The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes

THE SHADOW-DANCE

‘Yes, it was a rum start,’ said the modish young man.

He was a modern version of the crutch and toothpick genus, a derivative from the ‘Gaiety boy’ of the Nellie Farren epoch, very spotless, very superior, very – fundamentally and combatively – simple. I don’t know how he had found his way into Carleon’s rooms and our company, but Carleon had a liking for odd characters. He was a collector, as it were, of human pottery, and to the collector, as we know, primitive examples are of especial interest.

The bait in this instance, I think, had been Bridge, which, since some formal ‘Ducdame’ must serve for calling fools into a circle, was our common pretext for assembling for an orgy of talk. We had played, however, for insignificant stakes and, on the whole, irreverently as regarded the sanctity of the game; and the young man was palpably bored. He thought us, without question, outsiders, and not altogether good form; and it was even a relief to him when the desultory play languished, and conversation became general in its place.

Somebody – I don’t remember on what provocation – had referred to the now historic affair of the Hungarian Ballet, which, the rage in London for a season, had voluntarily closed its own career a week before the date advertised for its termination; and the modish young man, it appeared, was the only one of us all who had happened to be present in the theatre on the occasion of the final performance. He told us so; and added that ‘it was a rum start’.

‘The abrupt finish was due, of course,’ said Carleon, bending forward, hectic, bright-eyed, and hugging himself, as was his wont, ‘to Kaunitz’s death. She was the bright particular “draw”. It would have been nothing without her. Besides, there was the tragedy. What was the “rum start”? Tell us.’

‘The way it ended that night,’ said the young man. He was a little abashed by the sudden concentration of interest on himself; but carried it off with sang-froid. Only a slight flush of pink on his youthful cheek, as he flicked the ash from his cigarette with the delicate little finger of the hand that held it, confessed to a certain uneasy self-consciousness.

‘I have heard something about it,’ said Carleon. ‘Give us your version.’

‘I’m no hand at describing things,’ responded the young man, committed and at bay; ‘never wrote a line of description in my life, nor wanted to. It was the Shadow-Dance, you know – the last thing on the programme. I dare say some of you have seen Kaunitz in it.’

One or two of us had. It was incomparably the most beautiful, the most mystic, idyll achieved by even that superlative dancer; a fantasia of moonlight, supported by an ethereal, only half-revealed, shimmer of attendant sylphids.

‘Yes,’ said Carleon eagerly.

‘Well, you know,’ said the young man, ‘there is a sort of dance first, in and out of the shadows, a mysterious, gossamery kind of business, with nobody made out exactly, and the moon slowly rising behind the trees. And then, suddenly, the moon reaches a gap in the branches, and – and it’s full moon, don’t you know, a regular white blaze of it, and all the shapes have vanished; only you sort of guess them, get a hint of their arms and faces hiding behind the leaves and under the shrubs and things. And that was the time when Kaunitz ought to have come on.’

‘Didn’t she come on?’

‘Not at first; not when she ought to. There was a devil of a pause, and you could see something was wrong. And after a bit there was a sort of rustle in the house, and people began to cough; and the music slipped round to the beginning again; and they danced it all over a second time, until it came to the full moonlight – and there she was this time all right – how, I don’t know, for I hadn’t seen her enter.’

‘How did she dance – when she did appear?’

The young man blew the ash from his cigarette. ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ he said.

‘You must know. Wasn’t it something quite out of the common? You called it a rum start, you remember.’

‘Well, if you insist upon it, it was – the most extraordinary thing I ever witnessed – more like what they describe the Pepper’s Ghost business than anything else I can think. She was here, there, anywhere; seemingly independent of what d’ye call – gravitation, you know; she seemed to jump and hang in the air before she came down. And there was another thing. The idea was to dance to her own shadow, you see – follow it, run away from it, flirt with it – and it was the business of the moon, or the limelight man, to keep the shadow going.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, there was no shadow – not a sign of one.’

‘That may have been the limelight man’s fault.’

‘Very likely; but I don’t think so. There was something odd about it all; and most in the way she went.’

‘How was that?’

‘Why, she just gave a spring, and was gone.’

Carleon sank back, with a sigh as if of repletion, and sat softly cracking his fingers together.

‘Didn’t you notice anything strange about the house, the audience?’ he said – ‘people crying out; girls crouching and hiding their faces, for instance?’

‘Perhaps, now I think of it,’ answered the modish youth. ‘I noticed, anyhow, that the curtain came down with a bang, and that there seemed a sort of general flurry and stampede of things, both behind it and on our side.’

‘Well, as to that, it is a fact, though you may not know it, that after that night the company absolutely refused to complete its engagement on any terms.’

‘I dare say. They had lost Kaunitz.’

‘To be sure they had. She was already lying dead in her dressing-room when the Shadow-Dance began.’

‘Not when it began?’

‘So, anyhow, it was whispered.’

‘Oh I say,’ said the young man, looking rather white; ‘I’m not going to believe that, you know.’

WILLIAM TYRWHITT’S ‘COPY’

This is the story of William Tyrwhitt, who went to King’s Cobb for rest and change, and, with the latter, at least, was so far accommodated as for a time to get beyond himself and into regions foreign to his experiences or his desires. And for this condition of his I hold myself something responsible, inasmuch as it was my inquisitiveness was the means of inducing him to an exploration, of which the result, with its measure of weirdness, was for him alone. But, it seems, I was appointed an agent of the unexplainable without my knowledge, and it was simply my misfortune to find my first unwitting commission in the selling of a friend.

I was for a few days, about the end of a particular July, lodged in that little old seaboard town of Dorset that is called King’s Cobb. Thither there came to me one morning a letter from William Tyrwhitt, the polemical journalist (a queer fish, like the cuttle, with an ink-bag for the confusion of enemies), complaining that he was fagged and used up, and desiring me to say that nowhere could complete rest be obtained as in King’s Cobb.

I wrote and assured him on this point. The town, I said, lay wrapped in the hills as in blankets, its head only, winking a sleepy eye, projecting from the top of the broad, steep gully in which it was stretched at ease. Thither few came to the droning coast; and such as did, looked up at the High Street baking in the sun, and, thinking of Jacob’s ladder, composed them to slumber upon the sand and left the climbing to the angels. Here, I said, the air and the sea were so still that one could hear the oysters snoring in their beds; and the little frizzle of surf on the beach was like to the sound to dreaming ears of bacon frying in the kitchens of the blest.

William Tyrwhitt came, and I met him at the station, six or seven miles away. He was all strained and springless, like a broken child’s toy – ‘not like that William who, with lance in rest, shot through the lists in Fleet Street’. A disputative galley-puller could have triumphed over him morally; a child physically.

The drive in the inn brake, by undulating roads and scented valleys, shamed his cheek to a little flush of self-assertion.

‘I will sleep under the vines,’ he said, ‘and the grapes shall drop into my mouth.’

‘Beware,’ I answered, ‘lest in King’s Cobb your repose should be everlasting. The air of that hamlet has matured like old port in the bin of its hills, till to drink of it is to swoon.’

We alighted at the crown of the High Street, purposing to descend on foot the remaining distance to the shore.

‘Behold,’ I exclaimed, ‘how the gulls float in the shimmer, like ashes tossed aloft by the white draught of a fire! Behold these ancient buildings nodding to the everlasting lullaby of the bay waters! The cliffs are black with the heat apoplexy; the lobster is drawn scarlet to the surface. You shall be like an addled egg put into an incubator.’

‘So,’ he said, ‘I shall rest and not hatch. The very thought is like sweet oil on a burn.’

He stayed with me a week, and his body waxed wondrous round and rosy, while his eye acquired a foolish and vacant expression. So it was with me. We rolled together, by shore and by road of this sluggard place, like spent billiard balls; and if by chance we cannoned, we swerved sleepily apart, until, perhaps, one would fall into a pocket of the sand, and the other bring up against a cushion of sea-wall.

Yet, for all its enervating atmosphere, King’s Cobb has its fine traditions of a sturdy independence, and a slashing history withal; and its aspect is as picturesque as that of an opera bouffe fishing-harbour. Then, too, its High Street, as well as its meandering rivulets of low streets, is rich in buildings, venerable and antique.

We took an irresponsible, smiling pleasure in noting these advantages – particularly after lunch; and sometimes, where an old house was empty, we would go over it, and stare at beams and chimney-pieces and hear the haunted tale of its fortunes, with a faint half-memory in our breasts of that one-time bugbear we had known as ‘copy’. But though more than once a flaccid instinct would move us to have out our pencils, we would only end by bunging our foolish mouths with them, as if they were cigarettes, and then vaguely wondering at them for that, being pencils, they would not draw.

By then we were so sinewless and demoralised that we could hear in the distant strains of the European Concert nothing but an orchestra of sweet sounds, and would have given ourselves away in any situation with a pound of tea. Therefore, perhaps, it was well for us that, a peremptory summons to town reaching me after seven days of comradeship with William, I must make shift to collect my faculties with my effects, and return to the more bracing climate of Fleet Street.

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