Complete Short Stories by Robert Graves
‘Agreed,’ said Richard.
‘I have never yet shouted to satisfy an idle curiosity,’ said Charles, ‘but only when in danger of my life from enemies, black or white, and once when I was alone in the desert without food or drink. Then I was forced to shout, for food.’
Richard thought: ‘Well, at least I am a lucky man, and my luck will be good enough even for this.’
‘I am not afraid,’ he told Charles.
‘We will walk out on the sand hills tomorrow early,’ Charles said, ‘when nobody is stirring; and I will shout. You say you are not afraid.’
But Richard was very much afraid, and what made his fear worse was that somehow he could not talk to Rachel and tell her of it: he knew that if he told her she would either forbid him to go or she would come with him. If she forbade him to go, the fear of the shout and the sense of cowardice would hang over him ever afterwards; but if she came with him, either the shout would be nothing and she would have a new taunt for his credulity and Charles would laugh with her, or if it were something, she might well be driven mad. So he said nothing.
Charles was invited to sleep at the cottage for the night, and they stayed up late talking.
Rachel told Richard when they were in bed that she liked Charles and that he certainly was a man who had seen many things, though a fool and a big baby. Then Rachel talked a great deal of nonsense, for she had had two glasses of wine, which she seldom drank, and she said: ‘Oh, my dearest, I forgot to tell you. When I put on my buckled shoes this morning while you were away I found a buckle missing. I must have noticed that it was lost before I went to sleep last night and yet not fixed the loss firmly in my mind, so that it came out as a discovery in my dream; but I have a feeling, in fact I am certain, that Mr Charles has that buckle in his pocket; and I am sure that he is the man whom we met in our dream. But I don’t care, not I.’
Richard grew more and more afraid, and he dared not tell of the black silk handkerchief, or of Charles’s invitations to him to walk in the sand hills. And what was worse, Charles had used only a white handkerchief while he was in the house, so that he could not be sure whether he had seen it after all. Turning his head away, he said lamely: ‘Well, Charles knows a lot of things. I am going for a walk with him early tomorrow if you don’t mind; an early walk is what I need.’
‘Oh, I’ll come too,’ she said.
Richard could not think how to refuse her; he knew that he had made a mistake in telling her of the walk. But he said: ‘Charles will be very glad. At six o’clock then.’
At six o’clock he got up, but Rachel after the wine was too sleepy to come with them. She kissed him goodbye and off he went with Charles.
Richard had had a bad night. In his dreams nothing was in human terms, but confused and fearful, and he had felt himself more distant from Rachel than he had ever felt since their marriage, and the fear of the shout was gnawing at him. He was also hungry and cold. There was a stiff wind blowing towards the sea from the mountains and a few splashes of rain. Charles spoke hardly a word, but chewed a stalk of grass and walked fast.
Richard felt giddy, and said to Charles: ‘Wait a moment, I have a stitch in my side.’ So they stopped, and Richard asked, gasping: ‘What sort of shout is it? Is it loud, or shrill? How is it produced? How can it madden a man?’
Charles was silent, so Richard went on with a foolish smile: ‘Sound, though, is a curious thing. I remember once, when I was at Cambridge, that a King’s College man had his turn of reading the evening lesson. He had not spoken ten words before there was a groaning and ringing and creaking, and pieces of wood and dust fell from the roof; for his voice was exactly attuned to that of the building, so that he had to stop, else the roof might have fallen; as you can break a wine glass by playing its note on a violin.’
Charles consented to answer: ‘My shout is not a matter of tone or vibration but something not to be explained. It is a shout of pure evil, and there is no fixed place for it on the scale. It may take any note. It is pure terror, and if it were not for a certain intention of mine, which I need not tell you, I would refuse to shout for you.’
Richard had a great gift of fear, and this new account of the shout disturbed him more and more; he wished himself at home in bed, and Charles two continents away. But he was fascinated. They were crossing the links now and going through the bent grass that pricked through his stockings and soaked them.
Now they were on the bare sand hills. From the highest of them Charles looked about him; he could see the beach stretched out for two miles and more. There was no one in sight. Then Richard saw Charles take something out of his pocket and begin carelessly to juggle with it as he stood, tossing it from finger tip to finger tip and spinning it up with finger and thumb to catch it on the back of his hand. It was Rachel’s buckle.
Richard’s breath came in gasps, his heart beat violently and he nearly vomited. He was shivering with cold, and yet sweating. Soon they came to an open place among the sand hills near the sea. There was a raised bank with sea holly growing on it and a little sickly grass; stones were strewn all around, brought there, it seemed, by the sea years before. Though the place lay behind the first rampart of sand hills, there was a gap in the line through which a high tide might have broken, and the winds that continually swept through the gap kept them uncovered of sand. Richard had his hands in his trouser pockets for warmth and was nervously twisting a soft piece of wax around his right forefinger – a candle end that was in his pocket from the night before when he had gone downstairs to lock the door.
‘Are you ready?’ asked Charles.
Richard nodded.
A gull dipped over the crest of the sand hills and rose again screaming when it saw them. ‘Stand by the sea holly,’ said Richard, with a dry mouth, ‘and I’ll be here among the stones, not too near. When I raise my hand, shout! When I put my fingers to my ears, stop at once.’
So Charles walked twenty steps towards the holly. Richard saw his broad back and black silk handkerchief sticking from his pocket. He remembered the dream, and the shoe buckle and Elsie’s fear. His resolution broke: he hurriedly pulled the piece of wax in two, and sealed his ears. Charles did not see him.
He turned, and Richard gave the signal with his hand.
Charles leaned forward oddly, his chin thrust out, his teeth bared, and never before had Richard seen such a look of fear on a man’s face. He had not been prepared for that. Charles’s face, that was usually soft and changing, uncertain as a cloud, now hardened to a rough stone mask, dead white at first, and then flushing outwards from the cheek bones red and redder, and at last as black as if he were about to choke. His mouth then slowly opened to the full, and Richard fell on his face, his hands to his ears, in a faint.
When he came to himself he was lying alone among the stones. He sat up, wondering numbly whether he had been there long. He felt very weak and sick, with a chill on his heart that was worse than the chill of his body. He could not think. He put his hand down to lift himself up and it rested on a stone, a larger one than most of the others. He picked it up and felt its surface, absently. His mind wandered. He began to think about shoe-making, a trade of which he had known nothing, but now every trick was familiar to him. ‘I must be a shoemaker,’ he said aloud.
Then he corrected himself: ‘No, I am a musician. Am I going mad?’ He threw the stone from him; it struck against another and bounced off.
He asked himself: ‘Now why did I say that I was a shoemaker? It seemed a moment ago that I knew all there was to be known about shoe-making and now I know nothing at all about it. I must get home to Rachel. Why did I ever come out?’
Then he saw Charles on a sand hill a hundred yards away, gazing out to sea. He remembered his fear and made sure that the wax was in his ears: he stumbled to his feet. He saw a flurry on the sand and there was a rabbit lying on its side, twitching in a convulsion. As Richard moved towards it, the flurry ended: the rabbit was dead. Richard crept behind a sand hill out of Charles’s s
How Richard reached home he did not know, but there he was opening the back door and crawling upstairs on his hands and knees. He unsealed his ears.
Rachel was sitting up in bed, pale and trembling. ‘Thank God you’re back,’ she said; ‘I have had a nightmare, the worst of all my life. It was frightful. I was in my dream, in the deepest dream of all, like the one of which I told you. I was like a stone, and I was aware of you near me; you were you, quite plain, though I was a stone, and you were in great fear and I could do nothing to help you, and you were waiting for something and the terrible thing did not happen to you, but it happened to me. I can’t tell you what it was, but it was as though all my nerves cried out in pain at once, and I was pierced through and through with a beam of some intense evil light and twisted inside out. I woke up and my heart was beating so fast that I had to gasp for breath. Do you think I had a heart attack and my heart missed a beat? They say it feels like that. Where have you been, dearest? Where is Mr Charles?’
Richard sat on the bed and held her hand. ‘I have had a bad experience too,’ he said. ‘I was out with Charles by the sea and as he went ahead to climb on the highest sand hill I felt very faint and fell down among a patch of stones, and when I came to myself I was in a desperate sweat of fear and had to hurry home. So I came back running alone. It happened perhaps half an hour ago,’ he said.
He did not tell her more. He asked, could he come back to bed and would she get breakfast? That was a thing she had not done all the years they were married.
‘I am as ill as you,’ said she. It was understood between them always that when Rachel was ill, Richard must be well.
‘You are not,’ said he, and fainted again.
She helped him to bed ungraciously and dressed herself and went slowly downstairs. A smell of coffee and bacon rose to meet her and there was Charles, who had lit the fire, putting two breakfasts on a tray. She was so relieved at not having to get breakfast and so confused by her experience that she thanked him and called him a darling, and he kissed her hand gravely and pressed it. He had made the breakfast exactly to her liking: the coffee was strong and the eggs fried on both sides.
Rachel fell in love with Charles. She had often fallen in love with men before and since her marriage, but it was her habit to tell Richard when this happened, as he agreed to tell her when it happened to him: so that the suffocation of passion was given a vent and there was no jealousy, for she used to say (and he had the liberty of saying): ‘Yes, I am in love with so-and-so, but I only love you.’
That was as far as it had ever gone. But this was different. Somehow, she did not know why, she could not own to being in love with Charles: for she no longer loved Richard. She hated him for being ill, and said that he was lazy, and a sham. So about noon he got up, but went groaning around the bedroom until she sent him back to bed to groan.
Charles helped her with the housework, doing all the cooking, but he did not go up to see Richard, since he had not been asked to do so. Rachel was ashamed, and apologized to Charles for Richard’s rudeness in running away from him. But Charles said mildly that he took it as no insult; he had felt queer himself that morning; it was as though something evil was astir in the air as they reached the sand hills. She told him that she too had had the same queer feeling.
Later she found all Lampton talking of it. The doctor maintained that it was an earth tremor, but the country people said that it had been the Devil passing by. He had come to fetch the black soul of Solomon Jones, the gamekeeper, found dead that morning in his cottage by the sand hills.
When Richard could go downstairs and walk about a little without groaning, Rachel sent him to the cobbler’s to get a new buckle for her shoe. She came with him to the bottom of the garden. The path ran beside a steep bank. Richard looked ill and groaned slightly as he walked, so Rachel, half in anger, half in fun, pushed him down the bank, where he fell sprawling among the nettles and old iron. Then she ran back into the house laughing loudly.
Richard sighed, tried to share the joke against himself with Rachel – but she had gone – heaved himself up, picked the shoes from among the nettles, and after awhile walked slowly up the bank, out of the gate, and down the lane in the unaccustomed glare of the sun.
When he reached the cobbler’s he sat down heavily. The cobbler was glad to talk to him. ‘You are looking bad,’ said the cobbler.
Richard said: ‘Yes, on Monday morning I had a bit of a turn; I am only now recovering from it.’
‘Good God,’ burst out the cobbler, ‘if you had a bit of a turn, what did I not have? It was as if someone handled me raw, without my skin. It was as if someone seized my very soul and juggled with it, as you might juggle with a stone, and hurled me away. I shall never forget last Monday morning.’
A strange notion came to Richard that it was the cobbler’s soul which he had handled in the form of a stone. ‘It may be,’ he thought, ‘that the souls of every man and woman and child in Lampton are lying there.’ But he said nothing about this, asked for a buckle, and went home.
Rachel was ready with a kiss and a joke; he might have kept silent, for his silence always made Rachel ashamed. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘why make her ashamed? From shame she goes to self-justification and picks a quarrel over something else and it’s ten times worse. I’ll be cheerful and accept the joke.’
He was unhappy. And Charles was established in the house: gentle-voiced, hard-working, and continually taking Richard’s part against Rachel’s scoffing. This was galling, because Rachel did not resent it.
(‘The next part of the story,’ said Crossley, ‘is the comic relief, an account of how Richard went again to the sand hills, to the heap of stones, and identified the souls of the doctor and rector – the doctor’s because it was shaped like a whisky bottle and the rector’s because it was as black as original sin – and how he proved to himself that the notion was not fanciful. But I will skip that and come to the point where Rachel two days later suddenly became affectionate and loved Richard she said, more than ever before.’)
The reason was that Charles had gone away, nobody knows where, and had relaxed the buckle magic for the time, because he was confident that he could renew it on his return. So in a day or two Richard was well again and everything was as it had been, until one afternoon the door opened, and there stood Charles.
He entered without a word of greeting and hung his hat upon a peg. He sat down by the fire and asked: ‘When is supper ready?’
Richard looked at Rachel, his eyebrows raised, but Rachel seemed fascinated by the man.
She answered: ‘Eight o’clock,’ in her low voice, and stooping down, drew off Charles’s muddy boots and found him a pair of Richard’s slippers.
Charles said: ‘Good. It is now seven o’clock. In another hour, supper. At nine o’clock the boy will bring the evening paper. At ten o’clock, Rachel, you and I sleep together.’
Richard thought that Charles must have gone suddenly mad. But Rachel answered quietly: ‘Why, of course, my dear.’ Then she turned viciously to Richard: ‘And you run away, little man!’ she said, and slapped his cheek with all her strength.
Richard stood puzzled, nursing his cheek. Since he could not believe that Rachel and Charles had both gone mad together, he must be mad himself. At all events, Rachel knew her mind, and they had a secret compact that if either of them ever wished to break the marriage promise, the other should not stand in the way. They had made this compact because they wished to feel themselves bound by love rather than by ceremony. So he said as calmly as he could: ‘Very well, Rachel. I shall leave you two together.’
Charles flung a boot at him, saying: ‘If you put your nose inside the door between now and breakfast time, I’ll shout the ears off your head.’
Richard went out this time not
At last he came to the stones. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I shall find my soul in this heap and I shall crack it into a hundred pieces with this hammer’ – he had picked up the hammer in the coal shed as he came out.
Then he began looking for his soul. Now, one may recognize the soul of another man or woman, but one can never recognize one’s own. Richard could not find his. But by chance he came upon Rachel’s soul and recognized it (a slim green stone with glints of quartz in it) because she was estranged from him at the time. Against it lay another stone, an ugly misshapen flint of a mottled brown. He swore: ‘I’ll destroy this. It must be the soul of Charles.’
He kissed the soul of Rachel; it was like kissing her lips. Then he took the soul of Charles and poised his hammer. ‘I’ll knock you into fifty fragments!’
He paused. Richard had scruples. He knew that Rachel loved Charles better than himself, and he was bound to respect the compact. A third stone (his own, it must be) was lying the other side of Charles’s stone; it was of smooth grey granite, about the size of a cricket ball. He said to himself: ‘I will break my own soul in pieces and that will be the end of me.’ The world grew black, his eyes ceased to focus, and he all but fainted. But he recovered himself, and with a great cry brought down the coal hammer crack, and crack again, on the grey stone.
It split in four pieces, exuding a smell like gunpowder: and when Richard found that he was still alive and whole, he began to laugh and laugh. Oh, he was mad, quite mad! He flung the hammer away, lay down exhausted, and fell asleep.
He awoke as the sun was just setting. He went home in confusion, thinking: ‘This is a very bad dream and Rachel will help me out of it.’