She walked towards it. A huge black trunk with a flat top stood directly under the window, and in the dust which thickly coated it there were four curious marks. Two pairs of each. The farther ones, the marks nearest the window, she made out at once. They were the prints of hands. The fingers, pointing into the room, were splayed out and unnaturally elongated; where the hand joined the wrist there was a long shapeless smear. Opposite them, and within an arm’s length, were the other marks. At first they meant nothing to her: two symmetrical black smudges with rounded tops and a thin track of dust between them. The imprint of a man’s knees perhaps? Panic descended on Mrs. Playward. She fled, screaming ‘Mr. Ernest, Mr. Ernest, something has happened in the box-room!’ No one answered her; when she hammered on Mr. Ernest’s door no one replied, and when she went in, the room was empty.
THE THOUGHT
Henry Greenstream had always looked forward to his afternoon walk. It divided the day for him. In ideal circumstances a siesta preceded it and he awoke to a new morning, a false dawn, it is true, but as pregnant with unexpressed promise as the real one. For some weeks now, however, sleep had deserted his after-luncheon cushion; he could get to the brink of unconsciousness, when thoughts and pictures drifted into his mind independently of his will, but not over.
Still, the walk was the main thing even if he started on it a little tired. It calmed, it satisfied, it released. For an hour and twenty-five minutes he enjoyed the freedom of the birds of the air. Impressions and sensations offered themselves to him in an unending flow, never outstaying their welcome, never demanding more from his attention than a moment’s recognition. Lovely and pleasant voices that tonelessly proclaimed the harmony between him, Henry Greenstream, and the spirit of all created things.
Or they had proclaimed it till lately. Lately the rhythm of his thoughts had been disturbed by an interloper, yes, an interloper, but an interloper from within. Like a cuckoo that soon ceased to be a visitor, the stranger had entered his mind and now dwelt there, snatching at the nourishment meant for its legitimate neighbours. They pined, they grew sickly while Henry Greenstream suckled the parasite.
He knew what it was and whence it came. It was an infection from his conscience which had taken offence at an act so trivial that surely no other conscience would have noticed it. Indeed, he had himself almost forgotten what it originated in—something about a breach of confidence that (reason assured him a thousand times) could have harmed nobody. And when it stirred inside him it was not to remind him of his fault and recall the circumstances of his lapse, but simply to hurt him; to prick the tender tegument which, unpierced, assures comfort to the mind.
If it did not spoil his life it fretted him, reducing his capacity for enjoyment; and most of all did it make its presence felt when he took his afternoon exercise. The aery shapes that then haunted his imagination could not suppress it, nor was the scenery through which he passed such as to distract him from himself. Town gave way to suburb; suburb to ribbon development; only when it was time to turn back did he emerge into the unspoilt countryside. Motors rushed by; an occasional tramp asked for a match; dogs idled on the pavement. All this was uninspiring but at the same time it fostered his mood; even the ugly little houses, with their curtains drawn aside to reveal a plant or a pretentious piece of china, invited pleasing speculations. Confidently he looked forward to his reunion with these humble landmarks. But they had lost their power to draw him out, and lately he had invented a new and less satisfying form of mental pastime. Much less satisfying; for it consisted in counting the minutes that elapsed between one visitation of the Thought and the next. Even so might a Chinese malefactor seek to beguile himself while under the water-torture by calculating the incidence of the drops.
Where the signpost pointed to Aston Highchurch Mr. Greenstream paused. He had been walking half an hour and the Thought had recurred twenty-two times; that was an average of nearly once a minute, a higher average than yesterday, when he had got off with fourteen repetitions. It was in fact a record: a bad record. What could he do to banish this tedious symptom? Stop counting, perhaps? Make his mind a blank? He wandered on with uncertain footsteps unlike his ordinary purposeful stride. Ahead of him the October sun was turning down the sky, behind, the grass (for the fields now began to outnumber the houses) took on a golden hue; above, the clouds seemed too lazy to obey what little wind there was. It was a lovely moment that gathered to itself all the harmony of which the restless earth was capable. Mr. Greenstream opened his heart to the solace of the hour and was already feeling refreshed when ping! the Thought stung him again.
‘I must do something about this,’ thought Mr. Greenstream, ‘or I shall go mad.’
He looked round. To his left, in the hedge beyond the grass verge, was a wicket-gate, and from it a path ran diagonally over the shoulder of a little hill, a shabby asphalt path that gleamed in the sunlight and disappeared, tantalizingly, into the horizon. Mr. Greenstream knew where it led, to Aston Highchurch; but so conservative was he that in all these years of tramping down the main road he had never taken it. He did so now. In a few minutes he was on the high land in what seemed a different world, incredibly nearer the sky. Turning left along a country lane bordered by trees and less agreeably by chicken runs, he kept catching sight of a church; and at length he came to a path that led straight to it across a stubble field. It lay with its back to him, long and low, with a square tower at the further end that gave it the look of a cat resting on tucked-in legs, perhaps beginning to purr.
Mr. Greenstream stopped at the churchyard gate and stared up at the tower to make out what the objects were which, hanging rather crazily at the corners below the parapet, had looked in the distance like whiskers, and completed the feline impression made by the church. A whiskered church! The idea amused Mr. Greenstream until his watchful tormentor, ever jealous of his carefree moments, prodded him again. With a sigh he entered the porch and listened. No sound. The door opened stiffly to confront him with a pair of doors, green baize this time. He went back and shut the outer door, then the inner ones, and felt he had shut out the world. The church was empty; he had it to himself.
It was years since Mr. Greenstream had been inside a church except on ceremonial occasions or as a sightseer, and he did not quite know what to do. This was a Perpendicular church, light, airy and spacious, under rather than over furnished. The seats were chairs made of wood so pale as to be almost white: they were lashed together with spars, and the whole group, with its criss-cross of vertical and horizontal lines, made an effect that was gay and pretty and in so far as it suggested rigging, faintly nautical.
Mr. Greenstream wandered up the nave but felt a reluctance, for which he could not quite account, to mount the chancel steps; in any case there was little of note there and the east window was evidently modern. Straying back along the north aisle wall he read the monumental inscriptions, black lettering on white marble or white lettering on black marble. Then he came face to face with the stove, an impressive cylinder from which issued a faint crackling. His tour seemed to be over; but he was aware of a feeling of expectancy, as if the church were waiting for him to do something.
‘After all, why not?’ he thought, sinking to his knees. But he could not pray at once—he had lost the habit, he did not know how to begin. Moreover he felt ashamed of coming to claim the benefits of religion when for many years he had ignored its obligations. Such a prayer would be worse than useless; it was an insult; it would put God against him. Then the Thought came with its needle-jab and he waited no longer but prayed vehemently and incoherently for deliverance. But a morbid fear assailed him that it was not enough to think the words, for some of them, perhaps the most operative, might be left out, telescoped or elided by the uncontrollable hurry of his mind, so he repeated his petition out loud. Until he had ceased to speak he did not notice how strange his voice sounded in the empty church, almost as if it did not belong to him. Rising shakily to his feet he blinked, dazzled by the daylight, and stumbled out of the church without a backward look.