Local Color

This house, as I have said, stood almost opposite the Gaunt House. What went on within it no outsider ever knew, for no outsider ever crossed its threshold – to this good day no outsider ever has known; but every day its door opened to let out its draped and veiled mistress, setting forth on her business, which was to follow Major Foxmaster; and every night, when that day’s business was done, it opened again to let her back in. In time the town grew used to the sight; it never grew tired of talking about it.

As for Major Foxmaster, he would dodge about the country no more; for, in the long run or the short, dodging availed him nothing. The years behind him proved that. He would bide where he was until death, which was the supreme handicapper, named the winner of this, the last heat of their strange match. He would outlive her and be free; else she would outlive him, to see her long-famished hatred sated. And he wondered whether, if he died first, she, in her black mourning, would dog his dead body to the grave as she had dogged his living steps! It was a morbid fancy and, perhaps because it was morbid, it found a lodgment in the Major’s mind, recurring to him again and again. The existence that he – and she – had willed him to lead was not conducive to an entirely healthy mental aspect.

Whatever his thoughts were, he betrayed none of them to the rest of creation. Exactly as before she appeared, so he continued to deport himself. His behaviour showed no change. He took his walks, drove his bay filly, played his cards at the Kenilworth. He carried his head as high as ever; he snapped his military heels down as firmly as ever on the stones of the street and the bricks of the sidewalk. With a pair of eyes that were as inscrutable and yet as clear as two bits of hard blue ice, and with a face like a square of chipped flint, he went his daily and his hourly way, outwardly oblivious to the stares of acquaintance and stranger alike, seeming not to know that ten paces in his rear, or twelve, came drifting this erect veiled shape which was clad all in dead black – as black as sin, as black as his sin had been, as black as her misery had been – the incarnate embodiment of her shame and his.

In fair weather as in foul, in blistering midsummer and blizzardy midwinter, daytime and nighttime, she followed him. If she lost the trail she waited in all patience until he reappeared. She seemed tireless and hungerless. Wet or cold or heat seemed not to affect her. In her grim pursuit of him her spirit rose triumphant above the calls of the flesh. At midnight, after a long vigil outside the Kenilworth, she moved behind him with the same swift, noiseless, floating motion that marked her in the morning. And so it went with these two.

If he did not notice her presence, neither did he seek ever to elude her. If he never spoke to her, neither did he speak of her to others. As for the woman, she never spoke to any one at all. Outside the walls of the house where she lived her voice was never heard and her face was never seen. Only one person ever dared speak to the Major of her.

Old Sherwan himself did not dare. Of all human beings he stood nearest to the Major. If the Major might be said to have an intimate Judge Sherwan was the one. Moreover, he, Sherwan, was by way of being a he-gossip, which of all the created breeds of gossips is the most persistent and the most consistent, the most prying and, therefore, the most dangerous. He yearned for the smell of impropriety as a drug-fiend yearns for his drug. His was a brackish old soul and from its soured depths he dearly loved to spew up the bilge waters of scandal. The pumps leading to that fouled hold were always in good order. Give him the inch of fact and he would guarantee to provide the ell of surmise and innuendo. Grown too old to sin actually he craved to sin vicariously – to balance always on the edge of indiscretion, since he no longer plunged into it bodily.

Wherefore, after the woman came and the first shock of her coming wore off, he made a point of being seen in Major Foxmaster’s company as much as possible. The share of notoriety the association brought him was dear to his withered, slack-valved old heart. In his manner and his look, in the very way he cocked his hat and waggled his stiffened legs, you discerned that he wished to divide with his friend the responsibility for the presence of his friend’s trailing shadow.

But, for all this and all that, he did not dare ever to speak of her to Major Foxmaster. Joel Bosler dared to, though, he being one of the meagre-minded breed proverbially reputed to go rushing in where angels fear to tread. This Joel Bosler was a policeman; his beat included the Gaunt House corner and both sides of the street upon which the Gaunt House fronted. He was a kindly enough creature; a long slab-pole of a man, with the face of an old buck sheep. For some reason – which he least of all could fathom – Joel Bosler had contracted a vague sort of attachment for the Major. They met occasionally on the sidewalk outside the hotel; and, since the Major always responded with iced and ceremonial politeness to the policeman’s salute, it may have been that this, to Bosler’s limited mind, was proof of a friendly understanding existing between them.

One day, about a month after the woman moved into the old Gresham place, Bosler, having first scratched his head assiduously for a space of minutes to stimulate the thought, was moved to invade the Gaunt House lobby and send his name upstairs to the Major’s rooms. A negro bell boy brought word back that the Major would be very glad to see Policeman Bosler, and Policeman Bosler accordingly went up. The Major was in the sitting room of his suite of rooms on the second floor. Bosler, bowing, came in and shut the door behind him with an elaborate carefulness.

“Good morning, sir?” said Major Foxmaster formally, with the note of polite interrogation in his tone; and then, as Bosler stood fingering his blue cap and shuffling his feet: “Well, sir; well?”

“Major Foxmaster, suh,” began Bosler, “I – er – I kinder wanted to say somethin’ to you privatelike.”

He halted lamely. Before the daunting focus of those frigid blue eyes his speech, carefully rehearsed beforehand, was slipping away from him.

“Except for ourselves, there is no one within hearing,” stated the Major. “Kindly proceed – if you will be so good.”

“Well, suh,” faltered Bosler, fumbling his words out – “well, suh, Major Foxmaster, it’s this-a-way: I’ve been – been a-thinkin’ it over; and if this here lady – this woman that wears black all the time – the one that’s moved into the old Gresham place acrost the street – if she pesters you any by follerin’ you round every wheres, the way she does – I thought I’d be very glad – if you said the word – to warn her to quit it, else I’d – I’d have to take steps agin her by law or somethin’. And so – and so – ” He stopped altogether. He had been chilled at the moment of his entrance; now he was frozen mentally to below the zero point.

The Major spoke, and his syllables battered on Joel Bosler’s unprotected head like hailstones.

“Have you ever observed that the person to whom you refer has spoken to me?” he demanded.

“No, suh; but – ”

“Or ever molested me in any way?”

“Oh, no, suh; but, you see – ”

“Have you ever observed that I spoke to her?”

“No, suh; but – ”

“Have you any reason for believing, of your own knowledge, that she knows me?”

“Well, suh, I – ”

“Or that I am acquainted with her?”

“Well, I – ”

“Then, sir, since she is minding her own business and I am minding my own business, I suggest that you take pattern by such examples and cultivate the habit of minding your own business. Kindly do not address me hereafter upon this subject – or any other. I find your conversation singularly unattractive. Good day, sir!”

Policeman Joel Bosler had no recollection afterward of having withdrawn himself. He presently found himself downstairs in the lobby, and, a little later on, outside the hotel, upon his regular beat. How he got there or how long it took him to get there he could not, with any degree of certainty, say.

Presently, though, he saw the Major issue forth from the Gaunt House door. And as the Major’s foot descended upon the first step of the flight leading down to the street level, the gate of the old Gresham place across the way clicked, and here came the cloaked, veiled woman, floating noiselessly across the road to follow him.

Joel Bosler, still in a state of intellectual numbness, watched them as they passed down the street – the Major striding on ahead, the gliding woman ten paces behind him. He had witnessed the same sight perhaps thirty times before. In days to come he was to witness it hundreds of times more; but always he watched it and never grew weary of watching it. Nor did the eyes of the rest of the town weary of watching it.

And so the thing went on.

The years went by. Five of them went by. Ten of them went by. A new generation was growing up, coming into manhood and womanhood. An old generation was thinning out and dying off. The Gaunt House was no longer the best hotel in the city. It was the second best and, before very long, was to be the third best. Tall business houses – six, seven, eight, nine stories tall – shouldered up close to it; and they dwarfed it, making it seem squatty and insignificant, whereas before it had loomed massive and monument-high, dominating the corner and the rest of the block. Once the cobbled road before its doors had clinked to the heel-taps of smart carriage horses. Now it thundered clamorously beneath the broad iron-shod tires of dray and vans.

The old Gresham place, diagonally across the way, looked much as it had always looked; indeed, there was not much about it, exteriorly speaking, to undergo change. Maybe the green mould in the damp, slick walk at its northern side was a little bit greener and a little bit thicker; and maybe, in summer, the promenading snails were a trifle more numerous there. The iron gate, set in the middle breadth of the iron fence, lolled inward upon one rusted hinge, after the fashion of a broken wing. The close-drawn shades in the two lower front windows had faded from a tarnished silver colour to a dulled leaden colour; and one of them – the one on the right-hand side – had pulled away and awry from its fastenings above and was looped down, hanging at a skewed angle behind the dirtied and crusted panes, as though one of the coins had slipped halfway off the dead man’s eyelids. People persistently called it the old Gresham place, naming it so when they pointed it out to strangers and told them the tale of its veiled chatelaine and her earthly mission.

For, you know, Major Foxmaster’s shadow still followed after Major Foxmaster. Long before, these two had been accepted as verities; it might now be said of them that they had become institutional – inevitable fixtures, with orbits permanent and assured in the swing of community life. In the presence of this pair some took a degree of pride, bragging when away from home that they came from the town where so strange a sight might forever be seen, and when at home bringing visitors and chance acquaintances to this corner of the town in order to show it to these others.

Along with this morbid pride in a living tragedy ran a sort of undercurrent of sympathy for its actors. From the beginning there had been pity for the woman who, the better everlastingly to parade her shame, hid her face eternally from the light of day; and in possibly a more limited circle there had been abundant pity for the man as well. Settling down to watch the issue out, the town, from the outset, had respected the unbendable, unbreakable fortitude of the man, and respected, also, the indomitable persistency of the woman.

For a variety of very self-evident reasons no one had ever or would ever meddle in the personal affairs of Major Foxmaster. For reasons that were equally good, though perhaps not so easy to define in words, none meddled with her either. Street gamins feared to jeer her as she passed, without knowing exactly why they feared.

In these ten years the breaks in the strange relationship had been few and short. Once a year, on an average, the Major made short trips back to Virginia, presumably upon business pertaining to his estate and his investments. Such times the woman was not seen abroad. Once, in ’79, for a week, and once again, just following the great blizzard of ’81, she was missed for a few days; and people wondered whether she was ailing or housebound, or what. For those days the Major walked without his shadow. Then the swathed figure reappeared, tracking him about as before.

Time undeniably was working its changed with Major Foxmaster, as with his surroundings. He must be about sixty now; but, seeing him for the first time, you might have been pardoned for setting him down as a man of seventy or thereabouts – he looked it. His shoulders, which formerly he carried squared back so splendidly, were beginning to fold in upon the casing of his ribs. His hair used to be black, shot with white hairs; it was now white, shot with a few black hairs. His back had had a hollow in it; there was a curve in it yet, but the curve was outward instead of inward. When a man’s figure develops convex lines where there used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing shaggier, was as much of a mask as it had ever been.

What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who followed him. Within the flapping shapelessness of her disguise her figure showed as straight and supple as in the beginning, and her noiseless step was as nimble and quick as ever it had been. And that was a mighty strange thing too. It was as though her shroud of wrappings, which kept the sunshine and the wind off her, kept off age too.

This very same thought came at length into Major Foxmaster’s head. It took lodgment there and sprouted, sending out roots into all the odd corners of his mind. It is not for me to tell why or how he got this notion, or exactly when. It is for me merely to narrate as briefly as may be the progress of the obsession and its consequences.

Another five years passed, and then three, making eight more on top of the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty. Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the story of Major Foxmaster’s shadow and bear it forward into yet another generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house winked with one dead eye and stared with the other.

The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the trotting track wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more – he had a palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he adhered to the old habits. He took his daily constitutionals – sometimes alone – except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind him – oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down.

His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow places, the spittle would accumulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes – still the faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain – gave no betrayal of the racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The delusion was a mania now – a besetting mania, feeding on silence and isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.

By years – so he reasoned it out with himself in every waking hour – by years, she who bided within that shuttered house over the way was his age, or near it. By rights, her draped form should be as shrunken and warped as his own. By rights, the face behind that thick black veil should be as old as his, and bleached, moreover, to a corpsey paleness. Yet the furtive glances he stole over his shoulder told him that the figure behind him moved as alertly erect as ever it had; that its movements had the same sure and silent swiftness.

So that, after a while, Major Foxmaster began to think things that no entirely sane man has any business thinking. He began to say to himself that now he had solved the secret which, all these years, had been kept from his ken. A curse had been put upon him – that was it; that must be it! Behind that veil was no face old and sunken and wasted as his was, but, instead, a young, plump face, with luminous grey eyes set in it, and a sweet, full mouth, and about it wavings of lustrous, rich brown hair – the face of the girl he once loved as she looked in the days before he quit loving her.

He held up his own hands before his watery eyes. They were trembly, wrinkled hands, gnarled in their knuckles, corded on their backs. They were the colour of scorched leather – the texture of it too. But hers must be the plump little white hands he remembered, with rosy-pink palms and bright, pointed nails. Before a long mirror in his dressing room he studied himself – studied his bowed back and his hunching shoulders and his shaky shanks – and all. Her figure, inside its flapping black draperies, was straight as an arrow; her head poised itself firmly upright on her shoulders. That much at least he knew; so if that much were true, why was not the rest of it true too?

It was not fair! According to his lights he had fought out the fight with only such weapons as Nature and his own will gave him; but the Supreme Handicapper had stacked the cards against him. He was bound to lose the long, long race. He could not last much longer. He could feel age tugging at every flabby muscle; infirmity was forever fingering his tissues, seeking the most vulnerable spot at which to strike in at him.

He would lie down and die. And not until then – not until the last rattle of breath had scaped out of his collapsing windpipe; not until she, still triumphantly active and alert and youthful, still cloaked and gloved and hooded, had followed his sapped, empty shell to the graveyard – would she surrender and shrivel into her rightful semblance, growing old and feeble in an hour or in a day. It was not fair – this conjury business! From the beginning he never had a chance to win. All the days of his manhood he had walked with a living nightmare. Why, in dying, should he be doomed to point the moral of a living ghost tale?

First he told himself it could not be true; that it was a hideous imagination born of his broodings. This was the fag-end of the nineteenth century in which he lived, when supernatural events did not happen. Then he told himself it must be true – the testimony before his eyes proved the fact of what he could not see. Then something happened which, as far as Major Foxmaster was concerned, settled the issue.

On a winter night, after rough weather, the Major came feebly out of the Kenilworth Club, groping his way and muttering to himself. This habit of muttering to himself was one that had come on him just lately.

There were patches of ice upon the sidewalk, and the wind, like a lazy housewife, had dusted the snow back into corners and under projections. Between the porticoes of the doorway his foot slipped on one of these little ice patches. He threw out his gloved left hand to catch at some support and his fingers closed on her black-clad arm, where she had drawn herself into the shelter and shadow of the door-arch to await his appearance.

For the first time in nearly fifty years he touched her.

He jerked his hand back and fled away at a staggering, crippling run; and, as he ran to hide himself within his rooms, in panting gulps he blasphemed the name of his Maker; for to his feel her flesh, through the thick cloth sleeve on her arm, had seemed to him to be as firm and plump as it had felt when he was twenty-two and she was twenty. The evidence was complete.

All through the next day he kept himself behind closed doors, wrestling with his torments; but in the evening old Sherwan came for him and he dressed himself. They started out together, a doddering, tottering twain; suggesting, when they halted for a moment to rest at the foot of the office stairs, a pair of grey locust husks from which age, spider-fashion, had sucked out all the rich juices of health and strength; suggesting, when they went on again, a pair of crawling sick beetles which, though sick, still could crawl a little.

Side by side they crossed the tarnished, shabby old lobby, with its clumpings of dingy grey pillars and its red-plush sofa seats, and, in the centre, its rotunda mounting to the roof, up floor by floor, in spiral rings that in perspective graduated smaller and smaller, like an inverted funnel; and side by side they issued forth from beneath the morguelike copings of the outer door and descended the Gaunt House steps – Major Foxmaster feeling ahead of him with his cane, and Judge Sherwan patting his left breast with his open hand – just as Policeman Joel Bosler, now dead and gone, had seen them do upon many another such evening as this. Promptly and inevitably befell another thing, then, which likewise the late deceased Bosler had witnessed times without number.

From the darker space beyond the corner lamp-post, out into the gassy yellow circle of radiance, appeared the straight, gliding black form, advancing on silent, padded feet and without visible effort, relentlessly to follow after them wheresoever they might choose to go.

So, then, at sight of the familiar apparition the icy shell of half a century thawed and broke to bits and was washed away in a freshet of agony; and to his one friend, for one moment, Major Foxmaster bared his wrung and tortured soul. He threw down his cane and threw up his arms.

“Sherwan,” he shrieked out, “I can’t stand it any longer – I can’t stand it! It’s killing me! I must look at the face – I must know!”

With a sudden frenzied energy he darted at the cloaked shape. It hesitated, shrinking back from his onward rush as though daunted; but he fixed his clutching fingers in the crêpe veil and tore it in twisted rags from the front of its wearer, and the light shone full on the face revealed beneath the close black hood of the bonnet. … He gave one blubbery, slobbered, hideous yell and fell flat at the base of the lamp-post.

Old Sherwan saw the face too. Swollen and strengthened with senile rage, he seized the figure by both its arms and shook it.

“You hussy! You wench! You Jezebel! You she-devil!” he howled at the top of his cracked voice, and rocked his prisoner to and fro. “What’s this? What does this mean, you hell spawn?”

A dart of pain nipped at his diseased heart then, and closed his throat. For a moment, without words, they struggled together. With a heave of her supple arms she broke his hold. She shoved him off from her and reared back on her heels, breathing hard – a full-blooded negress, with chalky popeyes and thick, purplish lips that curled away in a wide snarl from the white teeth, and a skin that was blacker than sin.