The Moonlit Road - Ambrose Bierce

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce. One statement of John
Hetman Junior. I am the most unfortunate of men, rich, respected, fairly,
well educated, and of sound health, with many of the
advantages usually valued by those having them, and coveted by

(00:23):
those who have them not. I sometimes think that I
should be less unhappy if they had been denied me,
For then the contrast between my outer and my inner
life would not be continually claiming a painful attention. In
the stress of privation and the need of effort, I
might sometimes forget the somber secret, ever baffling the conjecture

(00:48):
that it compels. I am the only child of my parents,
John and Julia Hetman. The one was a well to
do country gentleman, the other a beautiful and accomplished woman,
to whom he was passionately attached, with what I now
know to have been a jealous and exacting devotion. The

(01:09):
family home was a few miles outside Nashville, Tennessee, a large,
irregularly built dwelling of no particular order of architecture, a
little way off the road in a park of trees
and shrubbery. At the time of which I write, I
was nineteen years old, a student at Yale. One day

(01:31):
I received a telegram from my father of such urgency that,
in compliance with its unexplained demand, I left at once
for home. At the railway station in Nashville, a distant
relative awaited me to apprise me of the reason for
my recall. My mother had been barbarously murdered. Why and

(01:53):
by whom none could conjecture. My father had gone to Nashville,
intending to return the next afternoon. Something prevented his accomplishing
the business in hand, so he returned on the same night,
arriving just before dawn. In his testimony before the coroner,

(02:14):
he explained that, having no latch key, and not caring
to disturb the sleeping servants, he had, with no clearly
defined intention, gone round to the rear of the house.
As he turned an angle of the building, he heard
a sound as of a door gently closed, and saw
in the darkness indistinctly the figure of a man, which

(02:37):
instantly disappeared among the trees of the lawn. A hasty
pursuit and brief search of the grounds, in the belief
that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant, proving fruitless,
he entered at the unlocked door and mounted the stairs
to my mother's chamber. Its door was open, and he,

(02:59):
stepping into black darkness, fell headlong over some heavy object
on the floor. I may spare myself the details. It
was my poor mother, dead of strangulation by human hands.
Nothing had been taken from the house. The servants had
heard no sound, and excepting those terrible finger marks upon

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the dead woman's throat, Dear God, that I might forget them,
no trace of the assassin was ever found. I gave
up my studies and remained with my father, who naturally
was greatly changed. Always of a silent, saturnine disposition, he

(03:43):
now fell into so deep a dejection that nothing could
hold his attention. Yet anything, a footfall, the sudden closing
of a door aroused in him a fitful interest. One
might have called it an apprehension. At any small surprise
of the senses, he would start visibly, and sometimes turn pale,

(04:06):
then relapse into a melancholy apathy deeper than before. I
suppose he was what is called a nervous wreck. As
for me, I was younger then than now. There is
much in that youth is Gilead, in which is balm
for every wound, Ah, that I might again dwell in

(04:30):
that enchanted land. Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how
to appraise my bereavement. I could not rightly estimate the
strength and terror of the stroke. One night, a few
months after the dreadful event, my father and I walked
home from the city. The full moon was only about

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three hours above the horizon, but the entire countryside had
the solemn stillness of a summer midnight. Our footfalls and
the ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sounds.
Aloof black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the road,
which in the short reaches between gleamed a ghostly white.

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As we approached the gate to our dwelling, whose front
was in shadow and in which no light shone, my
father suddenly stopped and clutched my arm, saying hardly above
his breath, God, God, what is that? I hear nothing,
I replied, But see see, he said, pointing along the

(05:39):
road directly ahead. I said, nothing is there. Come, Father,
let us go in. You are ill. He had released
my arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the
center of the illuminated roadway. Staring like one bereft of sense.

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His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity,
inexpressibly distressing. I pulled gently at his sleeve, but he
had forgotten my existence. Presently he began to retire backward,
step by step, never for an instant removing his eyes

(06:20):
from what he saw or thought he saw. I turned
half round to follow, but stood irresolute. I do not
recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was
its physical manifestation. It seemed as if an icy wind
had touched my face and enfolded my body from head

(06:41):
to foot. I could feel the stir of it in
my hair. At that moment, my attention was drawn to
a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of
the house. One of the servants, awakened by what mysterious
premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to
an impulse that she was never able to name, had

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lit a lamp. When I turned to look for my father,
he was gone. And in all the years that have passed,
no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland
of conjecture from the realm of the unknown two statement
of Caspar Gratten to day I am said to live

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to morrow. Here in this room will lie a senseless
shape of clay that all too long was I. And
if any one lift the cloth from the face of
that unpleasant thing, it will be in gratification of a
mere morbid curiosity. Some doubtless will go farther and inquire

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who was he in this writing? I supply the only
answer that I am able to make Caspar Gratten. Surely
that should be enough. It has served my small need
for more than twenty years of a life of unknown length. True,
I gave it to myself, but lacking another, I had

(08:11):
the right. In this world one must have a name.
It prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though,
are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions. One
day I was passing along a street of a city
far from here, when I met two men similarly clad,

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one of whom, half pausing and looking curiously into my face,
said to his companion that chap looks like seven six seven.
Something in the number seemed familiar and horrible. Moved by
an uncontrollable impulse, I sprang into a side street and
ran till I fell exhausted in a country lane. I

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have never forgotten that number, and always it comes to memory,
attended by gibbering, obscenity, peals of joyless laughter, the clang
of iron doors. So I say, a name, even if
self bestowed, is better than a number in the register
of the potter's field. I shall soon have both. What

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wealth of him who shall find this paper? I must
beg a little consideration. It is not the history of
my life, the knowledge to write that is denied me.
This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories,
some of them distinct and sequent, like brilliant beads upon

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a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of
crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black, which fires glowing
still and red, in a great desolation. Standing upon the
shore of eternity, I turn for a last look landward,

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over the course by which I came. There are twenty
years of footprints, fairly distinct, the impressions of bleeding feet.
They lead through poverty and pain, devious and unsure, as
of one staggering beneath a burden, remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow

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ah The poet's prophecy of me, how admirable, how dreadfully admirable.
Backward beyond the beginning of this via Dolrosa, this epic
of suffering with episodes of sin, I see nothing clearly.
It comes out of a cloud. I know that it

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spans only twenty years. Yet I am an old man.
Does not remember one's birth, one has to be told.
But with me it was different. Life came to me
full handed and dowered me with all my faculties and
powers of a previous existence. I know no more than others,

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for all have stammering intimations that may be memories and
may be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness
was of maturity in body and mind, a consciousness accepted
without surprise or conjecture. I merely found myself walking in
a forest, half clad, footsore, unutterably weary and hungry. Seeing

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a farm house, I approached and asked for food, which
was given me by one who inquired my name. I
did not know yet knew that all had names. Greatly Embarrassed,
I retired and night, coming on, lay down in the
forest and slept. The next day I entered a large

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town which I shall not name, nor shall I recount
further incidents of the life that is now to end,
A life of wandering, always and everywhere, haunted by an
overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong, and of
terror in punishment of crime. Let me see if I

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can reduce it to narrative. I seem once to have
lived near a great city, a prosperous planter, married to
a woman whom I loved and suspected we had it
sometimes seems one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise.

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He is at all times a vague figure, never clearly drawn,
frequently altogether out of the picture. One luckily day, it
occurred to me to test my wife's fidelity in a vulgar,
commonplace way familiar to every one who has acquaintance with
the literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city,

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telling my wife that I should be absent until the
following afternoon. But I returned before daybreak and went to
the rear of the house, purposing to enter by a
door with which I had secretly so tampered that it
would seem to lock, yet not actually fasten. As I
approached it, I heard it gently open and close, and

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saw a man steal away into the darkness. With murder
in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had
vanished without even the bad luck of identification. Crazed with
jealousy and rage, blind and bestial, with all the elemental
passions of insulted manhood, I entered the house and sprang

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up the stairs to the door of my wife's chamber.
It was closed, but having tempered with its lock also,
I easily entered, and despite the black darkness, soon stood
by the side of her bed. My groping hands told
me that although disarranged, it was unoccupied. She is below,

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I thought, and terrified by my entrance, has evaded me
in the hall. With the purpose of seeking her, I
turned to leave the room, but took a wrong direction,
the right one. My foot struck her, cowering in a
corner of the room. Instantly my hands were at her throat,

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stifling a shriek. My knees were upon her struggling body,
and there in the darkness, without a word of accusation
or reproach, I strangled her till she died. There ends
the dream. I have related it in the past tense,
but the present would be the fitter form. For again

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and again the somber tragedy re enacts itself in my consciousness.
Over and over I lay the plan, I suffer the confirmation,
I redress the wrong. Then all is blank. And afterward
the rains beat against the grimy window panes, or the

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snows fall upon my scant attire. The wheels rattle in
the squalid streets where my life lies in poverty and
mean employment. If there is ever sunshine, I do not
recall it. If there are birds, they do not sing.
There is another dream, another vision of the night. I

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stand among the shadows in a moonlit road. I am
conscious of another presence, but whose I cannot rightly determine.
In the shadow of a great dwelling, I catch the
gleam of white garments. Then the figure of a woman
confronts me in the road, my murdered wife. There is

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death in the face. There are marks upon the throat.
The eyes are fixed on mine with an infinite gravity,
which is not reproach, nor hate, nor menace, nor anything
less terrible than recognition. Before this awful apparition, I retire

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in terror, a terror that is upon me. As I write,
I can no longer rightly shape the words. See they
now I am calm, But truly there was no more
to tell. The incident ends where it began, in darkness

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and in doubt. Yes, I am again in control of myself,
the captain of my soul. But that is not respite.
It is another stage and phase of expiation. My penance,
constant in degree, is mutable in kind. One of its

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variants is tranquility. After all, it is only a life
sentence to hell. For life that is a full penalty.
The culprit chooses the duration of his punishment to day.
My term expires to each and all the peace that

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was not mine. Three statement of the late Julia Hetman
through the medium bay Rolls. I had retired early and
fallen almost immediately into a dreamless sleep, from which I
awoke with that vague, indeafenable sense of peril, which is

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I think a common experience in that other earlier life,
of its unmeaning character. Too. I was entirely persuaded, yet
that did not banish it. My husband was away from home,
the servants slept in another part of the house. But
these were familiar conditions. They had never before distressed me. Nevertheless,

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the strange terror grew so insupportable that, conquering my reluctance
to move, I sat up and lit the lamp at
my bedside. Contrary to my expectation, this gave me no relief.
The light seemed rather an added danger, for I reflected
that it would shine out under the door, disclosing my

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presence to whatever evil thing might lurk outside. You that
are still in the flesh subject to horrors of the imagination, Think,
what a monstrous fear that must be, which seeks in
darkness security from malevolent existences of the night, That is,

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to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy, the
strategy of despair. Extinguishing the lamp, I pulled the bed
clothing about my head and lay trembling and silent, unable
to shriek, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state, I
must have lain for what you call hours. With us,

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there are no hours, there is no time. At last,
it came a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs.
They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did
not see its way to my disordered reason. All the

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more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind
and mindless malevolence, to which is no appeal. I even
thought that I must have left the hall lamp burning,
and the groping of this creature proved it a monster
of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with my
previous dread of the light. But what would you have

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fear has no brains. It is an idiot. The dismal
witness that it bears and the coward counsel that it
whispers are unrelated. We know this well, we who have
passed into the realm of terror, whose skulk in eternal
dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even

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to ourselves and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places,
yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb and
as fearful of them as they of us. Sometimes the
disability is removed, the law suspended by the deathless power
of love or hate. We break the spell. We are

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seen by those whom we would warn, console or punish.
What form we seem to them to bear, we know not.
We know only that we terrify even those whom we
most wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave
tenderness and sympathy. Forgive. I pray you this inconsequent digression

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by what was once a woman, You who consult us
in this imperfect way, you do not understand. You ask
foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden. Much that
we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless
in yours. We must communicate with you through a stammering intelligence,

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in that small fraction of our language that you, yourselves can speak.
You think that we are of another world. No, we
have knowledge of no world but yours, though for us
it holds no no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter,

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no song of birds, nor any companionship. Oh God, what
a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and
shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair. No,
I did not die of fright. The thing turned and

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went away. I heard it go down the stairs hurriedly,
I thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then I
rose to call for help. Hardly had my shaking hand
found the doorknob. When merciful Heaven, I heard it returning
its footfalls as it remounted. The stairs were rapid, heavy

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and loud. They shook the house. I fled to an
angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. I
tried to pray, I tried to call then the name
of my dear husband. Then I heard the door thrown open.
There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when I revived,

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I felt a strangling clutch upon my throat, felt my
arms feebly beating against something that bore me backward, felt
my tongue thrusting itself from between my teeth. And then
I passed into this life. No, I have no knowledge
of what it was. The sum of what we knew

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at death is the measure of what we know afterward,
of all that went before. Of this existence. We know
many things, but no new light falls upon any page
of that in memory is written all of it that
we can read. Here are no new heights of truth
overlooking the confused landscape of that dubitable domain. We still

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dwell in the valley of the shadow, lurk in in
its desolate places, peering from brambles and thickets at its
mad malign inhabitants. How should we have new knowledge of
that fading past. What I am about to relate happened
on a night we know when it is night, for

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then you retire to your houses, and we can venture
from our places of concealment, to move unafraid about our
old homes, to look in at the windows, even to
enter and gaze upon your faces as you sleep. For
weeks I had lingered near the dwelling where I had
been so cruelly changed to what I am, as we do,

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while any that we love or hate remain vainly. I
had sought some method of manifestation, some way to make
my continued existence and my great love and poignant pity
understood by my husband and son. Always, if they slept,
they would wake, or if in my desperation I dared

(25:06):
approach them when they were awake, would turn toward me
the terrible eyes of the living, frightening me by the
glances that I sought from the purpose that I held.
On this night, I had searched for them, without success,
and fearing to find them, they were nowhere in the house,
nor about the moonlit lawn. For although the sun is

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lost to us forever, the moon, full orbed or slender,
remains to us. Sometimes it shines by night, sometimes by day,
but always it rises and sets as in that other life.
I left the lawn and moved in the white light
and silence along the road, aimless and sorrowing. Suddenly I

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heard the voice of my poor husband in exclamations of astonishment,
with that of my son, in reassurance and dissuasion. And there,
in the shadow of a group of trees, they stood near,
so near their faces were toward me. The eyes of
the elder man fixed upon mine. He saw me at last,

(26:19):
at last he saw me in the consciousness of that
My terror fled as a cruel dream. The death spell
was broken. Love had conquered law. Mad with exultation, I shouted,
I must have shouted, he sees, he sees, he will understand. Then,

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controlling myself, I moved forward, smiling and consciously beautiful, to
offer myself to his arms, to comfort him with endearments,
and with my son's hand in mine, to speak words
that should restore the broken bonds between the living and
the dead. Alas Alas, his face went white with fear.

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His eyes were as those of a hunted animal. He
backed away from me as I advanced, and at last
turned and fled into the wood. Whither it is not
given to me to know. To my poor boy, left
doubly desolate, I have never been able to impart a

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sense of my presence. Soon, he too must pass to
the invisible and be lost to me forever. End of
the Moonlit Road by Ambrose Bierce