The House of the Vampire - 11 - Chapters 21 and 22

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The House of the Vampire by George Sylvester Viereck, Chapter
twenty one. Reginald's revelations were followed by a long silence,
interrupted only by the officiousness of the waiter. The spell.
Once broken, they exchanged a number of more or less
irrelevant observations. Ethel's mind returned again and again to the

(00:21):
word he had not spoken. He had said nothing of
the immediate bearing of his monstrous power upon her own
life and that of Earnest Fielding. At last, somewhat timidly,
she approached the subject. You said you loved me, she remarked,
I did. But why then I could not help it?

(00:42):
Did you ever make the slightest attempt in the horrible
night hours? I struggled against it. I even implored you
to leave me. Ah, but I loved you. You would
not be warned, you would not listen. You stayed with me,
and slowly, surely the creator of urge went out of
your life. But what on earth could you find in

(01:04):
my poor art to attract you? What were my pictures
to you? I needed them, I needed you. It was
a certain something, a rich color effect perhaps, And then
under your very eyes the color that vanished from your canvases,
A reappeared in my prose. My style became more luxurious

(01:24):
than it had been while you tortured your soul in
the vain attempt of calling back to your brush. What
was irretrievably lost? Why did you not tell me? You
would have laughed in my face, and I could not
have endured your laugh. Besides, I always hoped, until it
was too late, that I might yet check the mysterious

(01:44):
power within me. Soon, however, I became aware that it
was beyond my control. The unknown God whose instrument I
am had wisely made it stronger than me. But why,
retorted Ethel, was it necessary to discard me like a
cast off garment, like a wanton who has lost the
power to please her frame shook with the remembered emotion

(02:06):
of that moment, when years ago he had politely told
her that she was nothing to him the law of being,
Reginald replied, almost sadly, the law of my being. I
should have pitied you, but the eternal reproach of your
suffering only provoked my anger. I cared less for you
every day, and when I had absorbed all of you

(02:28):
that my growth required, you were to me as one dead,
as a stranger you were, there was between us no
further community of interest. Henceforth I knew our lives must
move in totally different spheres. You remember that day when
we said good bye. You mean that day when I
lay before you on my knees, she corrected him, the

(02:49):
day I buried my last dream of personal happiness. I
would have gladly raised you from the floor, but love
was utterly gone. If I am tenderer today than I
am to be, it is because you mean so much
to me as the symbol of my renunciation. When I
realized that I could not even say of the thing
I loved from myself, I became hardened and cruel to others.

(03:12):
Not that I know no kindly feeling, but no qualms
of conscience lay their prostrate forms across my path. There
is nothing in life for me but my mission. His
face was bathed in ecstasy. The pupils were luminous, large
and threatening. He had the look of a madman or
a prophet. After a while, Ethel remarked, but you have

(03:33):
grown into one of the master figures of the age.
Why not be content with that? Is there no limit
to your ambition? Reginald smiled ambition. Shakespeare stopped when he
had reached his full growth, when he had exhausted the
capacities of his contemporaries. I am not yet ready to
lay down my pen and rest, and will you always

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continue in this criminal course? A murderer of other lives?
He looked her calmly in the face. I do not know.
Are you the slave of your unknown god? We are
all slaves, wire pulled marionettes. You earnest I there is
no freedom on the face of the earth, nor above.

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The tiger that tears a lamb is not free. I
am not free. You are not free. All that happens
must happen. No word that is said is said in vain.
In vain is raised no hand. Then Ethel retorted eagerly,
if I attempted to wrest your victim from you, I
should also be the tool of your God, assuredly, But

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I am his chosen Can you? Can you not set
him free? I need him a little longer then he
is yours? But can you not, if I beg you
again on my knees, at least loosen his chains before
he is utterly ruined. It is beyond my power if

(05:01):
I could not rescue you, whom I loved, what in
heaven or on earth can save him from his fate? Besides,
he will not be utterly ruined. It is only a
part of him that I absorb. In his soul are
chords that I have not touched. They may vibrate one day,
when he has gathered new strength. You too would have
spared yourself much pain, had you striven to attain success

(05:23):
in different fields, not where I had garnered the harvest
of a lifetime. It is only a portion of his
talent that I take from him. The rest I cannot harm.
Why should he bury that remainder? His eyes strayed through
the window to the firmament, as if to say that
words could no more bend his indomitable will than alter
the changeless course of the stars. Ethel had half forgotten

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the wrong she had herself suffered at his hands. He
could not be measured by ordinary standards, this dazzling madman,
whose diseased will power had assumed such uncanny proportions. But
here a young life was at stake. In her mind's eye,
she saw Reginald crush between his relentless hands, the delicate
soul of Earnest Fielding as a magnificent, carnivorous flower might

(06:08):
close its glorious petals upon a fly. Love, all conquering
love welled up in her. She would fight for Ernest
as a tiger cat fights for its young. She would
place herself in the way of the awful force that
had shattered her own aspirations, and save at any cost
the brilliant boy who did not love her. Chapter twenty two.

(06:32):
The last rays of the late afternoon sun fell slanting
through Ernest's window. He was lying on his couch in
a leaden, deathlike slumber that, for the moment at least,
was not even perturbed by the presence of Reginald Clark.
The latter was standing at the boy's bedside, calm unmoved,
as ever, the excitement of his conversation with Ethel had

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left no trace on the chiseled contour of his forehead.
Smilingly fastening an orchid of an indefinable purple tint in
his evening coat. Radiant buoyant with life, he looked down
upon the sleeper. Then he passed his hand over Ernest's forehead,
as if to wipe off beads of sweat. At the
touch of his hand, the boy stirred uneasily. When it

(07:13):
was not withdrawn, his countenance twitched in pain. He moaned
as men moan under the influence of some anesthetic, without
possessing the power to break through the narrow partition that
separates them from death on the one side and from
consciousness on the other. At last, a sigh struggled to
his seemingly paralyzed lips, then another. Finally, the babbling became articulate.

(07:36):
For God's sake, he cried in his sleep, take that
hand away, and all at once, the benignant smile on
Reginald's features was changed to a look of savage fierceness.
He no longer resembled the man of culture, but a disappointed,
snarling beast of prey. He took his hand from Ernest's
forehead and retired cautiously through the half open door. Hardly

(07:58):
had he disappeared. When Ernest woke for a moment, he
looked around like a hunted animal, then sighed with relief
and buried his head in his hand. At that moment,
a knock at the door was heard, and Reginald re entered,
calm as before I declare, he exclaimed, you have certainly
been sleeping the sleep of the just. It isn't laziness,

(08:20):
Ernest replied, looking up rather pleased at the interruption. But
I've a splitting headache. Perhaps those naps are not good
for your health. Probably, But of late I have frequently
found it necessary to exact from the day hours the
sleep which the night refuses me. I suppose it is
all due to indigestion. As you have suggested. The stomach

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is the source of all evil. It is also the
source of all good. The Greeks made it the seat
of the soul. I have always claimed that the most
important item in a great poet's biography is an exact
reproduction of his menu. True, a man who eats a
heavy beefsteak for breakfast in the morning is incapable of
writing a sonnet in the afternoon. Yes, Reginald added, we

(09:05):
are what we eat and what our forefathers have eaten
before us. I ascribe the staleness of American poetry to
the griddle cakes of our Puritan ancestors. I am sorry
we cannot go deeper into the subject at present, but
I have an invitation to dinner, where I shall study
experimentally the influence of French sauces on my versification. Good

(09:27):
Bye au Revoir, and with a wave of the hand,
Reginald left the room. When the door had closed behind him,
Ernest's thoughts took a more serious turn. The tone of
light bantering in which the preceding conversation had taken place
had been assumed on his part. For the last few weeks,
evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow

(09:47):
upon his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality,
in intensity, and in hideousness. Even now he could see
the long, tapering fingers that every night were groping in
the windings of his brain. It was a well formed,
manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull, carefully
feeling its way through the myriad convolutions where thought resides.

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And oh, the agony of it all. A human mind
is not a thing of stone, but alive, horribly alive
to pain. What was it those fingers sought? What mysterious treasures,
what jewels hidden in the under layer of his consciousness?
His brain was like a human gold mine, quaking under
the blow of the pick and the tread of the miner.

(10:31):
The miner. Ah the miner ceaselessly, thoroughly, relentlessly. He opened
vein after vein, and rested untold riches from the quivering ground.
But each vein was alive vein, and each nugget of
gold a thought no wonder. The boy was a nervous wreck.
Whenever a tremulous nascent idea was formulating itself, the dream

(10:51):
hand clutched it and took it away, brutally, severing the
fine threads that bind thought to thought. And when the
morning came, how his head ached, it was not an
acute pain, but dull, heavy, incessant. These sensations Ernest frequently
told himself were morbid phantasies. But then the monomaniac who

(11:13):
imagines that his arms have been mangled or cut from
his body might as well be without arms. Mind can
annihilate obstacles, it can also create them. Psychology was no
unfamiliar ground to Earnest, and it was not difficult for
him to seek, in some casual suggestion, an explanation for
his delusion, the fixed notion that haunted him day and night.

(11:34):
But he also realized that to explain a phenomenon is
not to explain it. Away. The man who analyzes his
emotions cannot wholly escape them, and the shadow of fear, primal,
inexplicable fear may darken at moments of weakness. The life
of the subtlest psychologist and the cleverest thinker. He had
never spoken to Reginald of his terrible nightmares coming on

(11:55):
the heel of the fancy that he, Earnest had written
The Princess with the Yellow Veil, a fancy, by the way,
had again possessed him of late. This new delusion would
certainly arouse suspicion as to his sanity. In Reginald's mind,
he would probably send him to a sanitarium. He certainly
would not keep him in the house beneficence itself. In
all other things, his host was not to be trifled with.

(12:17):
In any matter that interfered with his work, he would
act swiftly and without mercy. For the first time in
many days, Earnest thought of Abel Felton, poor boy. What
had become of him after he had been turned from
the house. He would not wait for any one to
tell him to pack his bundle, but then that was impossible.
Reginald was fond of him. Suddenly Ernest's meditations were interrupted

(12:39):
by a noise at the outer door. A key was
turned in the lock. It must be he, But why
so soon? What could have brought him back at this hour?
He opened the door and went out into the hall
to see what had happened. The figure that he beheld
was certainly not the person he expected, but a woman
from whose shoulders a theater cloak fell in graceful folds,
probably a visit her for Reginald. Ernest was about to

(13:02):
withdraw discreetly when the electric light that was burning in
the hallway fell upon her face and illumined it. Then, indeed,
surprise overcame him ethel He cried, is it you? End
of section eleven.