The White Hecatomb, and Other Stories

by W. C. Scully

The man ceased speaking and began to cough. Then he walked slowly backwards and forwards with an air of extreme preoccupation. The woman said nothing, but kept her eyes, which were now swimming in tears, fixed on him.

“Really, my darling,” he continued after a pause, and in an impatient tone, “you must try and look at the thing as I do. He is dead, and we saw the lid of the coffin screwed down over his cold body, yet, wonderful to relate, he is so close to us that I can bring him back at will. I have only to close my eyes and I see him. Look here, I hold his cap just three feet from the floor, and there he stands below it, with his face under the peak, and his curls behind. Now cover your face with the cap, and draw in your breath;—so—did I not tell you?—He has only just taken it off. Now, look: can you not see him there before you? Now he is here nestling up, and just going to beg for a story. There, he has gone over to his rocking-horse. Now close your eyes and rock it; to close your eyes at the right time is the great secret.”

Here the man’s voice was again interrupted by the cough. The woman stood up and laid her hand caressingly over his shoulder. Then she tried to move in front of him and look into his eyes. With an impatient gesture he shook himself free, and resumed his walking to and fro, always avoiding her eyes.

“How foolish you are,” he resumed, “not to help me, not to participate in this new creation which I have discovered the secret of effecting. Look here, be reasonable, every night we will make up his bed and place his clothes ready for the morning. Then we will tie the string to your wrist so that he can pull it and waken you without disturbing me. Now just try it, and I am quite positive you will feel the string being pulled just when he wants you to kiss him at the usual time. You have always been pitching into me for reading metaphysics, but look at the difference between us now. You remember what Fichte—”

Here the man’s voice was once more interrupted by the cough. He turned and leant against the wall, resting his forehead against his arm. The woman tried to make him sit down on an easy-chair, which she drew towards him, but he refused with the same impatient gesture. Soon he resumed his walking, and continued:

“I am even prepared to maintain that in some respects we are better off than if he had lived. I do not imagine that either of us will last very long, and think what it would have been to leave him behind, uncared for. Then, if he had grown up, who knows what mistakes he might have made, and what he might have suffered. As it is now, he will always be the same to us. I am glad you are not crying any longer. Now I will go and carry his cot back into the bedroom. Do not come in until I have things arranged.”

There was a smell of carbolic disinfectant throughout the house, for the boy had died of diphtheritic croup, after an agonising illness of five days. This smell continually suggested death to the woman; it seemed to have got into her nostrils permanently, go where she would she could not avoid it. She now stood up from where she had been sitting near the fireplace, and walked into the drawing-room, which had a south-eastern aspect. It was winter, and the night was somewhat unseasonably warm. The weather had long been dry. A bright moon was high in the heavens. The woman stood in the dark room and looked out of the window to where the bare, silvery rods of a willow swayed and undulated to the faint, intermittent breeze. Then her gaze wandered to an oak, out of the leafless boughs of which hung the ropes of the boy’s swing, oscillating gently. Every now and then she coughed, and the sound of the man’s coughing reached her at short intervals from the next room. The rising wind began to sough and moan over the house, and to call ghostly whisperings from the bare, chafing branches of the crowded oak trees. Stretched across the sky from horizon to horizon was a curved fringe of delicate snow-white cloud, suggestive of an ostrich feather in shape and texture. This came nearer every moment. It hung for a breath like a broken, opaline halo round the moon. Now it was over the house, and the moon was again clear, but low down on the southern horizon from whence it had arisen, dark clouds of gradually increasing bulk were surging up, and faint lightnings flickering.

The man came from the bedroom into the passage and called to the woman, who silently joined him, and again passed her arm over his shoulder.

“Come along, darling,” he said, as they went towards the bedroom; “see how I have arranged it all. What a pity we did not think of this last night!”

The little cot had been moved back to its place, and in it the boy’s bed had been made, pillow, white sheet turned back, and little eider-down quilt, all complete. In the middle of the pillow was a dent, as if a head had just been lying there, and the bed-clothes were slightly tumbled. On a chair at the foot of the cot were carelessly thrown a flannel shirt, a blue-striped tunic, and a pair of blue serge knickerbockers; upon these lay loose a pair of cardinal-coloured socks, and two shoes with bright steel buckles stood close by on the floor. The woman walked up to the cot, her face was ashen. Her lips had ceased quivering, but she could not speak. Her heart stood almost still. Her mental tension was such that she almost lost consciousness. Two impressions dominated all others, the smell of the carbolic, and the swelling moan of the wind over the roof. The man went on garrulously, and in a cheerful voice: