Algernon Blackwood: The Doll

The Doll

 by Algernon Blackwood
(Full story)

Some nights are merely dark, others are dark in a suggestive way as though something ominous, mysterious, is going to happen. In certain remote outlying suburbs, at any rate, this seems true, where great spaces between the lamps go dead at night, where little happens, where a ring at the door is a summons almost, and people cry “Let’s go to town!” In the villa gardens the mangy cedars sigh in the wind, but the hedges stiffen, there is a muffling of spontaneous activity.

On this particular November night a moist breeze barely stirred the silver pine in the narrow drive leading to the “Laurels” where Colonel Masters lived, Colonel Hymber Masters, late of an Indian regiment, with many distinguished letters after his name. The housemaid in the limited staff being out, it was the cook who answered the bell when it rang with a sudden, sharp clang soon after ten o’clock — and gave an audible gasp half of surprise, half of fear. The bell’s sudden clangour was an unpleasant and unwelcome sound. Monica, the Colonel’s adored yet rather neglected child, was asleep upstairs, but the cook was not frightened lest Monica be disturbed, nor because it seemed a bit late for the bell to ring so violently; she was frightened because when she opened the door to let the fine rain drive in she saw a black man standing on the steps. There, in the wind and the rain, stood a tall, slim nigger holding a parcel.

Dark-skinned, at any rate, he was, she reflected afterwards, whether negro, hindu or arab; the word “nigger” describing any man not really white. Wearing a stained yellow mackintosh and dirty slouch hat, and “looking like a devil, so help me God,” he shoved the little parcel at her out of the gloom, the light from the hall flaring red into his gleaming eyes. “For Colonel Masters,” he whispered rapidly, “and very special into his own personal touch and no one else.” And he melted away into the night with his “strange foreign accent, his eyes of fire, and his nasty hissing voice.”

He was gone, swallowed up in the wind and rain.

“But I saw his eyes,” swore the cook the next morning to the housemaid, “his fiery eyes, and his nasty look, and his black hands and long thin fingers, and his nails all shiny pink, and he looked to me — if you know wot I mean — he looked like — death…”

Thus the cook, so far as she was intelligently articulate next day, but standing now against the closed door with the small brown paper parcel in her hands, impressed by the orders that it was to be given into his personal touch, she was relieved by the fact that Colonel Masters never returned till after midnight and that she need not act at once. The reflection brought a certain comfort that restored her equanimity a little though she still stood there, holding the parcel gingerly in her grimy hands, reluctant, hesitating, uneasy. A parcel, even brought by a mysterious dark stranger, was not in itself frightening, yet frightened she certainly felt. Instinct and superstition worked perhaps; the wind, the rain, the fact of being alone in the house, the unexpected black man, these also contributed to her discomfort. A vague sense of horror touched her, her Irish blood stirred ancient dreams, so that she began to shake a little, as though the parcel contained something alive, explosive, poisonous, unholy, almost as though it moved, and, her fingers loosening their hold, the parcel — dropped. It fell on the tiled floor with a queer, sharp clack, but it lay motionless. She eyed it closely, cautiously, but, thank God, it did not move, an inert, brown paper parcel. Brought by an errand boy in daylight, it might have been groceries, tobacco, even a mended shirt. She peeped and tinkered, that sharp clack puzzled her. Then, after a few minutes, remembering her duty, she picked it up gingerly even while she shivered. It was to be handed into the Colonel’s “personal touch.” She compromised, deciding to place it on his desk and to tell him about it in the morning; only Colonel Masters, with those mysterious years in the East behind him, his temper and his tyrannical orders, was not easy of direct approach at the best of times, in the morning least of all.

The cook left it at that — that is, she left it on the desk in his study, but left out all explanations about its arrival. She had decided to be vague about such unimportant details, for Mrs. O’Reilly was afraid of Colonel Masters, and only his professed love of Monica made her believe that he was quite human. He paid her well, oh yes, and sometimes he smiled, and he was a handsome man, if a bit too dark for her fancy, yet he also paid her an occasional compliment about her curry, and that soothed her for the moment. They suited one another, at any rate, and she stayed, robbing him comfortably, if cautiously.

“It ain’t no good,” she assured the housemaid next day, “Wot with that ‘personal touch into his hands, and no one else,’ and that black man’s eyes and that crack when it came away in my hands and fell on the floor. It ain’t no good, not to us nor anybody. No man as black as he was means lucky stars to anybody. A parcel indeed — with those devil’s eyes—”

“What did you do with it?” enquired the housemaid.

The cook looked her up and down. “Put it in the fire o’ course,” she replied. “On the stove if you want to know exact.”

It was the housemaid’s turn to look the cook up and down.

“I don’t think,” she remarked.

The cook reflected, probably because she found no immediate answer.

“Well,” she puffed out presently, “d’you know wot I think? You don’t. So I’ll tell you. It was something the master’s afraid of, that’s wot it was. He’s afraid of something — ever since I been here I’ve known that. And that’s wot it was. He done somebody wrong in India long ago and that lanky nigger brought wot’s coming to him, and that’s why I says I put it on the stove — see?” She dropped her voice. “It was a bloody idol,” she whispered, “that’s wot it was, that parcel, and he — why, he’s a bloody secret worshipper.” And she crossed herself. “That’s why I said I put on the stove — see?”

The housemaid stared and gasped.

“And you mark my words, young Jane!” added the cook, turning to her dough.

And there the matter rested for a period, for the cook, being Irish, had more laughter in her than tears, and beyond admitting to the scared housemaid that she had not really burnt the parcel but had left it on the study table, she almost forgot the incident. It was not her job, in any case, to answer the front door. She had “delivered” the parcel. Her conscience was quite clear.

Thus, nobody “marked her words” apparently, for nothing untoward happened, as the way is in remote Suburbia, and Monica in her lonely play was happy, and Colonel Masters as tyrannical and grim as ever. The moist wintry wind blew through the silver pine, the rain beat against the bow window, and no one called. For a week this lasted, a longish time in uneventful Suburbia.

But suddenly one morning Colonel Masters rang his study bell and, the housemaid being upstairs, it was the cook who answered. He held a brown paper parcel in his hands, half opened, the string dangling.

“I found this on my desk. I haven’t been in my room for a week. Who brought it? And when did it come?” His face, yellow as usual, held a fiery tinge.

Mrs. O’Reilly replied, post-dating the arrival vaguely.

“I asked who brought it?” he insisted sharply.

“A stranger,” she fumbled. “No one,” she added nervously, “from hereabouts. No one I ever seen before. It was a man.”

“What did he look like?” The question came like a bullet.

Mrs. O’Reilly was rather taken by surprise. “D-darkish,” she stumbled. “Very darkish,” she added, “if I saw him right. Only he came and went so quick I didn’t get his face proper like, and . . .”

“Any message?” the Colonel cut her short She hesitated. “There was no answer,” she began remembering former occasions.

“Any message, I asked you?” he thundered.

“No message, sir, none at all. And he was gone before I could get his name and address, sir, but I think it was a sort of black man, or it may have been the darkness of the night — I couldn’t reely say, sir . . .”

In another minute she would have burst into tears or dropped to the floor in a faint, such was her terror of her employer especially when she was lying blind. The Colonel, however, saved her both disasters by abruptly holding out the half opened parcel towards her. He neither cross-examined nor cursed her as she had expected. He spoke with the curtness that betrayed anger and anxiety, almost it occurred to her, distress.

“Take it away and burn it,” he ordered in his army voice, passing it into her outstretched hands. “Burn it,” he repeated it, “or chuck the damned thing away.” He almost flung it at her as though he did not want to touch it. “If the man comes back,” he ordered in a voice of steel, “tell him it’s been destroyed — and say it didn’t reach me,” laying tremendous emphasis on the final words. “You understand?’’ He almost chucked it at her.

“Yes, sir. Exactly, sir,’’ and she turned and stumbled out, holding the parcel gingerly in her arms rather than in her hands and fingers, as though it contained something that might bite or sting.

Yet her fear had somehow lessened, for if he, Colonel Masters, could treat the parcel so contemptuously, why should she feel afraid of it. And, once alone in her kitchen among her household gods, she opened it. Turning back the thick paper wrappings. she started, and to her rather disappointed amazement, she found herself staring at nothing but a fair, waxen faced doll that could be bought in any toy-shop for one shilling and sixpence. A commonplace little cheap doll! Its face was pallid, white, expressionless, its flaxen hair was dirty, its tiny ill-shaped hands and fingers lay motionless by its side, its mouth was closed, though somehow grinning, no teeth visible, its eyelashes ridiculously like a worn toothbrush, its entire presentment in its flimsy skirt, contemptible, harmless, even ugly.

A doll! She giggled to herself, all fear evaporated.

“Gawd,” she thought. “The master must have a conscience like the floor of a parrot’s cage! And worse than that!” She was too afraid of him to despise him, her feeling was probably more like pity. “At any rate,’’ she reflected, “he had the wind up pretty had. It was something else he expected — not a two-penny halfpenny doll!’’ Her warm heart felt almost sorry for him.

Instead of “chucking the damned thing away or burning it,’’ however, for it was quite a nice looking doll, she presented it to Monica, and Monica, having few new toys, instantly adored it, promising faithfully, as gravely warned by Mrs. O’Reilly, that she would never, never let her father know she had it.

Her father, Colonel Hymber Masters, was, it seems, what’s called a “disappointed” man, a man whose fate forced him to live in surroundings he detested, disappointed in his career probably, possibly in love as well, Monica a love-child doubtless, and limited by his pension to face daily conditions that he loathed.

He was a silent, bitter sort of fellow, no more than that, and not so much disliked in the neighbourhood, as misunderstood. A sombre man they reckoned him, with his dark, furrowed face and silent ways. Yet “dark” in the suburbs meant mysterious, and “silent” invited female fantasy to fill the vacuum. It’s the frank, corn-haired man who invites sympathy and generous comment. He enjoyed his Bridge, however, and was accepted as a first-class player. Thus, he went out nightly, and rarely came back before midnight. He was welcome among the gamblers evidently, while the fact that he had an adored child at home softened the picture of this “mysterious” man. Monica, though rarely seen, appealed to the women of the neighbourhood, and “whatever her origin” said the gossips, “he loves her.”

To Monica, meanwhile, in her rather play-less, toy-less life, the doll, her new treasure, was a spot of gold. The fact that it was a “secret” present from her father, added to its value. Many other presents had come to her like that; she thought nothing of it; only, he had never given her a doll before, and it spelt rapture. Never, never, would she betray her pleasure and delight; it should remain her secret and his; and that made her love it all the more. She loved her father too, his taciturn silence was something she vaguely respected and adored. “That’s just like father,” she always said, when a strange new present came, and she knew instinctively that she must never say Thank you for it, for that was part of the lovely game between them. But this doll was exceptionally marvellous.

“It’s much more real and alive than my teddy-bears,” she told the cook, after examining it critically. “What ever made him think of it? Why, it even talks to me!” and she cuddled and fondled the half misshapened toy. “It’s my baby,” she cried taking it against her cheek.

For no teddy-bear could really be a child; cuddly bears were not offspring, whereas a doll was a potential baby. It brought sweetness, as both cook and governess realized, into a rather grim house, hope and tenderness, a maternal flavour almost, something anyhow that no young bear could possibly bring. A child, a human baby! And yet both cook and governess — for both were present at the actual delivery — recalled later that Monica opened the parcel and recognized the doll with a yell of wild delight that seemed almost a scream of pain. There was this too high note of delirious exultation as though some instinctive horror of revulsion were instantly smothered and obliterated in a whirl of overmastering joy. It was Madame Jodzka who recalled — long afterwards — this singular contradiction.

“I did think she shrieked at it a bit, now you ask me,” admitted Mrs. O’Reilly later, though at the actual moment all she said was “Oh, lovely, darling, ain’t it a pet!” While all Madame Jodzka said was a cautionary “If you squash its mouth like that, Monica, it won’t be able to breathe!”

While Monica, paying no attention to either of them, fell to cuddling the doll with ecstasy.

A cheap little flaxen-haired, waxen-faced doll.

That so strange a case should come to us at second hand is, admittedly, a pity; that so much of the information should reach us largely through a cook and housemaid and through a foreigner of questionable validity, is equally unfortunate. Where precisely the reported facts creep across the feathery frontier into the incredible and thence into the fantastic would need the spider’s thread of the big telescopes to define. With the eye to the telescope, the thread of that New Zealand spider seems thick as a rope; but with the eye examining second-hand reports the thread becomes elusive gossamer.

The Polish governess, Madame Jodzka, left the house rather abruptly. Though adored by Monica and accepted by Colonel Masters, she left not long after the arrival of the doll. She was a comely, youngish widow of birth and breeding, tactful, discreet, understanding. She adored Monica, and Monica was happy with her; she feared her employer, yet perhaps secretly admired him as the strong, silent, dominating Englishman. He gave her great freedom, she never took liberties, everything went smoothly. The pay was good and she needed it. Then, suddenly, she left. In the suddenness of her departure, as in the odd reason she gave for leaving, lie doubtless the first hints of this remarkable affair, creeping across that “feathery frontier” into the incredible and fantastic. An understandable reason she gave for leaving was that she was too frightened to stay in the house another night. She left at twenty-four hours’ notice. Her reason was absurd, even if understandable, because any woman might find herself so frightened in a certain building that it has become intolerable to her nerves. Foolish or otherwise, this is understandable. An idée fixe, an obsession, once lodged in the mind of a superstitious, therefore hysterically-favoured woman, cannot be dislodged by argument. It may be absurd, yet it is “understandable.”

The story behind the reason for Madame Jodzka’s sudden terror is another matter, and it is best given quite simply. It relates to the doll. She swears by all her gods that she saw the doll “walking by itself,” walking in a disjointed, hoppity, hideous fashion across the bed in which Monica lay sleeping.

In the gleam of the night-light, Madame Jodzka swears she saw this happen. She was half inside the opened door, peeping in, as her habit and duty decreed, to see if all was well with the child before going up to bed herself. The light, if faint, was clear. A jerky movement on the counterpane first caught her attention, for a smallish object seemed blundering awkwardly across its slippery silken surface. Something rolling, possibly, some object Monica had left outside on falling asleep rolling mechanically as the child shifted or turned over.

After staring for some seconds, she then saw that it was not merely an “object,” since it had a living outline, nor was it rolling mechanically, or sliding, as she had first imagined. It was horribly taking steps, small but quite deliberate steps as though alive. It had a tiny, dreadful face, it had an expressionless tiny face, and the face had eyes — small, brightly shining eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Madame Jodzka.

She watched for a few seconds thunderstruck, and then suddenly realised with a shock of utter horror that this small, purposive monster was the doll, Monica’s doll! And this doll was moving towards her across the tumbled surface of the counterpane. It was coming in her direction — straight at her.

Madame Jodzka gripped herself, physically and mentally, making a great effort, it seems, to deny the abnormal, the incredible. She denied the ice in her veins and down her spine. She prayed. She thought frantically of her priest in Warsaw. Making no audible sound, she screamed in her mind. But the doll, quickening its pace, came hobbling straight towards her, its glassy eyes fixed hard upon her own.

Then Madame Jodzka fainted.

That she was, in some ways, a remarkable woman, with a sense of values, is clear from the fact that she realised this story “wouldn’t wash,” for she confided it only to the cook in cautious whispers, while giving her employer some more “washable” tale about a family death that obliged her to hurry home to Warsaw. Nor was there the slightest attempt at embroidery, for on recovering consciousness she had recovered her courage, too — and done a remarkable thing: she had compelled herself to investigate. Aided and fortified by her religion, she compelled herself to make an examination. She had tiptoed further into the room, had made sure that Monica was sleeping peacefully, and that the doll lay — motionless — half way down the counterpane. She gave it a long, concentrated look. Its lidless eyes, fringed by hideously ridiculous black lashes, were fixed on space. Its expression was not so much innocent, as blankly stupid, idiotic, a mask of death that aped cheaply a pretence of life, where life could never be. Not ugly merely, it was revolting.

Madame Jodzka however, did more than study this visage with concentration, for with admirable pluck she forced herself to touch the little horror. She actually picked it up. Her faith, her deep religious conviction denied the former evidence of her senses. She had not seen movement. It was incredible, impossible. The fault lay somewhere in herself. This persuasion, at any rate, lasted long enough to enable her to touch the repulsive little toy, to pick it up, to lift it. She placed it steadily on the table near the bed between the bowl of flowers and the night-light, where it lay on its back helpless, innocent, yet horrible, and only then on shaking legs did she leave the room and up to her own bed. That her fingers remained ice-cold until eventually she fell asleep can be explained, of course, too easily and naturally to claim examination.

Whether imagined or actual, it must have been, none-the-less, a horrifying spectacle — a mechanical outline from a commercial factory walking like a living thing with a purpose. It holds the nightmare touch. To Madame Jodzka, protected since youth within cast-iron tenets, it came as a shock. And a shock dislocates. The sight smashed everything she knew as possible and real. The flow of her blood was interrupted, it froze, there came icy terror into her heart, her normal mechanism failed for a moment, she fainted. And fainting seemed a natural result. Yet it was the shock of the incredible masquerade that gave her the courage to act. She loved Monica, apart from any consideration of paid duty. The sight of this tiny monstrosity strutting across the counterpane not far from the child’s sleeping face and folded hands — it was this that enabled her to pick it up with naked fingers and set it out of reach…

For hours, before falling asleep, she reviewed the incredible thing, alternately denying the facts, then accepting them, yet taking into sleep finally the assured conviction that her senses had not deceived her. There seems little, indeed, that in a court of law could have been advanced against her character for reliability, for sincerity, for the logic of her detailed account.

“I’m sorry,” said Colonel Masters quietly, referring to her bereavement. He looked searchingly at her. “And Monica will miss you,” he added with one of his rare smiles. “She needs you.” Then just as she turned away, he suddenly extended his hand. “If perhaps later you can come back — do let me know. Your influence is — so helpful — and good.”

She mumbled some phrase with a promise in it, yet she left with a queer, deep impression that it was not merely, not chiefly perhaps, Monica who needed her. She wished he had not used quite those words. A sense of shame lay in her, almost as though she were running away from duty, or at least from a chance to help that God had put in her way. “Your influence is — so good.”

Already in the train and on the boat conscience attacked her, biting, scratching, gnawing. She had deserted a child she loved, a child who needed her, because she was scared out of her wits. No, that was a one-sided statement. She had left a house because the Devil had come into it. No, that was only partially true. When a hysterical temperament, engrained since early childhood in fixed dogmas, begins to sift facts and analyse reactions, logic and common sense themselves become confused. Thought led one way, emotion another, and no honest conclusion dawned on her mind.

She hurried on to Warsaw, to a stepfather, a retired General whose gay life had no place for her and who would not welcome her return. It was a derogatory prospect for this youngish widow who had taken a job in order to escape from his vulgar activities to return now empty-handed. Yet it was easier, perhaps, to face a step-father’s selfish anger than to go and tell Colonel Masters her real reason for leaving his service. Her conscience, too, troubled her on another score as thoughts and memories travelled backwards and half-forgotten details emerged.

Those spots of blood, for instance, mentioned by Mrs. O’Reilly, the superstitious Irish cook. She had made it a rule to ignore Mrs. O’Reilly’s silly fairy tales, yet now she recalled suddenly those ridiculous discussions about the laundry list and the foolish remarks that the cook and housemaid had let fall.

“But there ain’t no paint in a doll, I tell you. It’s all sawdust and wax and muck,” from the housemaid. “I know red paint when I sees it, and that ain’t paint, it’s blood.” And from Mrs. O’Reilly later: “Mother o’ God! Another red blob! She’s biting her fingernails — and that’s not my job . . . !”

The red stains on sheets and pillow cases were puzzling certainly, but Madame Jodzka, hearing these remarks by chance as it were, had paid no particular attention to them at the moment. The laundry lists were hardly her affair. These ridiculous servants anyhow . . . ! And yet, now in the train, those spots, be they paint or blood, crept back to trouble her.

Another thing, oddly enough, also troubled her — the ill-defined feeling that she was deserting a man who needed help, help that she could give. It was too vague to put into words. Was it based on his remark that her influence was “good” perhaps? She could not say. It was an intuition, and few intuitions bear analysis. Supporting it, however, was a conviction she had felt since first she entered the service of Colonel Masters, the conviction, namely, that he had a past that frightened him. There was something he had done, something he regretted and was probably ashamed of, something at any rate, for which he feared retribution. A retribution, moreover, he expected; a punishment that would come like a thief in the night and seize him by the throat.

It was against this dreaded vengeance that her influence was “good,” a protective influence possibly that her religion supplied, something on the side of the angels, in any case, that her personality provided.

Her mind worked thus, it seems; and whether a concealed admiration for this sombre and mysterious man, an admiration and protective instinct never admitted even to her inmost self, existed below the surface, hidden yet urgent, remains the secret of her own heart.

It was naturally and according to human nature, at any rate, that after a few weeks of her stepfather’s outrageous behaviour in the house, his cruelty too, she decided to return. She prayed to her gods incessantly, also she found oppressive her sense of neglected duty and failure of self-respect. She returned to the soulless suburban villa. It was understandable; the welcome from Monica was also understandable, the relief and pleasure of Colonel Masters still more so. It was expressed, this latter, in a courteous message only, tactfully worded, as though she had merely left for a brief necessity, for it was some days before she actually saw him to speak to. From cook and housemaid the welcome was voluble and — disquieting. There were no more inexplicable “spots of red,” but there were other unaccountable happenings even more distressing.

“She’s missed you something terrible,” said Mrs. O’Reilly, “though she’s found something else to keep her quiet — if you like to put it that way.” And she made the sign of the cross.

“The doll?” asked Madame Jodzka with a start of shocked horror, forcing herself to come straight to the point and forcing herself also to speak lightly, casually.

“That’s it, Madame. The bleeding doll.”

The governess had heard the strange adjective many times already, but did not know whether to take it figuratively or not. She chose the latter.

“Blood?” she asked in a lowered voice.

The cook’s body gave an odd jerk. “Well,” she explained, “I meant more the way it goes on. Like a thing of flesh and blood, if you get me. And the way she treats it and plays with it,” and her voice, while loud, had a hush of fear in it somewhere. She held her arms before her in a protective, shielding way, as though to ward off aggression.

“Scratches ain’t proof of nothing,’’ interjected the housemaid scornfully.

“You mean,” asked Madame Jodzka gravely, “there’s a question of — of injury — to someone?” She suppressed an involuntary gasp, but paid little attention to the maid’s interruption.

Mrs. O’Reilly seemed to mismanage her breath for a moment.

“It ain’t Miss Monica it’s after,” she announced in a defiant whisper as soon as she recovered herself, “it’s someone else. That’s what I mean. And no man as black as he was ever brought no good into a house, not since I was born.”

“Someone else — ?” repeated Madam Jodzka almost to herself, seizing the vital words.

“You and yer black man!” interjected the housemaid. “Get along with yer! Thank God I ain’t a Christian or anything like that! But I did ‘ear them sort of jerky shuffling footsteps one night, I admit, and the doll did look bigger — swollen like — when I peeked in and looked—”

“Stop it!” cried Mrs. O’Reilly, “for you ain’t saying what’s true or what you reely know.”

She turned to the governess.

“There’s more talk what means nothing about this doll,” she said by way of apology, “than all the fairy tales I was brought up with as a child in Mayo, and I — I wouldn’t be believing anything of it.”

Turning her back contemptuously on the chattering housemaid, she came close to Madame Jodzka.

“There’s no harm coming to Miss Monica, Madame,” she whispered vehemently, “you can be quite sure about her. Any trouble there may be is for someone else.” And again she crossed herself.

Madame Jodzka, in the privacy of her room, reflected between her prayers. She felt a deep, a dreadful uneasiness.

A doll! A cheap, tawdry little toy made in factories by the hundred, by the thousand, a manufactured article of commerce for children to play with . . . But . . .

“The way she treats it and plays with it . . .” rang on in her disturbed mind.

A doll! But for the maternal suggestion, a doll was a pathetic, even horrible plaything, yet to watch a child busy with it involved deep reflections, since here the future mother prophesied. The child fondles and caresses her doll with passionate love, cares for it, seeks its welfare, yet stuffs it down into the perambulator, its head and neck twisted, its limbs broken and contorted, leaving it atrociously upside down so that blood and breathing cannot possibly function, while she runs to the window to see if the rain has stopped or the sun has come out. A blind and hideous automatism dictated by the Race, provided nothing of more immediate interest interferes, yet a herd-instinct that overcomes all obstacles, its vitality insuperable. The maternity instinct defies, even denies death. The doll, whether left upside down on the floor with broken teeth and ruined eyes, or lovingly arranged to be overlaid in the night, squashed, tortured, mutilated, survives all cruelties and disasters, and asserts finally its immortal qualities. It is unkillable. It is beyond death.

A child with her doll, reflected Madame Jodzka, is an epitome of nature’s remorseless and unconquerable passion, of her dominant purpose — the survival of the race…

Such thoughts, influenced perhaps by her bitter subconscious grievance against nature for depriving her of a child of her own, were unable to hold that level for long; they soon dropped back to the concrete case that perplexed and frightened her — Monica and her flaxen haired, sightless, idiotic doll. In the middle of her prayers, falling asleep incontinently, she did not even dream of it, and she woke refreshed and vigorous, facing the fact that sooner or later, sooner probably, she would have to speak to her employer.

She watched and listened. She watched Monica; she watched the doll. All seemed as normal as in a thousand other homes. Her mind reviewed the position, and where mind and superstition clashed, the former held its own easily. During her evening off she enjoyed the local cinema, leaving the heated building with the conviction that coloured fantasy benumbed the faculties, and that ordinary life was in itself prosaic. Yet before she had covered the half-mile to the house, her deep, accountable uneasiness returned with over-mastering power.

Mrs. O’Reilly had seen Monica to bed for her, and it was Mrs. O’Reilly who let her in. Her face was like the dead.

“It’s been talking,” whispered the cook, even before she closed the door. She was white about the gills.

“Talking! Who’s been talking? What do you mean?”

Mrs. O’Reilly closed the door softly. “Both,” she stated with dramatic emphasis, then sat down and wiped her face. She looked distraught with fear.

Madame took command, if only a command based on dreadful insecurity.

“Both?” she repeated, in a voice deliberately loud so as to counteract the other’s whisper. “What are you talking about?”

“They’ve both been talking — together,” stated the cook.

The governess kept silent for a moment, fighting to deny a shrinking heart.

“You’ve heard them talking together, you mean?” she asked presently in a shaking voice that tried to be ordinary.

Mrs. O’Reilly nodded, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Her nerves were, obviously, in rags. “I thought you’d never come back,” she whimpered. “I could hardly stay in the house.

Madame looked intently into her frightened eyes.

“You heard . . . ?” she asked quietly.

“I listened at the door. There were two voices. Different voices.” Madame Jodzka did not insist or cross-examine, as though acute fear helped her to a greater wisdom.

“You mean, Mrs. O’Reilly,” she said in flat, quiet tones, “that you heard Miss Monica talking to her doll as she always does, and herself inventing the doll’s answers in a changed voice? Isn’t that what you mean you heard?”

But Mrs. O’Reilly was not to be shaken. By way of answer she crossed herself and shook her head.

She spoke in a low whisper. “Come up now and listen with me, Madame, and judge for yourself.”

Thus, soon after midnight, and Monica long since asleep, these two, the cook and governess in a suburban villa, took up their places in the dark corridor outside a child’s bedroom door. It was a quiet windless night; Colonel Masters, whom they both feared, doubtless long since gone to his room in another corner of the ungainly villa. It must have been a long dreary wait before sounds in the child’s bedroom first became audible — the low quiet sound of voices talking audibly — two voices. A hushed, secretive, unpleasant sound in the room where Monica slept peacefully with her beloved doll beside her. Yet two voices assuredly, it was.

Both women sat erect, both crossed themselves involuntarily, exchanging glances. Both were bewildered, terrified. Both sat aghast.

What lay in Mrs. O’Reilly’s superstitious mind, only the gods of “ould Oireland” can tell, but what the Polish woman’s contained was clear as a bell: it was not two voices talking, it was only one. Her ear was pressed against the crack in the door. She listened intently; shaking to the bone, she listened. Voices in sleep-talking, she remembered, changed oddly.

“The child’s talking to herself in sleep,” she whispered firmly, “and that’s all it is, Mrs. O’Reilly. She’s just talking in her sleep,” she repeated with emphasis to the woman crowding against her shoulder as though in need of support. “Can’t you hear it,” she added loudly, half angrily, “isn’t it the same voice always? Listen carefully and you’ll see I’m right.”

She listened herself more closely than before.

“Listen! Hark . . . !” she repeated in a breathless whisper, concentrating her mind upon the curious sound, “isn’t that the same voice — answering itself?”

Yet, as she listened, another sound disturbed her concentration, and this time it seemed a sound behind her — a faint, rustling, shuffling sound rather like footsteps hurrying away on tiptoe. She turned her head sharply and found that she had been whispering to no one. There was no one beside her. She was alone in the darkened corridor. Mrs. O’Reilly was gone. From the well of the house below a voice came up in a smothered cry beneath the darkened stairs: “Mother o’ God and all the Saints . . .” and more besides.

A gasp of surprise and alarm escaped her doubtless at finding herself deserted and alone but in the same instant, exactly as in the story books, came another sound that caught her breath still more aghast — the rattle of a key in the front door below. Colonel Masters, after all, had not yet come in and gone to bed as expected: he was coming in now. Would Mrs. O’Reilly have time to slip across the hall before he caught her? More — and worse — would he come up and peep into Monica’s bedroom on his way up to bed, as he rarely did? Madame Jodzka listened, her nerves in rags. She heard him fling down his coat. He was a man quick in such actions. The stick or umbrella was banged down noisily, hastily. The same instant his step sounded on the stairs. He was coming up. Another minute and he would start into the passage where she crouched against Monica’s door.

He was mounting rapidly, two stairs at a time.

She, too, was quick in action and decision. She thought in a flash. To be caught crouching outside the door was ludicrous but to be caught inside the door would be natural and explicable. She acted at once.

With a palpitating heart, she opened the bedroom door and stepped inside. A second later she heard Colonel Masters’ tread as he stumped along the corridor up to bed. He passed the door. He went on. She heard this with intense relief.

Now, inside the room, the door closed behind her, she saw the picture clearly.

Monica, sound asleep, was playing with her beloved doll, but in her sleep. She was indubitably in deep slumber. Her fingers, however, were roughing the doll this way and that, as though some dream perplexed her. The child was mumbling in her sleep, though no words were distinguishable. Muffled sighs and groans issued from her lips. Yet another sound there certainly was, though it could not have issued from the child’s mouth. Whence, then, did it come?

Madame Jodzka paused, holding her breath, her heart panting. She watched and listened intently. She heard squeaks and grunts, but a moment’s examination convinced her whence these noises came. They did not come from Monica’s lips. They issued indubitably from the doll she clutched and twisted in her dream. The joints, as Monica twisted them, emitted these odd sounds, as though the sawdust in knees and elbows wheezed and squeaked against the unnatural rubbing. Monica obviously was wholly unconscious of these noises. As the doll’s neck screwed round, the material — wax, thread, sawdust — produced this curious grating sound that was almost like syllables of a word or words.

Madame Jodzka stared and listened. She felt icy cold. Seeking for a natural explanation she found none. Prayer and terror raced in her helter-skelter. Her skin began to sweat.

Then suddenly Monica, her expression peaceful and composed, turned over in her sleep, and the dreadful doll, released from the dream-clutch, fell to one side on the bed and lay apparently lifeless and inert. In which moment, to Madame Jodzka’s unbelieving yet horrified ears, it continued to squeak and utter. It went on mouthing by itself. Worse than that, the next instant it stood abruptly upright, rising on its twisted legs. It started moving. It began to move, walking crookedly, across the counterpane. Its glassy, sightless eyes seemed to look straight at her. It presented an inhuman and appalling picture, a picture of the utterly incredible. With a queer, hoppity motion of its broken legs and joints, it came fumbling and tumbling across the rough unevenness of the slippery counterpane towards her. Its appearance was deliberate and aggressive. The sounds, as of syllables, came with it — strange, meaningless syllables that yet managed to convey anger. It stumbled towards her like a living thing.

Once again, this effect of a mere child’s toy, aping the life of some awful monstrosity with purpose and passion in its hideous tiny outline, brought collapse to the plucky Polish governess. The rush of blood without control drained her heart, and a moment of unconsciousness supervened so that everything, as it were, turned black.

This time, however, the moment of dark unconsciousness passed instantly: it came and went, almost like a moment of forgetfulness in passion. Passionate it certainly was, for the reaction came upon her like a storm. With recovered consciousness a sudden rage rushed into her woman heart — perhaps a coward’s rage, an exaggerated fury against her own weakness? It rushed, in any case, to help her. She staggered, caught her breath, clutched violently at the cupboard next her, and — recovered her self-control. A fury of resentment blazed through her, fury against this utterly incredible exhibition of a wax doll walking and squawking as though it were something intelligently alive that could utter syllables. Syllables, she felt convinced, in a language she did not know.

If the monstrous can paralyse, it also can affront. The sight and sound of this cheap factory toy behaving with a will and heart of its own stung her into an act of violence that became imperative. For it was more than she could stand. Irresistibly, she rushed forward. She hurled herself against it, her only available weapon the high-heeled shoe her foot kicked loose on the instant, determined to smash down the frightful apparition into fragments and annihilate it. Hysterical, no doubt, she was at the moment, and yet logical: the godless horror must be blotted out of visible existence. This one thing obsessed her — to destroy beyond all possibility of survival. It must be smashed into fragments, into dust.

They stood close, face to face, the glassy eyes staring into her own, her hand held high for the destruction she craved — but the hand did not fall. A stinging pain, sharp as a serpent’s bite, darted suddenly through her fingers, wrist and arm, her grip was broken, the shoe spun sideways across the room, and in the flickering light of the candle, it seemed to her, the whole room quivered. Paralysed and helpless, she stood utterly aghast. What gods or saints could come to aid her? None. Her own will alone could help her. Some effort, at any rate, she made, trembling, on the edge of collapse: “My God!” she heard her half-whispering, strangled voice cry out. “It is not true! You are a lie! My God denies you! I call upon my God . . . !”

Whereupon, to her added horror, the dreadful little doll, waving a broken arm, squawked back at her, as though in definite answer, the strange disjointed syllables she could not understand, syllables as though in another tongue. The same instant it collapsed abruptly on the counterpane like a toy balloon that had been pricked. It shrank down in a mutilated mess before her eyes, while Monica — added touch of horror — stirred uneasily in her sleep, turning over and stretching out her hands as though feeling blindly for something that she missed. And this sight of the innocently sleeping child fumbling instinctively towards an incomprehensibly evil and dangerous something that attracted her proved again too strong for the Polish woman to control.

The blackness intervened a second time.

It was undoubtedly a blur in memory that followed, emotion and superstition proving too much for common-sense to deal with. She just remembers violent, unreasoned action on her part before she came back to clearer consciousness in her own room, praying volubly on her knees against her own bed. The interval of transit down the corridor and upstairs remained blank. Yet her shoe was with her, clutched tightly in her hand. And she remembered also having clutched an inert, waxen doll with frantic fingers, clutched and crushed and crumpled its awful little frame till the sawdust came spurting from its broken joints and its tiny body was mutilated beyond recognition, if not annihilated . . . then stuffing it down ruthlessly on a table far out of Monica’s reach, Monica lying peacefully in deepest sleep. She remembered that. She also saw the clear picture of the small monster lying upside down, grossly untidy, an obscene attitude in the disorder of its flimsy dress and exposed limbs, lying motionless, its eyes crookedly aglint, motionless, yet alive still, alive moreover with intense and malignant purpose. No duration or intensity of prayer could obliterate the picture.

She knew now that a plain, face to face talk with her employer was essential; her conscience, her peace of mind, her sanity, her sense of duty all demanded this. Deliberately, and she was sure, rightly, she had never once risked a word with the child herself. Danger lay that way, the danger of emphasizing something in the child’s mind that was best left ignored. But with Colonel Masters, who paid her for her services, believed in her integrity, trusted her, with him there must be an immediate explanation.

An interview was absurdly difficult; in the first place because he loathed and avoided such occasions; secondly because he was so exceedingly impervious to approach, being so rarely even visible at all. At night he came home late, in the mornings no one dared go near him. He expected the little household, once its routine established, to run itself. The only inmate who dared beard him was Mrs. O’Reilly, who periodically, once every six months, walked straight into his study, gave notice, received an addition to her wages, and then left him alone for another six months.

Madame Jodzka, knowing his habits, waylaid him in the hall next morning while Monica was lying down before lunch, as usual. He was on his way out and she had been watching from the upper landing. She had hardly set eyes on him since her return from Warsaw. His lean, upright figure, his dark, emotionless face, she thought magnificent. He was the perfect expression of the soldier. Her heart fluttered as she raced downstairs. Her carefully prepared sentences, however, evaporated when he stopped and looked at her, a jumble of wild words pouring from her in confused English instead. He cut her rigmarole short, though he listened politely enough at first.

“I’m so glad you were able to come back to us, as I told you. Monica missed you very much—”

“She has something now she plays with—”

“The very thing,” he interrupted. “No doubt the kind of toy she needs… Your excellent judgment… Please tell me if there’s anything else you think…” and he half turned as though to move away.

“But I didn’t get it. It’s a horrible — horrible—”

Colonel Masters uttered one of his rare laughs. “Of course, all children’s toys are horrible, but if she’s pleased with it… I haven’t seen it, I’m no judge… If you can buy something better—” and he shrugged his shoulders.

“I didn’t buy it,” she cried desperately. “It was brought. It makes sounds by itself — syllables. I’ve seen it move — move itself. It’s a doll.”

He turned from the front door which he had just reached as though he had been shot; the skin held a sudden pallor beneath the flush and something contradicted the blazing eyes, something seemed to shrink.

“A doll,” he repeated in a very quiet voice. “You said — a doll?”

But his eyes and face disconcerted her, so that she merely gave a fumbling account of a parcel that had been brought. His question about a parcel he had ordered strictly to be destroyed added to her confusion.

“Wasn’t it?” he asked in a rasping whisper, as though a disobeyed order seemed incredible.

“It was thrown away, I believe,” she prevaricated, unable to meet his eyes, anxious to protect the cook as well. “I think Monica — perhaps found it.” She despised her lack of courage, but his intensity scattered her wits; she was conscious, moreover, of a strange desire not to give him pain, as though his safety and happiness, not Monica’s, were at stake. “It — talks! — as well as moves,” she cried desperately, forcing herself at last to look at him.

Colonel Masters seemed to stiffen; his breath caught oddly.

“You say Monica has it? Plays with it? You’ve seen movement and heard sounds like syllables?” He asked the questions in a low voice, almost as though talking to himself. You’ve — listened?” he whispered.

Unable to find convincing words, she bowed her head, while some terror in him came across to her like a blast of icy wind. The man was afraid in his heart. Instead, however, of some explosive reply by way of blame or criticism, he spoke quietly, even calmly: “You did right to come and tell me this — quite right,” adding then in so low a tone that she barely caught the ominous words, “for I have been expecting something of the sort . . . sooner or later . . . it was bound to come…” the voice dying away into the handkerchief he put to his face.

And abruptly then, as though aware of an appeal for sympathy, an emotional reaction swept her fear away. Stepping closer, she looked her employer straight in the eyes.

“See the child for yourself,” she said with sudden firmness. “Come and listen with me. Come into the bedroom.”

She saw him stagger. For a moment he said nothing.

“Who,” he then asked, the low voice unsteady, “who brought that parcel?”

“A man, I believe.”

There was a pause that seemed like minutes before his next question.

“White,” he asked, “or — black?”

“Dark,” she told him, “very dark.”

He was shaking like a leaf, the skin of his face blanched; he leaned against the door, wilted, limp; unless she somehow took command there threatened a collapse she did not wish to witness. “You shall come with me tonight,” she said firmly, “and we shall listen together. Wait till I return now. I go for brandy,” and a minute later as she came back breathless and watched him gulp down half a tumbler full, she knew that she had done right in telling him. His obedience proved it, though it seemed strange that cowardice should borrow from its like to produce courage.

“Tonight,” she repeated, “tonight after your bridge. We meet in the corridor outside the bedroom. I shall be there. At half-past twelve.”

He pulled himself into an upright position, staring at her fixedly, making a movement of his head, half bow, half nod.

“Twelve-thirty,” he muttered, “in the passage outside the bedroom door,” and using his stick heavily rather, he opened the door and passed out into the drive. She watched him go, aware that her fear had changed to pity, aware also that she watched the stumbling gait of a man too conscience-stricken to know a moments peace, too frightened even to think of God.

Madame Jodzka kept the appointment; she had eaten no supper, but had stayed in her room — praying. She had first put Monica to bed.

“My doll,” the child pleaded, good as gold, after being tucked up. “I must have my doll or else I’ll never get to sleep,” and Madame Jodzka had brought it with reluctant fingers, placing it on the night-table beside the bed.

“She’ll sleep quite comfortably here, Monica, darling. Why not leave her outside the sheets?” It had been carefully mended, she noticed, patched together with pins and stitches.

The child grabbed at it. “I want her in bed beside me, close against me,” she said with a happy smile. “We tell each other stories. If she’s too far away I can’t hear what she says.” And she seized it with a cuddling pleasure that made the woman’s heart turn cold.

“Of course, darling — if it helps you to fall asleep quickly, you shall have it,” and Monica did not see the trembling fingers, nor notice the horror in the face and voice. Indeed, hardly was the doll against her cheek on the pillow, her fingers half stroking the flaxen hair and pink wax cheeks, than her eyes closed, a sigh of deep content breathed out, and Monica was asleep.

Madame Jodzka, fearful of looking behind her, tiptoed to the door, and left the room. In the passage she wiped a cold sweat from her forehead. “God bless her and protect her,” her heart murmured, “and may God forgive me if I’ve sinned.”

She kept the appointment; she knew Colonel Masters would keep it, too.

It had been a long wait from eight o’clock till after midnight. With great determination she had kept away from the bedroom door, fearful lest she might hear a sound that would necessitate action on her part: she went to her room and stayed there. But praying exhausted itself, for it both excited and betrayed her. If her God could help, a brief request alone was needed. To go on praying for help hour by hour was not only an insult to her deity, but it also wore her out physically. She stopped, therefore, and read some pages of a Polish saint which she did not understand. Later she fell into a state of horrified nervous drowse. In due course, she slept…

A noise awoke her — steps going softly past her door. A glance at her watch showed eleven o’clock. The steps, though stealthy, were familiar. Mrs. O’Reilly was waddling up to bed. The sounds died away. Madame Jodzka, a trifle ashamed, though she hardly knew why, returned to her Polish saint, yet determined to keep her ears open. Then slept again…

What woke her a second time she could not tell. She was startled. She listened. The night was unpleasantly still, the house quiet as the grave. No casual traffic passed. No wind stirred the gloomy evergreens in the drive. The world outside was silent. And then, as she saw by her watch that it was some minutes after midnight, a sharp click became audible that acted like a pistol shot to her keyed-up nerves. It was the front door closing softly. Steps followed across the hall below, then up the stairs, unsteadily a little. Colonel Masters had come in. He was coming up slowly, unwillingly she felt, to keep the appointment. Madame Jodzka started from her chair, looked in the glass, mumbled a quick confused prayer, and opened her door into the dark passage.

She stiffened, physically and mentally. “Now, he’ll hear and perhaps see — for himself,” she thought. “And God help him!”

She marched along the passage and reached the door of Monica’s bedroom, listening with such intentness that she seemed to hear only the confused running murmur of her own blood. Having reached the appointed spot, she stood stock still and waited while his steps approached. A moment later his bulk blocked the passage, shown up as a dark shadow by the light in the hall below. This bulk came nearer, came right up to her. She believed she said “Good evening,” and that he mumbled something about “I said I’d come . . . damned nonsense…” or words to that effect, whereupon the couple stood side by side in the darkened silence of the corridor, remote from the rest of the house, and waited without further words. They stood shoulder to shoulder outside the door of Monica’s bedroom. Her heart was knocking against her side.

She heard his breathing, there came a whiff of spirits, of stale tobacco, smoke, his outline seemed to shift against the wall unsteadily, he moved his feet; and a sudden, extraordinary wave of emotion swept over her, half of protective maternal yearning, half almost of sexual desire, so that for a passing instant she burned to take him in her arms and kiss him savagely, and at the same time shield him from some appalling danger his blunt ignorance laid him open to. With revulsion, pity, and a sense of sin and passion, she acknowledged this odd sudden weakness in herself, but the face of the Warsaw priest flashed across her befuddled mind the next instant. There was evil in the air. This meant the Devil. She felt herself trembling dreadfully, shaking in her shoes, losing her balance, her whole body leaning over, but leaning in his direction. A moment more and she must have fallen towards him, dropped into his arms.

A sound broke the silence, and she drew up just in time. It came from beyond the door, from inside the bedroom.

“Hark!” she whispered, her hand upon his arm, and while he made no movement, spoke no word, she saw his head and shoulders bend down toward the panel of the closed door. There was a noise, upon the other side, there were noises, Monica’s voice distinctly recognizable, another slighter, shriller sound accompanying it, breaking in upon it, answering it. Two voices.

“Listen,” she repeated in a whisper scarcely audible, and felt is warm hand grip her own so fiercely that it hurt her.

No words were distinguishable at first, just these odd broken sounds of two separate voices in that dark corridor of the silent house — the voice of a child, and the other a strange faint, hardly a human sound, while yet a voice.

“Que le bon Dieu—” she began, then faltered, breath failing her, for she saw Colonel Masters stoop down suddenly and do the last thing that would have occurred to her as likely: he put his eye to the key-hole and kept it there steadily for the best part of a minute, his hand still gripping her own firmly. He knelt on one knee to keep his balance.

The sounds had ceased, no movement now stirred inside the room. The night-light, she knew, would show him clearly the pillows of the bed, Monica’s head, the doll in her arms. Colonel Masters must see clearly anything there was to see, and he yet gave no sign that he saw anything. She experienced a queer sensation for a few seconds — almost as though she had perhaps imagined everything and proved herself a consummate, idiotic, hysterical fool. For a few seconds this ghastly thought flashed over her, the odd silence emphasizing it. Had she been after all, just a crazy lunatic? Had her senses all deceived her? Why should he see nothing, make no sign? Why had the voice, the voices, ceased? Not a murmer of any sort was audible in the room.

Then Colonel Masters, suddenly releasing his grip of her hand, shuffled on to both feet and stood up straight, while in the same instant she herself stiffened, trying to prepare for the angry scorn, the contemptuous abuse he was about to pour upon her. Protecting herself against this attack, expecting it, she was the more amazed at what she did hear:

“I saw it,” came in a strangled whisper. “I saw it walk!”

She stood paralysed.

“It’s watching me,” he added, scarcely audible. “Me!”

The revulsion of feeling at first left her speechless; it was the sheer terror in his strangled whisper that restored a measure of self possession to her. Yet it was he who found words first, awful whispered words, words spoken to himself, it seemed, more than to her.

“It’s what I’ve always feared — I knew it must come some day — yet not like this. Not this way.”

Then immediately the voice in the room became audible, and it was a sweet and gentle voice, sincere and natural, with feeling in it — Monica’s childish voice, pleading:

“Don’t go, don’t leave me! Come back into bed — please.”

An incomprehensible sound followed, as though by way of answer. There were syllables in that faint, creaky tone Madame Jodzka recognized, but syllables she could not comprehend. They seemed to enter her like points of ice. She froze. And facing her stood the motionless, inanimate figure, though the darkness hid its expression. The solid bulk of him, his outline, then leaned over towards her, his lips so close to her own face that, as he spoke, she felt the breath upon her cheek.

“Buth laga…” she heard him repeat the syllables to himself again and again. “Revenge . . . in Hindustani . . . !” He drew a long, anguished breath. The sounds sank into her like drops of poison, the syllables she had heard several times already but had not understood. At last she understood their meaning. Revenge!

“I must go in, go in,” he was mumbling to himself. “I must go in and face it.” Her intuition was justified: the danger was not for Monica but for himself. Her sudden protective maternal instinct found its explanation too. The lethal power concentrated in that hideous puppet was aimed at him. He began to edge impetuously past her.

“No!’’ she cried, “I’ll go! Let me go in!” pushing him aside with all her strength. But his hand was already on the knob and the next instant the door was open and he was inside the room. On the threshold they stood still a second side by side, though she was slightly behind, struggling to shove past him and stand protectively in front.

She stared across his shoulder, her eyes so wide open that the intense strain to note everything at once threatened to defeat its own end. Sight, none-the-less, worked normally; she saw all there was to see, and that was — nothing; nothing unusual, that is, nothing abnormal, nothing terrifying, so that this second time the threat of anti-climax rose to her mind. Had she worked herself up to this peak of horror merely to behold Monica lying sound asleep in a safe and quiet room? The flickering night-light revealed no more than a child in natural slumber without a toy of any sort against her pillow. There stood the glass of water beside the flowers in their saucer, the picture-book on the sill of the window within reach, the window opened a little at the bottom, and there also lay the calm face of Monica with eyes tight shut upon the pillow. Her breathing was deep and regular, no sign of disquiet anywhere, no hint of disturbance that might have accompanied that pleading sentence of two minutes ago, except that the bed-clothes were perhaps somewhat tumbled. The counterpane humped itself in folds toward the foot of the bed, she noticed, as though Monica, finding it too warm, had tossed it away in sleep. No more than that.

In that first moment Colonel Masters and the governess took in this whole pretty picture complete. The room was so still that the child’s breathing was distinctly audible. Their eyes roved all over. Nothing was anywhere in movement. Yet the same instant Madame Jodzka became aware that there was movement. Something stirred. The report came, perhaps, through her skin, for no sense announced it. It was undeniable; in that still, silent room there was movement somewhere, and with that unreported movement there was danger.

Certain, rightly or wrongly, that she herself was safe, also that the quietly sleeping child was safe, she was equally certain that Colonel Masters was the one in danger. She knew that in her very bones.

“Wait here by the door,” she said almost peremptorily, as she felt him pushing past her further into the quiet room. “You saw it watching you. It’s somewhere — Take care!”

She clutched at him, but be was already beyond her.

“Damned nonsense,” he muttered and strode forward.

Never before in her whole life had she admired a man more than in this instant when she saw him moving towards what she knew to be physical and spiritual danger — never before, and never again, was such a hideous and dreadful sight to be repeatable in a woman’s life. Pity and horror drowned her in a sea of passionate, futile longing. A man going to meet his fate, it flashed over her, was something none, without power to help, should witness. No human power can stay the courses of the stars.

Her eyes rested, as it were by chance, on the crumpled ridges and hollows of the discarded counterpane. These lay by the foot of the bed in shadow, confused a little in their contours and their masses. Had Monica not moved, they must have lain thus till morning. But Monica did move. At this particular moment she turned over in her sleep. She stretched her little legs before settling down in the new position, and this stretching squeezed and twisted the contours of the heavy counterpane at the foot of the bed. The tiny landscape altered thus a fraction, its immediate detail shifted. And an outline — a very small outline — emerged. Hitherto, it had lain concealed among the shadows. It emerged now with disconcerting rapidity, as though a spring released it. Out of its nest of darkness it seemed almost to leap forward. Fast it came, supernaturally fast, its velocity actually shocking, for a shock came with it. It was exceedingly small, it was exceedingly dreadful, its head erect and venomous and the movement of its legs and arms, as of its bitter, glittering eyes, aping humanity. Malignant evil, personified and aggressive, shaped itself in this otherwise ridiculous outline.

It was the doll.

Racing with incredible security across the slippery surface of the crumpled silk counterpane, it dived and climbed and shot forward with an appearance of complete control and deliberate purpose. That it had a definite aim was overwhelmingly obvious. Its fixed, glassy eyes were concentrated upon a point beyond and behind the terrified governess, the point precisely where Colonel Masters, her employer, stood against her shoulder.

A frantic, half-protective movement on her part, seemed lost in the air…

She turned instinctively, putting an arm about his shoulders, which he instantly flung off.

“Let the bloody thing come,” he cried. “I’ll deal with it . . . !” He thrust her violently aside.

The doll came at him. The hinges of its diminutive broken arms and its jointed legs emitted a thin, creaking sound as it came darting — the syllables Madame Jodzka had already heard more than once. Syllables she had heard without understanding— “buth laga” — but syllables now packed with awful meaning: Revenge.

The sounds hissed and squeaked, yet clear as a bell as the beast advanced at this miraculous speed.

Before Colonel Masters could move an inch backwards or forwards in self protection, before he could command himself to any sort of action, or contrive the smallest measure of self defense, it was off the bed and at him. It settled. Savagely, its little jaws of tiny make-believe were bitten deep into Colonel Masters’ throat, fastened tightly.

In a flash this happened, in a flash it was over. In Madame Jodzka’s memory it remained like the impression of a lightning flash, simultaneously etched in black and white. It had happened in the present as though it had no past. It came and was gone again. Her faculties, as after a vivid lightning flash, were momentarily paralysed, without past or present. She had witnessed these awful things, but had not realized them. It was this lack of realization that struck her motionless and dumb.

Colonel Masters, on the other hand, stood beside her quietly as though nothing unusual had happened, wholly master of himself, calm, collected. At the moment of attack no sound had left his lips, there had been no gesture even of defence. Whatever had come, he had

“Hadn’t you better put that counterpane straight a bit… Perhaps?”

Common sense, as always, enables the gas of hysteria to escape. Madame Jodzka gasped, but she obeyed. Automatically she moved across to do his bidding, yet aware, even as she thus moved, that he flicked something from his neck, as though a wasp, a mosquito, or some poisonous insect, had tried to sting him. She remembered no more than that, for he, in his calmness, had contributed nothing else.

Fumbling with the folds of slippery counterpane she tried to straighten out, she was startled to find that Monica was sitting up in bed, awake.

“Oh, Doska — you here!” the child exclaimed innocently, straight out of sleep and using the affectionate nickname. “And Daddy, too! Oh, my goodness . . . !’’

“Sm-smoothing your bed, darling,” she stammered, hardly aware of what she said. “You ought to be asleep. I just looked in to see…” She mumbled a few other automatic words.

“And Daddy with you!” repeated the child excitedly, sleep still about her, wondering what it all meant. “Ooh! Ooh!” holding out her arms.

This brief exchange of spoken words, though it takes a minute to describe, occurred simultaneously with the action — perhaps ten seconds all told, for while the governess fumbled with the counterpane, Colonel Masters was in the act of brushing something from his neck. Nothing else was audible, nothing but his quick gasp and sudden intake of breath: but something else — she swears it on her Warsaw priest — was visible. Madame Jodzka maintains by all her gods she saw this other thing.

In moments of paralysing stress it is not the senses that act less speedily nor with less precision; their action, on the contrary, is intensified and speeded up: what takes longer is the registration of their reports. The numbed brain causes the apparent delay; realization is slowed down.

Madame Jodzka thus only realized a fraction of a second later what her eyes had indubitably witnessed; a dark-skinned arm slanting in through the open window by the bed and snatching at a small object that lay on the floor after dropping from Colonel Masters’ throat, then withdrawing again at lightning speed into the darkness of the night outside.

No one but herself, apparently, had seen this — it was almost supernaturally swift.

“And now you’ll be asleep again in two minutes, lucky Monica,” Colonel Masters was whispering over the bed. “I just peeped in to see that you were all right . . .” His voice was thin, dreadfully soundless.

Madame Jodzka, against the door, frozen, terrified, looked on and listened.

“Are you quite well, Daddy? Sure? I had a dream, but it’s gone now.”

“Splendid. Never better in my life. But better still if I saw you sound asleep. Come now, I’ll blow out this silly night-light, for that’s what woke you up, I’ll be bound.”

He blew it out, he and the child blew it out together, the latter with sleepy laughter that then hushed. And Colonel Masters tiptoed to join Madame Jodzka at the door. “A lot of damned fuss about nothing,” she heard him muttering in that voice, and then, as they closed the door and stood a moment in the darkened passage, he did suddenly an unexpected thing. He took the Polish woman in his arms, held her fiercely to him for a second, kissed her vehemently, and flung her away.

“Bless you and thank you,” he said in a low, angry voice. “You did your best. You made a great fight. But I got what I deserved. I’ve been waiting years for it.” And he was off down the stairs to his own quarters. Half way down he stopped and looked up to where she stood against the rails. “Tell the doctor,” he whispered hoarsely, “that I took a sleeping draught — an overdose.” And he was gone.

And this was, roughly, what she did tell the doctor next morning when a hurried telephone summons brought him to the bed whereon a dead man lay with a swollen, blackened tongue. She told the same tale at the inquest too and an emptied bottle of a powerful sleeping draught supported her…

And Monica, too young to realize grief beyond its trumpery meaning of a selfishly felt loss, never once — oddly enough — referred to the absence of her lovely doll that had comforted so many hours, proved such an intimate companion day and night in a life that held no other playmates. It seemed forgotten, expunged utterly from her memory, as though it had never existed at all. She stared blankly, stupidly, when a doll was mentioned: she preferred her worn-out teddy-bears. The slate of memory, in this particular case, was wiped clean.

“They’re so warm and comfy,” she described her bears, “and they cuddle without tickling. Besides,” she added innocently, “they don’t squeak and try to slip away…”

Thus in the suburbs, where great spaces between the lamps go dead at night, where the moist wind comes whispering through the mournful branches of the silver pines, where nothing happens and people cry “Let’s go to town!” there are occasional stirrings among the dead dry bones that hide behind villa walls…

THE END