The Day (White)

by E. L. White

The Day

By E. L. White

AS THE cathedral chimes struck eleven, Hubert Quality raised the corner of the blind and looked into the street.

A deep peace reigned; the cobbles of the road glistened from recent rain; wet wads of yellowed leaves padded the pavements. Very far away on the horizon, a fitful red quiver told of heathen fires lighted to the dark god Thor.

No human form was visible in the street. Yet Quality shrank from the uneasy sensation that some one was spying upon him.

Bracing himself with an effort, he looked up furtively into the indigo vault of the heavens—knowing the while that he was about to be subjected to some fresh demonstration of trickery on the part of his nerves.

Instantly, he started back with a stifled cry.

A face was watching him from the moon.

For several full seconds it bleached him, the unhuman stare of century-old eyes, before it blended again into the blank silver disc.

With shaking fingers, Quality dropped the curtain—the pallor of his face and the twitching of his features testifying to the cumulative effect of oft-repeated shocks.

For the past two weeks his terror-maddened nerves had rent him with the strength of lunatic devils—making every heart-beat leap like a bead of quicksilver, and chopping up each breath into demi-semiquavers of panting panic. Only the consciousness of one supreme fact held them back from their objective—the wreck of Quality’s sanity.

On the morrow, their victim was going home.

It was his day.

The most cursory glance at his face proclaimed him the predestined prey of his imagination. His dreamy eyes, sensitive mouth and delicate physique denoted him student—or visionary—rather than man of action, and, as such, averse from any act or form of violence.

During the siege and occupation of the town by the enemy, in his role of spectator, he had been plunged into a super-hell, in which he groped in a red delirium—fire-flecked and blood-smudged. His razor-keen sympathies supplying the lack of experience, he had died, by proxy, many deaths a day. He had seen human faces blasted by the red-hot touch of the Martian hand, and the sight had not been good to see. Above all, his ears were deafened by the constant terrific speech of great guns that spoke.

Peace—passionately he prayed for it. And tomorrow that peace would be his.

Soothed by the mere thought of his imminent release, he turned back again towards the room which he had grown to hate. It was a prim, mid-Victorian-looking apartment, stuffy from a porcelain stove and crowded with horsehair furniture. At the round table of highly-polished walnut wood, his landlady sat at her knitting.

Apparently about forty years of age, madame was of ponderous build, clumsy as a Flemish horse, with massive heaving shoulders, and broad hips. Abundant black hair was brushed back from her face and gathered in a knot on the top of her head. Her sallow skin was partially redeemed by the beauty of her eyes—velvet-brown and fringed with thick lashes. Her full lips were penciled with a fine line of black down. It was a typical enough face of a daughter of the people, sprung from peasant stock and now the wife of a small tradesman.

This was the woman whom Quality feared with his very soul.

When he had first rented her apartment she had reminded him of a woman in a fairy tale, who, while apparently honest and homely, concealed under her ordinary exterior that element of the sinister supernatural that often accompanies such histories. Thus looked the pleasant-faced female, who afterwards figured as the ogress; thus appeared the harmless peasant, who changed nightly into a were-wolf.

It was not his fanciful idea of a composite personality, however, which inspired Quality’s dislike of his landlady. That had come with the knowledge that she was utterly lacking in the usual sentiments of humanity. Undisturbed by any horrors of the siege, and showing neither pity nor fear, she continued her daily routine with the mechanical precision of a machine. The sole interest that she ever showed in her boarder was connected with the weekly note.

It was since the War that his distaste had magnified into fear. And his fear was the craven terror of one who, amidst hostile surroundings, carries his very life on a tongue-string. For Fate, choosing her instrument with callous cruelty, had ordained that he should serve his country by means of those subterranean methods, for which the punishment is summary death.

Quality now eyed the woman with the oblique glance of suspicion.

How much did madame know? Did she merely suspect? Was her inaction a sign of ignorance? Or was she on crouch, bidding her time to pounce?

Yet through the shifting mists of those dream-days of doubt and fear—when rustling leaves tracked him homewards, and his own shadow slipped away to denounce him—one fact remained real and potent. He knew that all appeal to madame’s feminine compassion would be vain. If she possessed his secret, she would certainly betray him.

Again he looked at her, marking, with strong dislike, the rust-red grain of her skin over her cheek-bones, the tight tartan-silk blouse, the stiff linen collar that made her neck appear so dirty by contrast. The room, with its hideous-patterned paper seemed to wall him in alive; the charcoal fumes from the stove to suffocate him.

Then suddenly he smiled. All this, too, would pass away. Next week, he would rub his eyes and wonder if—somewhere—on some alien planet, there really existed a strange, hostile room, tenanted by an unhuman, sawdust-stuffed woman. Both would dwindle down to a name on an envelope—merely an address.

In the reaction of spirits, he stopped to pick up madame’s ball of worsted.

“The last time I shall do this for you, madame!”

Even as he spoke, his morbid mind quarreled with his sentence; it seemed as though its finality left a loophole for sinister interpretation.

“Bien!”

“Shall you miss me, madame?”

“Yes.” Her “si” was emphatic. “As one misses all men. Less work, but, unfortunately, less money.”

The speech, typical of the frugal housekeeper of grasping spirit, was reassuring. He smiled once more as he looked at the clock.

“You're late tonight, madame! You should save your eyesight—or, better still, your oil and fuel. Aren’t you going to bed at all?”

She shook her head vehemently.

“For me, I have no stomach for bed, at all, at all. To sleep would be but to see again, that which I have, this day, seen. What? Have you not heard?”

He shook his head.

“Ah! What misfortune! Today, at noon, they shot M. Lemoine!”

“M. Lemoine—the prominent citizen and advocate.” Quality could not credit the news. His mind conjured up a vivid picture of that portly form and plum-colored face, as madame proceeded.

“Yes, m’sieur, I saw it. It was horrible. Two soldiers ran him down the steps of the hotel—quick, quick! yet, at every step, one saw him shrink. It was as though a hole had been pierced in him, so that the man came leaking through. At the top, there was the fine figure—so brave, so big; at the bottom, only a shrunken stranger, with eyes that ran, ran, and fingers that picked, and little bubbles around his lips, rising, rising. He—himself—was gone. There was no longer any M. Lemoine!”

Told in her native tongue, with pantomimic gesture to point her words, the recital was ghastly.

Breathing heavily, Quality cleared his throat to ask a question.

“What was the charge?”

Surely the woman must notice the treacherous quiver of his voice! Her answer seemed to be delayed for an eternity.

“The charge, m’sieur?—He was a spy!”

“Ah!”

Quality sank down upon a bristly horsehair chair the crocheted antimacassar slipping down behind his back. He looked around him with eyes of sick loathing. The clicking sound of madame’s needles maddened him; he had watched the incessant flash of steel for so many long-drawn-out evenings of strain.

The flawed mirror, set above the marble console table, reflected the room, duplicating the gilt clock on the mantelshelf and the pallid waxen fruit, cherished under crystal shades. Presently, however, the hateful vision blurred and faded away, and the homesick man saw, in its stead, the picture that was engraved upon his mind.

Somewhere, far away from this place of thunder, bloodshed and cold fears—geographical facts non-existent was an isle that rocked gently like an ark of safety, on the gray-green seas. And tucked away, within its very heart, approached only by grass-grown ruts, was a long, gray house. Sentineled by age-old oaks, there brooded over it the very spirit of security and peace.

Again he sat in his own familiar study, surrounded by the good company of his books, while the fire burned red in the grate and his old hound dozed upon the rug at his feet. This was his proper place—his own milieu—of which he thought by day and dreamed by night.

His longings to escape magnified these nightly dreams into passions. He was always trying to get home. He took abortive railway journeys, when the train broke down and changed into inadequate rubbish, leaving him stranded in unfriendly country. Sometimes he boarded a steamer, which ploughed its way through fields and streets, ever seeking a far-receded sea. These nightmares were varied by the nerve-racking experience of ceaseless preparations for a journey, which ended in the poignant pang of reaching the station only to see the express dash through, its lighted windows merging into one golden streak.

Often, too, he tried to fly home—even as a bird—swooping from his bedroom window in vain essay at flight, and sinking lower into the darkness at each impotent stroke.

His distraught mind, flashing its S. O. S. signals across the sea, must have stirred the rest of those who slumbered safely in that lamppost-lit, policeman-guarded isle. For influence began its wire-pulling work, its efforts resulting in the promise of the special train that was to convey certain refugees homewards by way of neutral territory.

Tomorrow would be the day.

“I am going home—tomorrow!”

He silently repeated the words with a thrill of joyful anticipation, fingering his papers and passport the while, to assure himself of their truth. Thus fortified, he nerved himself for another question.

“By the way, madame, speaking of poor M. Lemoine. Who—who gave information?”

“A woman betrayed him.”

Involuntarily, Quality started. He had not before noticed the grating rasp of madame’s voice. It irritated him to unreasonable resentment and disgust.

“A woman? Damnable!”

“Plait-il?” Madame raised her brows in interrogation. “But why? M. Lemoine sold his secrets for gold. The woman sold her secret for gold. C’est egal!”

How furiously her needles flew! In just such manner must her forbears have sat, knitting and counting in the blood-sodden days of the Revolution.

“But, madame”—Quality’s voice was vibrant with horror—“how can you call it equal? It is inconceivable that a woman, with a woman’s heart beating within her breast, should sell a life merely for money!”

“Ah, m’sieur!”—Madame laughed mirthlessly—“it is easy to see that all your life you have had more than enough. For the others, though—what will they not do for gold?”

She proceeded to answer her own question by illustration.

“My young brother killed the farmer that he worked for, the farmer’s wife, four children, and a farm-hand—all for the sake of the gold that was in the house. Alone he did it, with a hatchet—and he was but a child of fifteen! Such a good lad, and regular with his Mass. It was merely the gold that maddened him, and yet they imprisoned him—le pauvre!”

At last Quality had heard the thrill of emotion in her voice. Looking up, he detected a bead of moisture in her eyes. The sight of her sorrow only added to the horror. On top of her calm recital of the crime, such sympathy for the juvenile monster was nauseating.

“Your young brother must be a unique specimen,” he said stiffly, speaking with an effort.

“Not at all. Like all the rest of us. Like you, perhaps. Certainly, like me!”

A pleasant family history. To steady his nerves. Quality fingered his papers feverishly, repeating the while his magic formula: “Tomorrow, I go home.”

Even as his lips silently framed the words, he started back, blinking his eyes, and momentarily stunned and deafened. For it seemed to him that a lighted express had shot, shrieking, through the room, like a rocket—thundering past him in a long golden streak.

It was only a fresh manifestation of infamous buffoonery on the part of his nerves, yet it left Quality utterly shaken. He felt suddenly stranded and abandoned. All his vague fears and doubts of the past days sharpened into a definite pang of fear.

Was he, in actual fact, going home tomorrow? Or was he called upon to undergo the supreme anguish of cheated hope? To see his prison-bars opening—only to be slammed again in his face?

As, still unstrung from shock, he looked round the room, he was a prey of minor optical delusions. Madame seemed to have swollen in bulk—the apartment to have grown distinctly smaller. He hated it with the savage hatred of a convict for his concrete cell.

Inaction became unendurable, and he pushed back his chair.

“I’m going out, madame.”

“No, m’sieur. No, no!”

“Why not?”

Suspicion stabbed him anew at madame’s vehement outcry. Yet her next words were reassuring by reason of their sound common sense.

“Because, m’sieur, it is too late. See, it wants but a little to midnight. It might arouse suspicion in this place, where every brick had an eye. Tomorrow, you return to your own country. How imprudent to risk your liberty thus, at the eleventh hour!”

His head approved the wisdom of the woman’s words. Once again he saw her as she was—callous, mercenary, possibly—but, for the rest, an ordinary hard-working housewife of her class.

Again he sat down, watching the flashing points of her needles, until his mind gave a sudden slip—and he found himself thinking with drowsy amusement of the Sheep in “Alice through the Looking-glass.”

He roused with a violent start to find that madame had laid down her wool and was watching him intently. The reflection from the lamp fell on her eyes, lighting therein twin balls of orange flame.

“What is it, madame?”

“Nothing! I thought I heard a knocking at the street door, that is all.”

“I heard nothing. But, then, I was nearly asleep.”

“Best so.” Her voice thickened. “Get all the sleep you can—in preparation for the morrow!”

As she snatched up her knitting, he stared at her, all his drowsiness dissipated by her words. He watched her furious energy, trying the while to conceive some adequate motive for her unusual vigil and her evident wish for his own company.

Of a sudden, instinct supplied the knowledge.

Madame was waiting for something to happen.

Like vultures scenting their prey, his nerves instantly swooped down on their victim, agonizing him with the refined torture of mirage. As the parched traveler feasts hollow eyes on waving date-palm and bubbling well, so Quality, with aching intensity of longing, saw a clear picture of his own familiaar room. He smelled the faint odor of worn leather; heard the crackling whisper of the wood fire; felt the muzzle of his hound moist against his hand.

Would the day never come? He looked at the clock, crookedly upheld by misshapen gilded cupids.

Only a quarter to twelve.

Slowly, slowly, the minutes ticked away. The night was dying hard.

Presently, Quality noticed that madame had laid down her needles and was again listening. Her tense attitude, flattened ears and craning neck told of an intensity of purpose that would strain her aural organs beyond the limits of their power.

He saw her sudden start—the involuntary wince.

“Footsteps, m’sieur! Do you not hear them? Footsteps without in the street!”

“I can hear nothing!”

“But they are passing this way. Open the window, and see if there is any one in the street!”

What was she? Quality could not decide. Merely the shrewd, suspicious housewife, with natural fears—or the composite fearsome creation of his diseased imagination?

With the reluctant step of one who fears a snare, he walked to the window, and, opening it, looked out into the street.

A deep tranquility reigned without. The old houses, steeped in the milky bath of moonshine, seemed to sway gently, as though in sleep; the sable shadow of the drinking fountain seemed to rock, as though the ancient town slumbered to the croon of some unheard lullaby.

“Ah, how peaceful!” Madame had risen and was now standing by his side. Her breath, onion-flavored from her last meal, fell on his cheek in hot puffs.

“What a picture! And see the leaves, how they fly!”

At a sudden gust of wind, the withered foliage arose from the bare boughs like a flock of birds, and soared into the air in a mad ecstasy of flight—rising, wheeling, swooping—only to sink, feebly fluttering, to the pavement.

With a cold chill of premonition, Quality recalled his own dream of impotent flight.

“See, the floating leaves are like revenants! Or perhaps the souls—ever rising in their thousands—swarming from field and trench. Whither? Whither?—Ah!”

She recoiled with a cry as a leaf, fluttering in through the window, brushed against her face, and then fell, brown and shriveled, at her feet.

She stooped and picked it up.

“Blasted!”

The sound of her whisper was terrible. In the moonlight her face appeared to be blanched to a greenish-white hue. Involuntarily, Quality saw, in a lightning flash of clairvoyance, the white, dripping face of a peasant boy, with wolfish eyes glowing yellow, as he felt the edge of his axe with tremulous finger.

“Ah, m’sieur, our last night together!” Inspired by an unusual affection, madame pressed his arm. “Tomorrow, you will be gone. But what of me? Helas! what of me?”

“Your” Quality strove to speak naturally. “Oh, very soon I hope the Allies will make good, and your town be again cleared of the enemy.”

“The enemy? Ah!”

Madame broke off abruptly. Following the direction of her gaze, Quality also looked at the fountain darkly carven against the luminous sky.

Obedient to the dictate of his mountebank nerves, it slightly altered its position. Or was it a shape that slipped farther into the depths of its shadow?

“The enemy!” Madame raised her voice shrilly, with startling lack of caution. “Who is the enemy? Have you ever given thought to the lot of us who live in a province that today is French and tomorrow German? Can one say with certainty: ‘This one is French; that one German?’ No, no, m’sieur! My name may be French as the wife of a French spouse, but I have German blood in my veins—German sympathies—love of the Fatherland—deep hatred for all his foes!”

Again the fountain moved, to give sign that it had heard.

In a last desperate effort to preserve his sanity, Quality slammed down the window, forcing a laugh the while.

“Come, madame! That’s not a very friendly sentiment. You cannot mean what you say. You are overstrung—got nerves.”

“Nerves? Bien! Tonight, I see always M. Lemoine.”

She sank down heavily, her fingers groping for her knitting. The steel needles began to click with mechanical precision.

Quality looked at the clock. It wanted but three minutes to twelve.

The day was near its birth.

At the same moment, madame broke the silence.

“Courage, m’sieur!” Her teeth flashed into a smile. “We were both wrong. There were no footsteps after all!”

Her words, vibrant with cheerful sympathy, awoke in Quality a response that was almost electric. Suspicion and fear melted at the warm touch of humanity. The devils that had possessed and tormented him went out of him, leaving him wrapped in a foretaste of that peace that passeth understanding.

He saw the room dimly, as though through a veil of blue transparency, in a new guise. It was the abode of warmth and comfort—a domestic interior. Madame, smiling over her work was a type of tranquil femininity.

Suddenly, without warning, the all-pervading calm was shattered.

There was the sound of loud knocking on the street door. The violent double-beat of Quality’s heart seemed almost its echo. He started upright, every frayed nerve at utmost stretch; his eyes searching madame’s face, as though he would read therein the Riddle of the Sphinx.

There was a rapid, breathless exchange of question and answer.

“There is some one at the door, madame.”

“I hear.”

“Who can it be?”

“Who knows? Visitors, perhaps.”

“At this hour! Why do you not open to them?”

“Why? Marie will doubtless hear.”

In the pause that followed, the knocking again sounded, louder and more peremptory, as though the door were battered by the impact of a mailed fist.

Still mute to its summons, madame sat motionless, her needles flying with incredible rapidity.

Then, higher up in the building, a door opened. Hurried shuffling footsteps descended the stairs and pattered along the passage.

“C’est Marie.”

As she spoke, Madame raised her face, and, for the first time, Quality saw her eyes.

Swiftly he averted his own, shrinking back before that stare of unholy guilt.

She had betrayed him.

For a fractional measure of time, he was rent by the throes of an elemental passion to grip the woman’s throat and wring out her life in bubbling breaths. But the wholly foreign impulse came and passed almost simultaneously at the grating scream of a bolt being withdrawn.

The sound of a man’s voice, sharp and peremptory, drowned the woman’s quavering tones in a rapid colloquy.

Then. there was silence, followed by the slam of a door.

Quality’s whole frame shook in a tempestuous ague of suspense.

Had they gone again? Was the blow to be averted at the eleventh hour? Were his hopes yet to find consummation?

Even as he asked the question the answer came.

There was the sound of heavy footsteps along the passage.

Once more, Quality’s hunted glance flickered around the room, with the sharpened sense of the trapped quarry, seeking desperately for some channel of escape.

His eyes fell upon the papers lying on the table before him. He began to read them with dull interest. Who was this Hubert Quality whose harmlessness and integrity were vouched for in black and white? What of him?

Bereft of all sense of identity—calmly expectant—he watched the door burst open.

It seemed the final performance of an oft-rehearsed drama. Inside—they were actually inside at last; these oft-dreamed of figures of his fears—stern-faced men, wearing the gray Prussian uniform.

Before him was the officer seemingly magnified to unhuman stature, in long, belted coat and spiked helmet. His eyes, blue and polar raked the room. His voice, sharp and metallic, gave the word of command. He was no man, but merely a vehicle of inexorable justice—a machine that has found its range.

Slowly, slowly, Quality arose to his feet. He stretched out his hands.

Arose—only to sink back in his seat. For, at the sound of a woman’s laugh, he realized that he was but the spectator in another’s drama.

With a soldier on either side of her, madame stood rigid and frozen. No need for plea or denial; in her lying outburst of apostasy to the fountain she had made her ultimate appeal.

As the spy passed through the doorway, Quality saw her face. And it was even as the face of M. Lemoine.

****

The clock struck twelve.

Through the shriveled sheath of the dead night broke the glorious promise of the new day.