into the
sunlight and the air, and hear young voices, the voices
of the morning, not of the twilight, and be away
from wrinkled death that seemed sitting on the doorstep of
that house, huddled up like a beggar, waiting for the
door to be opened. I was bored till I grew malignant,

(13:29):
I confess it, And feeling malignant, I began to long
more and more passionately to vent myself on someone or something.
I looked at the cat, which, as usual, was sitting
before the fire. Animals have intuitions as keen as those
of a woman, keener than those of a man. They

(13:52):
inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them,
from a long line of ancestors who have suffered at
the hands of cruel men. They can tell by a look,
by emotion, by the tone of a voice, whether to
expect from any one kindness or malignity. The cat had

(14:13):
purred complacently on the first day of my arrival, and
had hunched up her white furry back towards my hand,
and had smiled with her calm, light blue eyes. Now
when I approached her, she seemed to gather herself together
and to make herself small. She shrank from me. There was,

(14:36):
as I fancied, a dawning comprehension, a dawning terror in
her blue eyes. She always sat very close to my
grandmother now, as if she sought protection, And she watched
me as if she were watching for an intention which
she apprehended to grow in my mind, and the intention came.

(15:00):
For as the days went on and my grandmother still lived,
I began to grow desperate. My holiday time was over now,
but my parents wrote telling me to stay where I
was and not to think of returning to school. My
grandmother had caused a letter to be sent to them,
in which she said that she could not part from me,

(15:23):
and added that my parents would never have cause to
regret interrupting my education for a time. He will be
paid in full for every moment he loses, she wrote,
referring to me. It seemed a strange taste in her
to care so much for a boy, but she had

(15:43):
never loved women, and I was handsome, and she liked
handsome faces. The brutality in my nature was not written
upon my features. I had smiling, frank brown eyes, a
lithe young figure, a a gay boy's voice. My movements
were quick, and I have always been told that my

(16:06):
gestures were never awkward. My demeanor was never unfinished, as
is the case so often with lads at school. Outwardly,
I was attractive, and the old woman who had married
two husbands merely for their looks, delighted in feeling that
she had the power to retain me by her side

(16:27):
at an age when most boys avoid old people as
if they were the pestilence. And then I pretended to
love her and obeyed all her insufferably tiresome behests, But
I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same.
My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to

(16:49):
have spent my holidays, was leaving at the end of
this term which I was missing. He wrote to me
furious letters urging me to come back and read reproaching
me for my selfishness and lack of affection. Each time
I received one, I looked at the cat, and the
cat shrank nearer to my grandmother's chair. It never purred now,

(17:14):
and nothing would induce it to leave the room where
she sat. One day, the servant said to me, I
believe the poor dumb thing knows my mistress can't last
very much longer, sir. The way that cat looks up
at her goes to my heart. Ah, them beasts understand

(17:35):
things as well as we do. I believe I think
the cat understood quite well. It did watch my grandmother
in a very strange way, gazing up into her face,
as if to mark the changing contours, the increasing lines,
the down droop of the features that bespoke the gradual,

(17:57):
soft approach of death. It listened to the sound of
her voice, and as each day the voice grew more vague,
more weak, and toneless, an anxiety that made me exult
downed and deepened in its blue eyes. Or so I thought.

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I had a great deal of morbid imagination at that age,
and loved to weave a web of fancies, mostly horrible,
around almost everything that entered into my life. It pleased
me to believe that the cat understood each new intention
that came into my mind, read me silently from its

(18:38):
place near the fire, tracked my thoughts, and was terror
stricken as they concentrated themselves round a definite resolve which
hardened and toughened day by day. It pleased me to believe,
Do I say, I did, really believe, and do believe

(18:59):
now that the cat understood all and grew haggard with
fear as my grandmother failed visibly, for it knew what
the end would mean for it. That first day of
my arrival, when I saw my grandmother in her white cap,
with her white face and hands and the big white

(19:19):
cat sitting near to her. I had thought there was
a similarity between them. That similarity struck me more forcibly
grew upon me as my time in the house grew longer,
until the latter seemed almost a reproduction of the former,
And after each letter from my friend, my hate for

(19:40):
the two increased. But my hate for my grandmother was impotent,
and would always be so. I could never repay her
for the anui, the furious forced inactivity, which made my
life a burden and spurred my bad passions while they
lulled me in a terrible and forced repose. I could

(20:04):
repay her favorite, the things she had always cherished, her
feline confidant, who lived in safety under the shadows of
her protection. I could wreak my fury on that when
the protection was withdrawn, as it must be at last.
It seemed to my brutal, imaginative, unfinished boy's mind that

(20:27):
the murder of her pet must hurt and wound my
grandmother even after she was dead. I would make her suffer. Then,
when she was impotent to wreak a vengeance upon me,
I would kill the cat. The creature knew my resolve.
The day I made it, and had even I should say,

(20:50):
anticipated it, as I sat day after day beside my
grandmother's arm chair in the dim room, with the blinds
drawn to shut out the summer sunlight, and talked to
her in a subdued and reverent voice, agreeing with all
the old banalities she uttered, all the preposterous opinions she propounded,

(21:13):
all the commands she laid upon me. I gazed beyond
her at the cat, and the creature was haggard with apprehension.
It knew as I knew that its day was coming.
Sometimes I bent down and took it up in my
lap to please my grandmother, and praised its beauty and

(21:35):
its gentleness to her. And all the time I felt
its warm, furry body trembling with horror between my hands.
This pleased me, and I pretended that I was never
happy unless it was on my knees. I kept it
there for hours, stroking it so tenderly, smoothing its thick

(21:58):
white coat, which was always in the most perfect order,
talking to it, caressing it, and sometimes I took its
head between my two hands, turned its face to mine,
and stared into its large blue eyes. Then I could
read all its agony, all its torture of apprehension, And

(22:21):
in spite of my friend's letters and the dulness of
my days, I was almost happy. The summer was deepening,
the glow of the roses flushed the garden ways, The
skies were clear above. Sca fell when the end at
last drew near. My grandmother's face was now scarcely recognizable.

(22:45):
The eyes were sunk deep in her head. All expression
seemed to fade gradually away. Her cheeks were no longer
fine ivory white. A dull, sickening yellow pallor overspread them.
She seldom looked at me now, but rested and tombed
in her great armchair, her shrunken limbs seeming to tend downwards,

(23:10):
as if she were inclined to slide to the floor
and die there. Her lips were thin and dry, and
moved perpetually in a silent chattering, as if her mind
were talking and her voice were already dead. The tide
of life was retreating from her body. I could almost

(23:31):
see it visibly ebb away. The failing waves made no
sound upon the shore. Death is uncanny, like all silent things.
Her maid wished her to stay entirely in bed, but
she would get up muttering that she was well, and
the doctor said it was useless to hinder her. She

(23:54):
had no specific disease, only the years were taking their
last to her. So she was placed in her chair
each day by the fire and sat there till evening,
muttering with those dry lips. The stiff folds of her
silken skirts formed an angle, and there the cat crouched

(24:17):
hour after hour, a silent, white waiting thing, and the
waves ebbed and ebbed away, And I waited too. One afternoon,
as I sat by my grandmother, the servant entered with
a letter from me, just arrived by the post. I

(24:37):
took it up. It was from Willoughby, my school friend.
He said the term was over, that he had left
school and his father had decided to send him out
to America to start a business in New York, instead
of entering him at Oxford as he had hoped. He
bade me goodbye and said he supposed we should not

(24:59):
meet again for years, but he added, no doubt, you
won't care a straw so long as you get the
confounded money you're after. You've taught me one of the
lessons of life. Young Ronald, never to believe in friendship.
As I read the letter, I set my teeth. All

(25:22):
that was good in my nature centered round Willoughby. He
was a really fine fellow. I honestly and truly loved him.
His news gave me a bitter shock and turned my
heart to iron and to fire. Perhaps I should never
see him again. Even if I did, time would have

(25:44):
changed him, seared him, My friend in his wonderful youth,
with the morning in his eyes, would be no more.
I hated myself in that moment for having stayed. I
hated still more her, who had kept me For the
moment I was carried out of myself. I crushed the

(26:07):
letter up in my burning hand. I turned fiercely round
upon that yellow, enigmatic, dying figure in the great chair.
All the fury locked within my heart for so long
rose to the surface and drove self interest away. I
turned upon my grandmother, with blazing eyes and trembling limbs.

(26:32):
I opened my mouth to utter a torrent of reproachful words.
When what was it? What slight change had stolen into
the wrinkled yellow face. I bent over her. The eyes
gazed at me, but so horribly she sat so low

(26:52):
in her chair. She looked so fearful, so very strange.
I put my fingers on her eyelids. I drew them
down over the eyeballs. They did not open again. I
felt her withered hands. They were ice. Then I knew,

(27:15):
and I felt myself smiling. I leaned over the dead woman.
There on the far side of her crouched the cat.
Its white fur was all bristling, Its blue eyes were dilated.
On its jaws. There were flecks of foam. I leaned

(27:36):
over the dead woman and took it in my arms.
That was nearly twenty years ago, and yet tonight the
memory of that moment and what followed it bring a
fear to my heart which I must combat. I have
read of men who lived for long spaces of time,

(27:57):
haunted by demons created by their massa, and I have
laughed at them and pitied them. Surely I am not
going to join in their folly, in their madness, led
to the gates of terror by my own fancies, half
confirmed apparently by the chance utterances of a conceited professor,

(28:19):
a man of fads, although a man of science, that
was twenty years ago. After tonight, let me forget it.
After tonight, do I say, hark? The birds are twittering
in the dew outside the pale early sunshafts strike over

(28:41):
the moors, and I am tired. Tomorrow night I will
finish this wrestle with my own folly. I will give
the coup de gras to my imagination, but no more.
Now my brain is not calm, and I will not
rune in excitement. End of chapter one recording by Roger

(29:08):
Molin