Day and Night Stories

in front of the little hotel was there noise and light and bustle-for a moment. The horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the road and disappeared into the stable of their

tral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink; and the keen air smelt of pine forests, dew-soaked pastures, and freshly sawn wood. He took it all in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few minutes, while the other three passen

e ideal to the actual. For at the inn-the only inn-there wa

emembered, for he had come to the decision suddenly that morning in G

hard, he noticed-gesticulating all the time, and pointing all about the village with sug

ow, perhaps-if So-and-So give up their rooms--!" And then, with much shrugging of shoulders, the hard-

under 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 speak with the old woman. The houses sketched themselves dimly in the general blackness. The air was cold. The whole valley was filled wi

olloquy and whispered asides in patois between the woman and the porter-the net result of which was that, "If Monsie

ided it so suddenly. The ethics of hotel-keeping had nothing to do with him. If the woman offered him

in a mixture of French and English details omitted by the landlady-and Minturn, the schoolmas

eir dark terror in the sky. The atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable from any imaginative contemplation of the scene; and the idea Minturn 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 porter had seen her start

t. 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 ma

ed he kept looking over his shoulder as though some one were watching him from the corners. Any 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

y 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, her glazed eyes staring sightless up to the stars.?... It made him

. 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 Alpenrosen standing in a glass jar upon the washhand stand. This, and a certain faint perfume, were all that rema

s possible from view. 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

h the blackness, there came a sudden rush of cold that he found it hard to explain. And the

itted 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 everyt

ribe. And its first effect was to banish fear. He no longer possessed enough energy to feel really afraid 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 sp

cs! That gold-braided porter, so talkative, fussy, energetic, 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 labour and drudgery he went through in that preparatory school where he was

to nothing but the dreary labour of a small headmastership after all-seemed as vain and foolish as his holiday 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-resulted in nothing. A drearines

wait for

ng 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, and so forth. It had all rather frighte

irst sign of his returning normal Self. For

itched on the electric light. And the first t

yet aloud. It held all the clothes, the swinging skirts and coats and summer b

, the snow-dust eddying about her hair and eyes, her broken limbs pushing against the 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 f

anted to see those clothes-things she had used and worn. Quite close he stood, almos

ve done so he found it as 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 realisation of the woman's presence t

udgment; for he became possessed by such an overmastering desire to tear open that cupboard door and see the clothes within, that he tr

s 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 s

d impatience, "I want a man. Wake the porter and se

n 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 i

rl 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 air of wonderin

ll against the wooden floor-within. The cupboard had been locked from the inside. But it was the scared housema

lmaster and himself made a simultaneous rush towa

woman hanging by the neck, the head bent horribly forwards, the tongue protruding. Jarred by the movement of unlocking, the body swung slow

is black. I must put an end to it.?... I meant to do it on the mountains, but wa