Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre

by Hugh Walpole

Harkness looked out once more at the great window with its splash of glorious sky, then ceased to struggle with his cords. His lips moved in some prayer perhaps, and once more, surely now for the last time, he closed his eyes. He had a strange vision of all the moving world beyond that window. At that moment at the hotel the maids would be sweeping the corridors, people would be stirring and rubbing their eyes and looking at their watches; in the town family breakfasts would be preparing, men would be sauntering down the narrow streets to their work; the connection with the London train would be running in with the London papers, already the men and women would be in the fields, the women would be waiting perhaps for the fishing-fleet to come in, Mrs. Jabez would be at the cottage door looking up the road for her husband. . . .

His heart pounded into his mouth, with a mighty impulse he drove it back. Crispin was laughing. The knife was raised. His face was wrinkled. He was running round the room, round and round, making with the knife strange movements in the air. He was whispering to himself. Round and round and round he ran, words pouring from his mouth in a thick unending stream. They were not words, they were sounds, and once and again a strange sigh like a catch of the breath, like a choke in the throat. He ran, bending, not looking at the three men, bending low as though as he ran he were looking for something on the floor.

Then quite suddenly he straightened himself, and with a growl and a snarl, the knife raised in one hand, hurled himself at Jabez.

All followed then quickly. The knife flashed in the sunlight. It seemed that the hands caught at Jabez's eyes, first one and then another, but there had been more than the hands because suddenly blood poured from those eyes, spouting over, covering the face, mingling with the beard.

With a great cry Jabez put forth his strength. Stung by agony to a power that he had never known until then his body seemed to rise from the ground, to become something superhuman, immortal. The great head towered, the limbs spread out, it seemed for a moment as though the pillar itself would fall.

The cord that tied him to the pillar snapped and his hands were free. He tottered, the blood pouring from his face. He moved, blindly, staggering. Not a sound had come from him since that first cry.

His hands flung out, and in another moment Crispin was caught into his arms. He raised him. The little fat hands fluttered. The knife flashed loosely and fell to the ground. The giant swung into the middle of the room blinded, but holding to himself ever tighter and ever tighter the short fat body.

Crispin, his head tossed back, his legs flung out in an agony now of terror, screamed with a strange shrill cry like a rabbit entrapped.

Jabez turned, and now he had Crispin's soft chest against his bleeding face, the arms fluttering above his head. As he turned his shoulder touched the glass of the window. He pushed backward with his arm and the window swung open, some of the broken glass tinkling to the ground. There was a great rush of air.

That strange thing, like no human body, the white silk, the brown slippers, the red hair, swung. For one second of time, suspended as it were on the thread of that long animal scream, so shrill and yet so thin and distant, the white face, its little eyes staring, the painted mouth open, hung towards Harkness. Then into the air like a coloured bundle of worthless junk, for a moment a dark shadow across the steeple of sunlight, and then down, down, into fathomless depths of air, leaving the space of sky stainless, the morning blue without taint. . . .