OLD MAN'S BEARD Read online

  Mr Bickley had waded his way through the evidence to a fairly favourable summing-up when something else came to worry him. Mariella didn’t seem very flourishing. The family G.P. had described her as the most flawless physical specimen he had ever examined, and the sun and sea and air of Brinton should have put the keenest edge on this brilliant Toledo blade, and the close presence of her lover should have made her spirit leap within her. But the actual result was depressingly different. After the first few days she seemed limp and lethargic and ‘snappy’ in the mornings. She shook this off during the day, but began to droop again at sundown and showed a marked distaste for going to bed; not a distaste born of overmastering vitality, but something less reassuring than that, something less readily explicable. Her mother had noticed it, of course, and was rather worried, had questioned her gently and been testily repulsed.

  Look at her now, for example, just come in from bathing on such a glorious day, and young Randall gazing at her with such undisguised adoration. What more could she want? Yet she seemed shadowed, brooding over something. She really almost looked ill and yet, in a purely physical sense, radiantly healthy — it must be some mental trouble; but what conceivable reason could there be for it? Yes, she was looking in that way worse then he’d ever seen her look, worse even than when he’d kicked that ghastly young dancing partner creature down the steps at home. It then occurred to Mr Bickley that his old friend, Sir Perseus Farrar, had just arrived at the Royal Hotel, and that he was the greatest authority in Europe on that awful and occult business, the female nervous system. How Mr Bickley admired a man who had the audacity to make a living out of delving into that monstrous region, that scarifying inferno! He knew it was the unforgivable sin to consult members of the medical profession out of office hours, and specially while on holiday, but Sir Perseus was such an old friend and kindly person and so fond of Mariella that he’d risk it, if she didn’t get better. So far from getting better she burst into hysterical tears in the middle of breakfast the very next morning, ran up to her bedroom, locked the door and refused to see anyone. So Mr Bickley trotted round to the Royal. He found Sir Perseus smoking in the lounge, and forthwith burst into a halting recital concerning Mariella, liberally studded with apologies. These Sir Perseus cut short. ‘My dear Horace,’ he said, ‘I was just thinking when you came in how glad I should be to have a little work to do. I’m always like that after a week’s idling, and though I am very sorry that that which will rescue me from my sloth is some trouble with my dear and exquisite Mariella, I don’t suppose there’s much wrong, and if I can set it right, I shall feel doubly grateful to you for allowing me to don my harness for an hour or two. I’ll drop in casually after lunch.’ Which he did, and Mariella came out of her seclusion to greet him. By arrangement Mrs Bickley and young Randall had gone out before his arrival, and very soon Mr Bickley found an excuse to absent himself. Sir Perseus was not a famous authority on the female nervous system for nothing, and within a quarter of an hour Mariella was telling him something to which he was listening with an absorbed and authoritative attention. At the end of half an hour he began to ask questions, and at the end of an hour he patted her hand and told her there was nothing seriously to fuss about, but that unless she objected he would like her to put herself in his hands, by which he meant that she should tell him at once anything else which happened, and confide absolutely in him. She agreed thankfully. And then he left her with a very puzzled and thoughtful expression on his face and, as arranged, met Mr Bickley on the front.

  They sat down on a seat overlooking the sea, on which Sir Perseus stared for a time, while Mr Bickley waited rather anxiously for him to speak.

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything at all serious,’ said Sir Perseus at length, ‘but very unpleasant for her, poor child. It’s a nightmare she’s been having. I asked her if she were accustomed to dream, and she replied with great candour that ever since she could remember she had dreamed frequently and vividly of young men.’

  Mr Bickley shuffled on his seat, his thoughts winging back. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘that’s quite usual, quite natural? I mean, most young girls dream of young men.’

  ‘Oh, quite, quite,’ replied Sir Perseus; ‘but I gather that her dreams have been exceptionally, well — vivid. I was relieved to hear it, for it makes the deep etching of this nightmare less hard to explain. Apparently she experienced it for the first time ten days ago — on the second evening she was here. She has had it twice since. It takes this form. As she relates it, her room appears to be divided into two parts; that in which she herself is in is darkness, the rest of the room is highly lighted. In it there is a bed, rather a big bed, and on it is an old man with a longish, grey beard wearing a nightshirt. He is apparently writhing in great agony. He is twisting over and over, his hands to his heart, his head flung back. And then he suddenly rolls over and drops from the bed to the floor and is hidden from her. Then the light seems to spread towards her across the carpet, and she sees between the bed and where she is placed a coffin on the ground. And it seems to her as though there must be many cracks in this coffin, for long grey hair is streaming through it, some coiled over the lid and some streaming upwards. And presently the lid starts slowly to rise, and then the whole room is in darkness, and she has the impression that something is moving towards her and then bending over her, and she feels something spreading over her face — hair, she thinks; she has a sensation of suffocation, and awakes.’

  ‘My God!’ cried Mr Bickley. ‘That is foul, dreadful! Poor little girl, what a bestial, terrifying experience!’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Sir Perseus, ‘it is one of the most disgusting and unnerving dreams of the kind I have ever had described to me. There must be some explanation of it. Recurrent nightmares of this type are invariably the echo — stored in the subconscious — of some sharp experience once upon a time recorded. That sounds obscure, and it is so, but I have known very many such cases. Can you recall anything in Mariella’s short existence which, when regurgitated, as it were, might cause this beastly dream; anything to do with a grey-bearded man, for example?’

  ‘Nothing whatever,’ said Mr Bickley, emphatically. ‘I have certainly come across grey-bearded men in the course of business and so on, but I cannot remember that Mariella ever met one.’ (‘But what a lot of men Mariella has taken to,’ he thought to himself. ‘It is conceivable there was one with a grey beard, but it is excessively improbable.’)

  ‘I stress the detail of the beard,’ continued Sir Perseus, ‘because it seems to be the hair which sharply dominates this dream, and chiefly disturbs Mariella’s mind; for example, when she broke down at breakfast it was because, so she told me, she saw someone with a grey beard pass by the window, which shows how sensitive she is to, and preoccupied by, the hair element. And I am convinced that she must have had some shock — long ago quite possibly — connected with a person so adorned, and that this vile dream is a throw-back to this experience. I have told her to sift her memory for something of the kind. I am interested in her case, not only for professional reasons — I am very fond of her — and I feel it is up to me to exorcise this horror. She is too young and too innocent to be made a victim of such devilry. She has agreed to put herself in my hands and consult me at once if there are any developments. I will send her a sleeping draught, and I suggest she should not sleep alone. She had better have her mother with her in the same room, also a night-light, and try to give her as amusing and tiring a day as possible.’

  ‘I certainly will,’ said Mr Bickley, ‘and I’m deeply grateful to you for taking up the case — if that isn’t too alarming a way of putting it. She shall sleep in our room and I’ll move into hers. But, good heavens, if I thought as I got into bed I was doomed to have that dream, I should never dare to close my eyes!’

  ‘Remember this,’ said Sir Perseus; ‘if you actually had such a dream it would not seem quite as dreadful as you expected it to be; that is an axiom of human experience. It is not quite as shocking to Marie
lla as you think it must be. Nevertheless, it is loathsome enough, and therefore we’ve got to be very gentle and swift-witted with her. Oh, these dreams — how often I’ve puzzled over them! I’ve always firmly maintained they were distorted echoes of reality, though I know there is a school which regards them as nothing of the sort, but as reflections from another mode of consciousness, so that they can be prophetic — more than that — definitely another existence as it were, so much so that if the dreaming faculty was fostered to its highest voltage, waking up might be equivalent to slipping into dreamland, and sinking into dreamland really waking up; but that is too hard a saying for my old cranium to digest. But the land of dreams is largely an unexplored terrain, or anyway unsuccessfully mapped and surveyed, and Mariella’s case sharply reminds me of it. And now I must be off, my dear Horace. Don’t worry, we will make her once more as sweetly light-hearted and fancy-free as she deserves to be.’

  When Mr Bickley got back to the house Mariella had gone to lie down, but her mother and young Randall were awaiting him. He retailed to them a brief résumé of what Sir Perseus had told him. Mrs Bickley had one admirable trait; in moments of crisis she acted first and talked afterwards, though most certainly she talked afterwards! So with hardly a word she bustled off to see about the change of rooms and the purchase of night-lights. Compared with young Randall’s reception of the news hers seemed almost callous and unfeeling. For he became highly agitated and upset to an extent that slightly surprised Mr Bickley, for surely it wasn’t as bad as all that! Young Randall went very white, and cross-examined him closely and urgently concerning the details of Mariella’s nightmare, and seemed more and more distressed at every additional detail of it. As if such minutiae made any great difference, wondered Mr Bickley. How very much in love with her he must be! He felt compelled to impress on him that they must all do as Sir Perseus had decreed and keep Mariella’s spirits up and her mind off her trouble as much as possible, and so on; but young Randall hardly seemed to be listening to these excellent platitudes, and if he hadn’t been drinking a good deal when he came down to dinner, Mr Bickley was no judge of the earlier stages of intoxication. Mariella, on the other hand, seemed better, and the doctor’s visit had restored her confidence. And this was justified, for under the influence of the sleeping-draught she enjoyed ten hours of dreamless slumber and was very glad to have her mother by her side and a tiny light shining between them. The next morning she was in excellent spirits and once more keenly appreciative of those glances of masculine admiration and feminine envy which she always evoked as she slipped her wrap from her shoulders and stepped slowly down the beach to the sea. She was — and still is for that matter — five feet nine inches and a half in height, magnificently ‘marshalled’. The peculiar beauty of her figure is due to the fact that while she seems very long from hip to knee, she is one inch longer from knee to foot, and her torso, rippling, taut and beautifully developed, is just exactly proportionately right. When the critical eye of the Brinton visitor turned from her perfection to the many other ‘very good figures’ on the beach, their slight but recognisable flaws seemed brutally intensified. And then those tantalisingly lifted eyelids! Well, young Randall was deemed a damned lucky dog so soon to have all those rare felicities to sample. Yet on that occasion he didn’t look as if he sufficiently appreciated the fact. He looked morose and hardly said a word. ‘A thick night or a tiff,’ surmised the knowing onlookers.

  Sir Perseus looked in during the afternoon and professed himself quite satisfied with the patient. And for forty-eight hours he had every reason to be. But three nights later Mrs Bickley woke up suddenly and looked across to Mariella. She was lying on her back and moving about with a slight incessant restlessness. ‘Shall I wake her?’ thought her mother. ‘No, I’ll wait a little while, it may be nothing.’ Presently Mariella’s motions became more rapid, pronounced and urgent. And then she sat up in bed and began thrusting with her hands, and then brushing her face as if to free it from something which was spreading over it. This impressed her mother very horribly, and she jumped out of bed and went over to her, spoke her name, and touched her gently. And presently she awoke, her eyes staring, her body trembling. And then she burst into tears. Her mother gave her a sleeping-draught, stroked her hair and comforted her, and took her to her own bed. Soon her sobbing became less violent and, as the drug allied itself with her exhaustion, she fell into a deep sleep. Mrs Bickley, however, didn’t close her eyes again that night. Early next morning she rang up Sir Perseus, who was vaguely reassuring. ‘Whatever the cause,’ he said, ‘it cannot be expected that complete recovery can be immediate.’ For the present he ordered a sleeping-draught every night.

  Mariella seemed listless but fairly cheerful and, after her bathe, almost her usual self. Mr Bickley was worried, but succeeded in disguising the fact. Young Randall was told nothing about it. And then there was another three days’ pause and everyone’s spirits rose again.

  Mariella’s temperament demanded a certain amount of solitude. She had found a very secluded spot wherein to rest and read in the afternoons, and she liked to go there alone after tea for a while. It was beside a groyne about half a mile from the house. She used to go there in her bathing dress and have a dip just before going back to change for dinner.

  On the fourth day after her bad night she strolled down there about five o’clock. Randall and her father were playing golf, and Mrs Bickley was busy with the laundry. Mariella usually returned about half-past six, but on this occasion a quarter-past seven struck and still she had not appeared.

  ‘We’d better go and fetch her,’ said Mr Bickley to young Randall. ‘She may have gone to sleep.’ He tried to keep all trace of uneasiness out of his voice, but each knew the other was anxious as they walked at top speed towards that cozy little spot under the shelter of the groyne. What they saw when they reached it made young Randall leap recklessly down the fifteen feet from the sea-wall to the beach, while Mr Bickley ran for the steps. For Mariella lay sprawled down the shingle. Her beach cloak had draped itself over her head so that only her legs were visible. Her book lay where she had flung it, almost at the water’s edge. Young Randall pulled back the cloak. Her face was dead white and she was unconscious. He dashed down to the sea, soaked his handkerchief and squeezed the water over Mariella’s face, but she showed no sign of recovery. ‘We must carry her back,’ said Mr Bickley. By good fortune a taxi was passing just as they got her to the top of the steps, and three minutes later she was lying on her bed and Mr Bickley was telephoning to Sir Perseus. He was in, and the taxi was sent to fetch him. Meanwhile Mrs Bickley and young Randall were busy with restoratives and hot-water bottles.

  Mariella was just conscious but quite dazed when Sir Perseus arrived. After a few hurried words with Mr Bickley he went upstairs and asked to be left alone with his patient. Half an hour later he left her in charge of her mother and came downstairs. He was looking grave as he joined the two men in the study. Though he had something else almost monopolising his mind, the attention of his expert eye was fleetingly seized by the appearance of young Randall, who was looking almost as ill as his young woman, he thought.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the bare facts are these. Mariella was resting against the breakwater and reading, when she felt something tickling her neck. She paid no heed for a while, and then the irritation became more insistent. She looked round casually and, according to her account, streamers of grey hair were flowing through the cracks in the woodwork and coiling round her neck. She remembers nothing more.’ Young Randall poured himself out half a tumbler of neat whisky and drained it.

  ‘What is it? What is it?’ cried Mr Bickley desperately.

  ‘It is, to put it crudely, an hallucination,’ replied Sir Perseus, ‘and I will not disguise from you the fact that it is a serious matter. A nightmare is one thing, a violent waking illusion of this kind quite another. I must tell you one thing. She says she occasionally has the impression that someone is whispering in her ear.’

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sp; ‘But, good God!’ said Mr Bickley miserably, ‘that sounds like madness!’

  ‘It sounds like nothing of the sort,’ replied Sir Perseus sharply; ‘get any such idea out of your head. Mariella is ill, but she’s absolutely sane.’

  ‘Of course she’s sane,’ said young Randall violently.

  Sir Perseus looked across at him, and once more his expert eye was steeply challenged by that look about him.

  ‘What does she hear whispered?’ asked Mr Bickley.

  ‘She is uncertain about that. She thinks she has heard the words “September the tenth”, but usually it sounds more like vague chatter. She likened it rather vividly to those soft husky mutterings one often hears between items on the radio. And once or twice she fancies she hears a sort of sniggering chuckle. She believes she heard such a sound first before she felt that tickling sensation. However, I don’t think such details have much significance. The point is, she is ill, she has some disturbing, I may say dangerous, symptoms. She must not be left alone; she must have the reinforcement and comfort of you all, and especially of you, Mr Randall. You are to be her future husband, and she naturally already regards you as the person who will guard and cherish her in the coming time. All this is inevitably a very horrible business for you, but you must do your utmost to conceal the fact in front of her.’