Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery Read Free Page B

unknown possibilities were about me in the
night puzzled and distressed me perhaps more than I cared to admit.
III
    All this that takes so long to describe became apparent to me in a few
seconds. What I had always despised ascended the throne.
    But with the finding of Bassett's cottage, as a sign-post close to
home, my former
sang-froid
, my stupidity, would doubtless return, and
my relief was therefore considerable when at length a faint gleam of
light appeared through the mist, against which the square dark shadow
of the chimney-line pointed upwards. After all, I had not strayed so
very far out of the way. Now I could definitely ascertain where I was
wrong.
    Quickening my pace, I scrambled over a broken stone wall, and almost
ran across the open bit of grass to the door. One moment the black
outline of the cottage was there in front of me, and the next, when I
stood actually against it—there was nothing! I laughed to think how
utterly I had been deceived. Yet not utterly, for as I groped back
again over the wall, the cottage loomed up a little to the left, with
its windows lighted and friendly, and I had only been mistaken in my
angle of approach after all. Yet again, as I hurried to the door, the
mist drove past and thickened a second time—and the cottage was not
where I had seen it!
    My confusion increased a lot after that. I scrambled about in all
directions, rather foolishly hurried, and over countless stone walls it
seemed, and completely dazed as to the true points of the compass. Then
suddenly, just when a kind of despair came over me, the cottage stood
there solidly before my eyes, and I found myself not two feet from the
door. Was ever mist before so deceptive? And there, just behind it, I
made out the row of pines like a dark wave breaking through the night.
I sniffed the wet resinous odour with joy, and a genuine thrill ran
through me as I saw the unmistakable yellow light of the windows. At
last I was near home and my troubles would soon be over.
    A cloud of birds rose with shrill cries off the roof and whirled into
the darkness when I knocked with my stick on the door, and human
voices, I was almost certain, mingled somewhere with them, though it
was impossible to tell whether they were within the cottage or outside.
It all sounded confusedly with a rush of air like a little whirlwind,
and I stood there rather alarmed at the clamour of my knocking. By way,
too, of further proof that my imagination had awakened, the
significance of that knocking at the door set something vibrating
within me that most surely had never vibrated before, so that I
suddenly realized with what atmosphere of mystical suggestion is the
mere act of knocking surrounded—
knocking at a door
—both for him who
knocks, wondering what shall be revealed on opening, and for him who
stands within, waiting for the summons of the knocker. I only know that
I hesitated a lot before making up my mind to knock a second time.
    And, anyhow, what happened subsequently came in a sort of haze. Words
and memory both failed me when I try to record it truthfully, so that
even the faces are difficult to visualise again, the words almost
impossible to hear.
    Before I knew it the door was open and before I could frame the words
of my first brief question, I was within the threshold, and the door
was shut behind me.
    I had expected the little dark and narrow hallway of a cottage,
oppressive of air and odour, but instead I came straight into a room
that was full of light and full of—people. And the air tasted like the
air about a mountain-top.
    To the end I never saw what produced the light, nor understood how so
many men and women found space to move comfortably to and fro, and pass
each other as they did, within the confines of those four walls. An
uncomfortable sense of having intruded upon some private gathering was,
I think, my first emotion; though how the poverty-stricken country-side
could have produced such an assemblage puzzled me beyond belief.