Hill of Dreams — Chapter 7 Part 2

How he had toiled and laboured at the desk before him!

He had put away the old wild hopes of the masterpiece conceived and executed in a fury of inspiration, wrought out in one white heat of creative joy; it was enough if by dint of long perseverance and singleness of desire he could at last, in pain and agony and despair, after failure and disappointment and effort constantly renewed, fashion something of which he need not be ashamed.

He had put himself to school again, and had, with what patience he could command, ground his teeth into the rudiments, resolved that at last he would test out the heart of the mystery.

They were good nights to remember, these; he was glad to think of the little ugly room, with its silly wall-paper and its “bird’s-eye” furniture, lighted up, while he sat at the bureau and wrote on into the cold stillness of the London morning, when the flickering lamplight and the daystar shone together.

It was an interminable labour, and he had always known it to be as hopeless as alchemy.

The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, would never shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible, but in the course of the life, in the interval between the failures, he might possibly discover curious things.

These were the good nights that he could look back on without any fear or shame, when he had been happy and content on a diet of bread and tea and tobacco, and could hear of some imbecility passing into its hundredth thousand, and laugh cheerfully—if only that last page had been imagined aright, if the phrases noted in the still hours rang out their music when he read them in the morning.

He remembered the drolleries and fantasies that the worthy Miss Deacon used to write to him, and how he had grinned at her words of reproof, admonition, and advice.

She had once instigated Dolly _fils_ to pay him a visit, and that young prop of respectability had talked about the extraordinary running of Bolter at the Scurragh meeting in Ireland; and then, glancing at Lucian’s books, had inquired whether any of them had “warm bits.

” He had been kind though patronizing, and seemed to have moved freely in the most brilliant society of Stoke Newington.

He had not been able to give any information as to the present condition of Edgar Allan Poe’s old school.

It appeared eventually that his report at home had not been a very favorable one, for no invitation to high tea had followed, as Miss Deacon had hoped.

The Dollys knew many nice people, who were well off, and Lucian’s cousin, as she afterwards said, had done _her_ best to introduce him to the _beau monde_ of those northern suburbs.

But after the visit of the young Dolly, with what joy he had returned to the treasures which he had concealed from profane eyes.

He had looked out and seen his visitor on board the tram at the street corner, and he laughed out loud, and locked his door.

There had been moments when he was lonely, and wished to hear again the sound of friendly speech, but, after such an irruption of suburban futility, it was a keen delight, to feel that he was secure on his tower, that he could absorb himself in his wonderful task as safe and silent as if he were in mid-desert.

But there was one period that he dared not revive; he could not bear to think of those weeks of desolation and terror in the winter after his coming to London.

His mind was sluggish, and he could not quite remember how many years had passed since that dismal experience; it sounded all an old story, but yet it was still vivid, a flaming scroll of terror from which he turned his eyes away.

One awful scene glowed into his memory, and he could not shut out the sight of an orgy, of dusky figures whirling in a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing in the darkness, of great glittering lamps, like infernal thuribles, very slowly swaying in a violent blast of air.

And there was something else, something which he could not remember, but it filled him with terror, but it slunk in the dark places of his soul, as a wild beast crouches in the depths of a cave.

Again, and without reason, he began to image to himself that old mouldering house in the field.

With what a loud incessant noise the wind must be clamoring about on this fearful night, how the great elm swayed and cried in the storm, and the rain dashed and pattered on the windows, and dripped on the sodden earth from the shaking shrubs beside the door.

He moved uneasily on his chair, and struggled to put the picture out of his thoughts; but in spite of himself he saw the stained uneven walls, that ugly blot of mildew above the window, and perhaps a feeble gleam of light filtered through the blind, and some one, unhappy above all and for ever lost, sat within the dismal room.

Or rather, every window was black, without a glimmer of hope, and he who was shut in thick darkness heard the wind and the rain, and the noise of the elm-tree moaning and beating and weeping on the walls.

For all his effort the impression would not leave him, and as he sat before his desk looking into the vague darkness he could almost see that chamber which he had so often imagined; the low whitewashed ceiling held up by a heavy beam, the smears of smoke and long usage, the cracks and fissures of the plaster.

Old furniture, shabby, deplorable, battered, stood about the room; there was a horsehair sofa worn and tottering, and a dismal paper, patterned in a livid red, blackened and mouldered near the floor, and peeled off and hung in strips from the dank walls.

And there was that odour of decay, of the rank soil steaming, of rotting wood, a vapor that choked the breath and made the heart full of fear and heaviness.

Lucian again shivered with a thrill of dread; he was afraid that he had overworked himself and that he was suffering from the first symptoms of grave illness.

His mind dwelt on confused and terrible recollections, and with a mad ingenuity gave form and substance to phantoms; and even now he drew a long breath, almost imagining that the air in his room was heavy and noisome, that it entered his nostrils with some taint of the crypt.

And his body was still languid, and though he made a half motion to rise he could not find enough energy for the effort, and he sank again into the chair.

At all events, he would think no more of that sad house in the field; he would return to those long struggles with letters, to the happy nights when he had gained victories.

He remembered something of his escape from the desolation and the worse than desolation that had obsessed him during that first winter in London.

He had gone free one bleak morning in February, and after those dreary terrible weeks the desk and the heap and litter of papers had once more engulfed and absorbed him.

And in the succeeding summer, of a night when he lay awake and listened to the birds, shining images came wantonly to him.

For an hour, while the dawn brightened, he had felt the presence of an age, the resurrection of the life that the green fields had hidden, and his heart stirred for joy when he knew that he held and possessed all the loveliness that had so long mouldered.

He could scarcely fall asleep for eager and leaping thoughts, and as soon as his breakfast was over he went out and bought paper and pens of a certain celestial stationer in Notting Hill.

The street was not changed as he passed to and fro on his errand.

The rattling wagons jostled by at intervals, a rare hansom came spinning down from London, there sounded the same hum and jangle of the gliding trams.

The languid life of the pavement was unaltered; a few people, un-classed, without salience or possible description, lounged and walked from east to west, and from west to east, or slowly dropped into the byways to wander in the black waste to the north, or perhaps go astray in the systems that stretched towards the river.

He glanced down these by-roads as he passed, and was astonished, as always, at their mysterious and desert aspect.

Some were utterly empty; lines of neat, appalling residences, trim and garnished as if for occupation, edging the white glaring road;

and not a soul was abroad, and not a sound broke their stillness.

It was a picture of the desolation of midnight lighted up, but empty and waste as the most profound and solemn hours before the day.

Other of these by-roads, of older settlement, were furnished with more important houses, standing far back from the pavement, each in a little wood of greenery, and thus one might look down as through a forest vista, and see a way smooth and guarded with low walls and yet untrodden, and all a leafy silence.

Here and there in some of these echoing roads a figure seemed lazily advancing in the distance, hesitating and delaying, as if lost in the labyrinth.

It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life.

For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who traveled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come and go across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting.

So they passed and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity.

One might have sworn that not a man saw his neighbor who met him or jostled him, that here every one was a phantom for the other, though the lines of their paths crossed and recrossed, and their eyes stared like the eyes of live men.

When two went by together, they mumbled and cast distrustful glances behind them as though afraid all the world was an enemy, and the pattering of feet was like the noise of a shower of rain.

Curious appearances and simulations of life gathered at points in the road, for at intervals the villas ended and shops began in a dismal row, and looked so hopeless that one wondered who could buy.

There were women fluttering uneasily about the greengrocers, and shabby things in rusty black touched and retouched the red lumps that an unshaven butcher offered, and already in the corner public there was a confused noise, with a tossing of voices that rose and fell like a Jewish chant, with the senseless stir of marionettes jerked into an imitation of gaiety.

Then, in crossing a side street that seemed like grey mid-winter in stone, he trespassed from one world to another, for an old decayed house amidst its garden held the opposite corner.

The laurels had grown into black skeletons, patched with green drift, the ilex gloomed over the porch, the deodar had blighted the flower-beds.

Dark ivies swarmed over an elm-tree, and a brown clustering fungus sprang in gross masses on the lawn, showing where the roots of dead trees mouldered.

The blue verandah, the blue balcony over the door, had faded to grey, and the stucco was blotched with ugly marks of weather, and a dank smell of decay, that vapor of black rotten earth in old town gardens, hung heavy about the gates.

And then a row of musty villas had pushed out in shops to the pavement, and the things in faded black buzzed and stirred about the limp cabbages, and the red lumps of meat.

It was the same terrible street, whose pavements he had trodden so often, where sunshine seemed but a gaudy light, where the fume of burning bricks always drifted.

On black winter nights he had seen the sparse lights glimmering through the rain and drawing close together, as the dreary road vanished in long perspective.

Perhaps this was its most appropriate moment, when nothing of its smug villas and skeleton shops remained but the bright patches of their windows, when the old house amongst its mouldering shrubs was but a dark cloud, and the streets to the north and south seemed like starry wastes, beyond them the blackness of infinity.

Always in the daylight it had been to him abhorred and abominable, and its grey houses and purlieus had been fungus-like sproutings, an efflorescence of horrible decay.

But on that bright morning neither the dreadful street nor those who moved about it appalled him.

He returned joyously to his den, and reverently laid out the paper on his desk.

The world about him was but a grey shadow hovering on a shining wall; its noises were faint as the rustling of trees in a distant wood.

The lovely and exquisite forms of those who served the Amber Venus were his distinct, clear, and manifest visions, and for one amongst them who came to him in a fire of bronze hair his heart stirred with the adoration of love.

She it was who stood forth from all the rest and fell down prostrate before the radiant form in amber, drawing out her pins in curious gold, her glowing brooches of enamel, and pouring from a silver box all her treasures of jewels and precious stones, chrysoberyl and sardonyx, opal and diamond, topaz and pearl.

And then she stripped from her body her precious robes and stood before the goddess in the glowing mist of her hair, praying that to her who had given all and came naked to the shrine, love might be given, and the grace of Venus.

And when at last, after strange adventures, her prayer was granted, then when the sweet light came from the sea, and her lover turned at dawn to that bronze glory, he saw beside him a little statuette of amber.

And in the shrine, far in Britain where the black rains stained the marble, they found the splendid and sumptuous statue of the Golden Venus, the last fine robe of silk that the lady had dedicated falling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at her feet.

And her face was like the lady’s face when the sun had brightened it on that day of her devotion.

The bronze mist glimmered before Lucian’s eyes; he felt as though the soft floating hair touched his forehead and his lips and his hands.

The fume of burning bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never reached his nostrils that were filled with the perfume of rare unguents, with the breath of the violet sea in Italy.

His pleasure was an inebriation, an ecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile Hottentot kraals and mud avenues as with one white lightning flash, and through the hours of that day he sat enthralled, not contriving a story with patient art, but rapt into another time, and entranced by the urgent gleam in the lady’s eyes.

The little tale of _The Amber Statuette_ had at last issued from a humble office in the spring after his father’s death.

The author was utterly unknown; the author’s Murray was a wholesale stationer and printer in process of development, so that Lucian was astonished when the book became a moderate success.

The reviewers had been sadly irritated, and even now he recollected with cheerfulness an article in an influential daily paper, an article pleasantly headed: “Where are the disinfectants?

” And then—but all the months afterwards seemed doubtful, there were only broken revelations of the labourious hours renewed, and the white nights when he had seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight grow wan at the approach of dawn.

He listened.

Surely that was the sound of rain falling on sodden ground, the heavy sound of great swollen drops driven down from wet leaves by the gust of wind, and then again the strain of boughs sang above the tumult of the air; there was a doleful noise as if the storm shook the masts of a ship.

He had only to get up and look out of the window and he would see the treeless empty street, and the rain starring the puddles under the gas-lamp, but he would wait a little while.

He tried to think why, in spite of all his resolutions, a dark horror seemed to brood more and more over all his mind.

How often he had sat and worked on just such nights as this, contented if the words were in accord though the wind might wail, though the air were black with rain.

Even about the little book that he had made there seemed some taint, some shuddering memory that came to him across the gulf of forgetfulness.

Somehow the remembrance of the offering to Venus, of the phrases that he had so lovingly invented, brought back again the dusky figures that danced in the orgy, beneath the brassy glittering lamps;

and again the naphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in the fields, and the red glare lit up the mildewed walls and the black hopeless windows.

He gasped for breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air that reeked of decay and rottenness, and the odour of the clay was in his nostrils.

That unknown cloud that had darkened his thoughts grew blacker and engulfed him, despair was heavy upon him, his heart fainted with a horrible dread.

In a moment, it seemed, a veil would be drawn away and certain awful things would appear.

He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not.

Deep, deep the darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away.

The Roman fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a ring, and behind them a glow and heat of fire.

There were hideous shapes that swarmed in the thicket of the oaks; they called and beckoned to him, and rose into the air, into the flame that was smitten from heaven about the walls.

And amongst them was the form of the beloved, but jets of flame issued from her breasts, and beside her was a horrible old woman, naked; and they, too, summoned him to mount the hill.

He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been found in old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances.

She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.

He fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewildered him.

All his life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the common world he had fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his eyes.

Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one from the other.

He had let Annie drink his soul beneath the hill, on the night when the moonfire shone, but he had not surely seen her exalted in the flame, the Queen of the Sabbath.

Dimly he remembered Dr. Burrows coming to see him in London, but had he not imagined all the rest?

Again he found himself in the dusky lane, and Annie floated down to him from the moon above the hill.

His head sank upon her breast again, but, alas, it was aflame.

And he looked down, and he saw that his own flesh was aflame, and he knew that the fire could never be quenched.

There was a heavy weight upon his head, his feet were nailed to the floor, and his arms bound tight beside him.

He seemed to himself to rage and struggle with the strength of a madman; but his hand only stirred and quivered a little as it lay upon the desk.

Again he was astray in the mist; wandering through the waste avenues of a city that had been ruined from ages.

It had been splendid as Rome, terrible as Babylon, and for ever the darkness had covered it, and it lay desolate for ever in the accursed plain.

And far and far the grey passages stretched into the night, into the icy fields, into the place of eternal gloom.

Ring within ring the awful temple closed around him; unending circles of vast stones, circle within circle, and every circle less throughout all ages.

In the center was the sanctuary of the infernal rite, and he was borne thither as in the eddies of a whirlpool, to consummate his ruin, to celebrate the wedding of the Sabbath.

He flung up his arms and beat the air, resisting with all his strength, with muscles that could throw down mountains; and this time his little finger stirred for an instant, and his foot twitched upon the floor.

Then suddenly a flaring street shone before him.

There was darkness round about him, but it flamed with hissing jets of light and naphtha fires, and great glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a violent blast of air.

A horrible music, and the exultation of discordant voices, swelled in his ears, and he saw an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky figures that circled and leapt before him.

There was a noise like the chant of the lost, and then there appeared in the midst of the orgy, beneath a red flame, the figure of a woman.

Her bronze hair and flushed cheeks were illuminate, and an argent light shone from her eyes, and with a smile that froze his heart her lips opened to speak to him.

The tossing crowd faded away, falling into a gulf of darkness, and then she drew out from her hair pins of curious gold, and glowing brooches in enamel, and poured out jewels before him from a silver box, and then she stripped from her body her precious robes, and stood in the glowing mist of her hair, and held out her arms to him.

But he raised his eyes and saw the mould and decay gaining on the walls of a dismal room, and a gloomy paper was dropping to the rotting floor.

A vapor of the grave entered his nostrils, and he cried out with a loud scream; but there was only an indistinct guttural murmur in his throat.

And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her.

She fled away before him through midnight country, and he followed after her, chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley.

And at last he captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went up to celebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath.

They were within the matted thicket, and they writhed in the flames, insatiable, for ever.

They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousands who gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a black smoke.

Without, the storm swelled to the roaring of an awful sea, the wind grew to a shrill long scream, the elm-tree was riven and split with the crash of a thunderclap.

To Lucian the tumult and the shock came as a gentle murmur, as if a brake stirred before a sudden breeze in summer.

And then a vast silence overwhelmed him.

A few minutes later there was a shuffling of feet in the passage, and the door was softly opened.

A woman came in, holding a light, and she peered curiously at the figure sitting quite still in the chair before the desk.

The woman was half dressed, and she had let her splendid bronze hair flow down, her cheeks were flushed, and as she advanced into the shabby room, the lamp she carried cast quaking shadows on the mouldering paper, patched with marks of rising damp, and hanging in strips from the wet, dripping wall.

The blind had not been drawn, but no light or glimmer of light filtered through the window, for a great straggling box tree that beat the rain upon the panes shut out even the night.

The woman came softly, and as she bent down over Lucian an argent gleam shone from her brown eyes, and the little curls upon her neck were like golden work upon marble.

She put her hand to his heart, and looked up, and beckoned to some one who was waiting by the door.

“Come in, Joe,” she said.

“It’s just as I thought it would be: ‘Death by misadventure’;” and she held up a little empty bottle of dark blue glass that was standing on the desk.

“He would take it, and I always knew he would take a drop too much one of these days.

” “What’s all those papers that he’s got there?

” “Didn’t I tell you?

It was crool to see him.

He got it into ’is ’ead he could write a book; he’s been at it for the last six months.

Look ’ere.

” She spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and took a sheet at haphazard.

It was all covered with illegible hopeless scribblings; only here and there it was possible to recognize a word.

“Why, nobody could read it, if they wanted to.

” “It’s all like that.

He thought it was beautiful.

I used to ’ear him jabbering to himself about it, dreadful nonsense it was he used to talk.

I did my best to tongue him out of it, but it wasn’t any good.

” “He must have been a bit dotty.

He’s left you everything.

” “Yes.

” “You’ll have to see about the funeral.

” “There’ll be the inquest and all that first.

” “You’ve got evidence to show he took the stuff.

” “Yes, to be sure I have.

The doctor told him he would be certain to do for himself, and he was found two or three times quite silly in the streets.

They had to drag him away from a house in Halden Road.

He was carrying on dreadful, shaking at the gaite, and calling out it was ’is ’ome and they wouldn’t let him in.

I heard Dr. Manning myself tell ’im in this very room that he’d kill ’imself one of these days.

Joe!

Aren’t you ashamed of yourself.

I declare you’re quite rude, and it’s almost Sunday too.

Bring the light over here, can’t you?

” The man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and set it on the desk, beside the scattered heap of that terrible manuscript.

The flaring light shone through the dead eyes into the dying brain, and there was a glow within, as if great furnace doors were opened.

THE END

Other books by Arthur Machen Novels The Hill of Dreams The Great Return The Terror The Secret Glory The Green Round The Great God Pan Kings of Horror The Chronicle of Clemendy The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light The Three Imposters The House of Souls The Angels of Mons, The Bowmen, and Other Legends of the War Fantastic Tales or the Way to Attain The Shining Pyramid The Glorious Mystery Ornaments in Jade The Children of the Pool and Other Stories The Cosy Room and Other Stories Holy Terrors Tales of Horror and the Supernatural Tales of Horror and the Supernatural Volume Two The Strange World of Arthur Machen Black Crusade The Novel of the Black Seal and Other Stories The Novel of the White Powder and Other Stories *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HILL OF DREAMS *** Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.

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