We continue with our third horror collection from Librivox. This week it's "Phantom" by Arnold Bennett.
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Horror Story Collection 003- Phantom(080624)
[MUSIC PLAYING] This episode is brought to you by Experian. Are you paying for subscriptions you don't use, but can't find the time or energy to cancel them? Experian could cancel unwanted subscriptions for you, saving you an average of $270 per year, and plenty of time. Download the Experian app. Results will vary. Not all subscriptions are eligible. Savings are not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. It's time for Tuesday Terror here on the Mutual Audio Network. Be sure to leave the lights on while you listen. The following audio drama is rated PG-13, suggesting that children under the age of 13 should listen accompanied with an adult. This is a Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. Read and recorded by William Kuhn, December 2006. Phantom by Arnold Bennett. One, the heart of the five towns, that undulating patch of England covered with mean streets and dominated by tall smoking chimneys, once or derived your cups and saucers and plates, some of your coal, and a portion of your iron, is handbridge, a burrow larger and busier than its four sisters, and even more grimy and commonplace than they. And the heart of handbridge is probably the offices of the Five Towns Banking Company, where the last trace of magic and romance is beaten out of human existence. And the meaning of life is expressed in balances, deposits, percentages, and overdrafts, especially overdrafts. In a fine suite of rooms on the first floor of the bank building resides Mr. Lionel Woolley, the manager, with his wife May, and their children. Yet Mr. Woolley was once brought into contact with the things which cannot be defined and assessed. Once he stood face to face with some strange, visible resultant of those secret forces that lie beyond the human kin. And more over, the adventure affected the whole of his domestic life. The wonder and the pathos of the story lie in the fact that nature, prodigal though she is known to be, should have wasted the rare and beautiful visitation on just Mr. Woolley. Mr. Woolley was bathed in romance of the most singular kind, and the precious fluid ran off him like water off a duck's back. 2. Ten years ago, on a Thursday afternoon in July, Lionel Woolley, as he walked up through the new park at Bursley to his celibate rooms in Park Terrace, was making addition sums out of various items connected with the institution of marriage. Bursley is next door to handbridge, and Lionel happened to be the cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which appealed to him, and he was unable to decide between them by any mathematical process. Suddenly, from a glazed shelter near the empty bandstand, there emerged in front of him one of the delectable creatures who had excited his fancy. Mae Lawton was 28, an orphan, and a school mistress. She too had celibate rooms in Park Terrace, and it was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had made her acquaintance six months previously. She was not pretty, but she was tall, straight, well-dressed, well-educated, and not lacking an experience, and she had a little money of her own. "Well, Mr. Woolley," she said easily, stopping for him as she raised her sunshade, "how satisfied you look!" "It's the side of you," he replied, without a moment's hesitation. He had a fine, assured way with women. He need not of envy to cure at accustomed to sewing meetings. And Mae Lawton belonged to the type of girl whose demeanor always challenges the masculine in a man. Gazing at her, Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things. The pecancy of her snub nose, the brightness of her smile, it once defiant and wistful, the lingering softness of her gloved hand, and the extraordinary charm of her sunshade, which matched her dress and formed a sort of canopy and frame for that intelligent, tantalizing face. He remembered that of late he and she had grown very intimate, and it came upon him with a shock, as though he had just opened a telegram which said so, that Mae, and not the other girl, was his destined mate. And he thought of her fortune, tiny but nevertheless useful, and how clever she was, and how inexplicably different from the rest of her sex, and how she would adorn his house and set him off, and help him in his career. He heard himself saying negligently to friends, "My wife speaks French like a native. Of course my wife has travelled a great deal. My wife has thoroughly studied the management of children. Now my wife does understand the art of dress. I put my wife's bit of money into so-and-so. In short, Lionel was as near being in love as his character permitted." And while he walked by Mae's side past the bowling greens at the summit of the hill, she lightly quizzing the raw newness of the park and its apurtanences. He wondered, he honestly wondered, that he could ever have hesitated between Mae Lawton and the other. Her superiority was too obvious. She was a woman of the world. She, in a flash he knew that he would propose to her that very afternoon. And when he had suggested a stroll towards Morthorne, and she had deliciously agreed, he was conscious of a tumultuous uplifting and splendid carelessness of spirits. "Imagine me bringing it to a climax today," he reflected, profoundly pleased with himself. "Ah, well, it will be settled once for all." He admired his own decision. He was quite struck by it. "I shall call her Mae before I leave her," he thought, gazing at her, and discovering how well the name suited her with its significance as of alertness, geniality, and half-mocking coiness. "So, school is closed," he said, and added humorously, "broken up is the technical term I believe." "Yes," she answered, "and I had walked out into the park to meditate seriously upon the question of my holiday." She caught his eye in a net of bright glances, and romance was in the air. They had crossed the couple of smoke-soiled fields, and struck into the old handbridge road just below the abandoned tall house with its broad ease. "And whether do your meditation's point," he demanded playfully. "My meditation's point to Switzerland," she said. "I have friends in Lausanne." The reference to foreign climbs impressed him. "Would that I could go to Switzerland too," he exclaimed, and privately. "Now for it, I'm about to begin." "Why?" she questioned with elaborate simplicity. At the moment, as they were passing the tall house, the other girl appeared surprisingly from round the corner of the tall house, where the lane from toft and joins the high road. The second creature was smaller than Miss Lawton, less assertive, less intelligent, perhaps, but much more beautiful. Everyone halted, and everyone blushed. "May," the interruptor at length stammered, "may," responded Miss Lawton, lamely. The other girl was named May, too, May Dean, the child of the well-known Magellica manufacturer, who lived with his sons and daughters in a solitary and ancient house at toft end. Lionel Woolley said nothing until they had all shaken hands. His famous way with women seemed to have deserted him. And then he actually stated that he had forgotten an appointment and must depart. He had gone before the girls could move. When they were alone, the two May's fronted each other, confused, hostile, almost homicidal. "I hope I didn't spoil it, t-t-t-t," said May Dean, stiffly and sharply, in a manner quite foreign to her soft and yielding nature. The school mistress, abandoning herself to an inexplicable but overwhelming impulse, took breath for a proud lie. "No," she answered, "but if you had come three minutes earlier," she smiled calmly. "Oh," murmured May Dean, after a pause. Three. That evening May Dean returned home at half past nine. She had been with her two brothers to a lawn tennis party at Hillport, and she told her father, who was reading the Staffordshire signal in as a customed solitude, that the boys were staying later for cards, but that she had declined to stay because she felt tired. She kissed the old widower goodnight and said that she should go to bed at once. But before retiring she visited the housekeeper in the kitchen in order to discuss certain household matters. Jim's early breakfast, the proper method of washing Herbert's new flannels, Herbert would be very angry if they were shrunk, and the dog biscuits for Carlo. These questions settled. She went to her room, drew the blind, lighted some candles, and sat down near the window. She was twenty-two, and she had about her that strange and charming, none-like mystery, which often comes to a woman who lives alone and unguessed at among male relatives. Her room was her bower. No one saved the servants and herself ever entered it. After Dean and Jim and Bertie might glance carelessly through the open door and passing along the corridor. But had they chanced in idle curiosity to enter, the room would have struck them as unfamiliar, and they might perhaps have exclaimed with momentary interest, "So this is May's room." And some hint that May was more than a daughter and sister, a woman, withdrawn, secret, disturbing, living her own inner life side by side with the household life. They'd have penetrated their obtuse paternal and fraternal masculinity. Her beautiful face, the nose and mouth were perfect, and at either extremity of the upper lip grew a soft down. Her dark hair, her quiet voice, and her gentle acquiescence, diversified by occasional outbursts of sarcasm, appealed to them and won them. But they accepted her as something of course, as something which went without saying. They adored her and did not know that they adored her. May took off her hat, stuck the pins into it again, and threw it on the bed, whose white and green counterpane hung down nearly to the floor on either side. Then she lay back in the chair and, pulling away the blind, glanced through the window. The moon, rather dim behind the furnace lights of red-cow ironworks, was rising over morthorn. May dropped the blind with a weary gesture, and turned within the room, examining its contents as if she had not seen them before. The wardrobe, the chest of drawers which was also a dressing-table, the wash-stand, the dwarf bookcase with its store of Edna Lyles, Elizabeth Gaskells, Thackeries, Charlotte Youngs, Charlotte Prontes, Atamis Hardy or so, and some old schoolbooks. She looked at the pictures, including a sampler worked by a deceased aunt. At the loud-ticking Swiss clock on the mantelpiece, at the higgly-piggly photographs there, at the new X-menster carpet, the piece of linoleum in front of the wash-stand, and the bad joining of the wallpaper to the left of the door. She missed none of the details which she knew so well, with such long monotonous intimacy. And sighed. Then she got up from the chair, and, opening a small drawer in the chest of drawers, put her hand familiarly to the back and drew forth a photograph. She carried the photograph to the light of the candles on the mantelpiece, and gazed at it attentively, puckering her brows. It was a portrait of Lionel Woolley. Heaven knows by what subterfuge or lucky accident she had obtained it, for Lionel certainly had not given it to her. She loved Lionel. She had loved him for five years with a love-silent, blind, intense, irrational, and too elemental to be concealed. Everyone knew of May's passion. Many women admired her taste. A few were shocked and puzzled by it. All the men of her acquaintance either pitied or despised her for it. Her father said nothing. Her brothers were less cautious, and summed up their opinion of Lionel in the Kurt, scornful assertion that he showed a tendency to cheat at tennis. But May would never hear ill of him. He was a god to her, and she could not hide her worship. For more than a year, until lately, she had been almost sure of him, and then came a faint, vague rumour concerning Lionel and May Lawton, a rumour which she had refused to take seriously. The encounter of that afternoon, and Miss Lawton's triumphant remark, had dazed her. For seven hours she had existed in a kind of semi-conscious delirium in which she could perceive nothing but the fatal fact emerging more clearly every moment from the welter of her thoughts, that she had lost Lionel. Lionel had proposed to May Lawton, had been accepted just before she surprised them together, and Lionel, with a man's excusable cowardice, had left his betrothed to announce the engagement. She tore up the photograph, put the fragments in the grate, and set a light to them. Her father stepped sounded on the stairs, he hesitated, and knocked sharply at her door. "What's burning, May?" "It's all right, father," she answered calmly. "I'm only burning some papers in the fire grate." "Well, so you don't burn the house down?" He passed on. And she found a sheet of notepaper, and wrote on it in pencil, using the mantelpiece for a desk. "Dear home, good night, good-bye," she cogitated and wrote further, "Forgive me, May." She put the message in an envelope and wrote on the envelope, Jim, and placed it prominently in front of the clock. But after she had looked at it for a minute, she wrote, "Father," above Jim, and then Herbert, below. There were noises in the hall. The boys had returned earlier than she expected. As they went along the corridor and caught a glimpse of her light under the door, Jim cried gaily. "Now, then, out with that light, a little thing like you ought to be asleep hours since." She listened for the bang of their door, and then, very hurriedly, she removed her pink rock, and put on an old black one, which was rather tight in the waist. And she donned her hat, securing it carefully with both pins, extinguished the candles, and crept quietly downstairs, and so by the back door into the garden. Carlo, the retriever, came half way out of his kennel and greeted her in the moonlight with a yawn. She patted his head and ran stealthily up the garden through the gate and up the waist-green land toward the crown of the hill. 4. The top of Toft End is the highest land in the five towns, and from it may be clearly seen all the lurid evidences of manufacture which sweep across the borders of the sky on northeast, west, and south. Northeast words lie the morlins, and far off manifold the metropolis of the morlins, as it is called. On this night the furnaces of red cow-iron works in the hollow to the east were in full blast, their fluctuating yellow light illuminated clearly the grass of the fields above Dean's house. And the regular roar of their breathing reached that solitary spot like the distant rumour of some Leviathan beast angrily fuming. Further away to the southwest, the cauldron bar-iron works reproduce the same phenomena, and round the whole horizon near and far, except to the northeast, the lesser fires of labour leapt and flickered and glinted in their mists of smoke, burning ceaselessly, as they burned every night and every day at all seasons of all years. The town of Bursley slept in the deep valley to the west, and vast hand-bridge in the shallower depression to the south, like two sleepers accustomed to rest quietly amid great disturbances. The beacons of their town halls and churches kept watch, and the whole scene was dominated by the placidity of the moon, which had now risen clear of the red cow furnace clouds and was passing upwards through tracts of stars. Into this scene, climbing up from the direction of Manifold, came Lionel Woolley, nearly at midnight, having walked some eighteen miles in a vain effort to re-establish his self-satisfaction by a process of reasoning and ingenious excuses. Lionel felt that in the brief episode of the afternoon he had scarcely behaved with dignity. In other words he was fully and painfully aware that he must have looked a fool, a coward, an ass, a contemptible and pitiful person, in the eyes of at least one girl, if not two. He did not like this. No man would have liked it, and to lie on all the memory of an undignified act was a cute torture. Why had he biden the girls adieu and departed? Why had he in fact run away? What precisely would May Lawton think of him? How could he explain his conduct to her and to himself? And had that worshiping, affectionate thing made Dean take a note of his confusion, of the confusion of him who was never confused, who was equal to every occasion and every emergency? These were some of the questions which harried him and declined to be settled. He had walked to Manifold and had tea at the row-buck and walked back, and still the questions were harrying. And as he came over the hill by the field-path and described the lone house of the deans in the light of the red calph furnaces and of the moon, the worship of May Dean seemed suddenly very precious to him, and he could not bear to think that any stupidity of his could have impaired it. And he saw May Dean walking slowly across the field, close to an abandoned pit-shaft, whose low protecting circular wall of brick was crumbling to ruin on the side nearest to him. She stopped, appeared to gaze at him intently, turned, and began to approach him. And he too moved by a mysterious impulse which he did not pause to examine, swerved, and quickened his step in order to lessen the distance between them. He did not at first even feel surprised that she should be wandering solitary on the hill at that hour. Presently she stood still, while he continued to move forward. It was as if she drew him, and soon in the pale moonlight and the wavering light of the furnaces he could decipher all the details of her face, and he saw that she was smiling fondly, invitingly, admiringly, lustrously. With the old undiminished worship and affection. And he perceived a dark discoloration on her right cheek as though she had suffered a blow, but this mark did not long occupy his mind. He thought suddenly of the strong probability that her father would leave a nice little bit of money through each of his three children. And he thought of her beauty, and of her timid fragility in the tight black dress, and of her immense and unquestioning love for him, which would survive all accidents and mishaps. He seemed to sink luxuriously into this grand passion of hers, which he deemed quite natural and proper, as into a soft feather bed. To live secure in an atmosphere of exhaustless worship, to keep a fount of balm and admiration forever in the house, a bubbling spring of passionate appreciation which would be continually available for the refreshment of his self-esteem. To be always sure of an obedience blind and willing, a subservience which no tyranny and no harshness and no whim would rouse into revolt, to sit on a throne with so much beauty kneeling at his feet. And the possession of her beauty would be a source of legitimate pride to him. People would often refer to the beautiful Mrs. Woolley. He felt that in sending May Dean to interrupt his highly emotional conversation with May Lawton, Providence had watched over him and done him a good turn. May Lawton had advantages and striking advantages, but he could not be sure of her. The suspicion that if she married him, she would marry him for her own ends caused him a secret disquiet. And he feared that one day, perhaps one morning at breakfast, she might take it into her intelligent head to mock him, to exercise upon him her gift of irony, and to intimate to him that if he fancied she was his slave, he was deceived. That she sincerely admired him he never for an instant doubted, but, and moreover, the unfortunate episode of the afternoon might have cooled her ardour to the freezing point. He stood now in front of his worshiper, and the notion crossed his mind that in after years he could say to his friends, "I proposed to my wife at midnight under the moon. Not many men have done that." "Good evening!" he ventured to the girl, and he added with bravado. "We've met before today, haven't we?" She made no reply, but her smile was more affectionate, more inviting than ever. "I am glad of this opportunity, very glad," he proceeded. "I've been wanting to. You must know, my dear girl, how I feel." She gave a gesture, charming in its sweet humility, as if to say, "Who am I that I should dare?" and then he proposed to her, asked her to share his life, and all that sort of thing, and when he had finished he thought, "It's done now, anyway." Strange to relate, she offered no immediate reply, but she bent a little towards him, with shining, happy eyes. He had an impulse to seize her in his arms and kiss her, but Prudence suggested that he should defer the right. She turned and began to walk slowly and meditatively towards the pit-shaft. He followed almost at her side but a foot or so behind, waiting for her to speak, and as he waited, expectant, he looked at her profile and reflected how well the name may suited her, with its significances of shyness and dreamy hope, and hidden fire in the modesty of spring. And while he was thus savoring her face, and there were still ten yards from the pit-shaft, she suddenly disappeared from his vision, as it were by a conjuring trick. He had a horrible sensation in his spinal column; he was not the man to mistrust the evidence of his senses, and he knew, therefore, that he had been proposing to a phantom. 5. The next morning, early because of Jim's early breakfast, when Maydine's disappearance became known to the members of the household, Jim had the idea of utilizing Carlo in the search for her. The retriever went straight without a fault to the pit-shaft, and May was discovered alive and unscathed, save for a contusion of the face and a sprain in the wrist. Her suicidal plunge had been arrested at only a few feet from the top of the shaft by a cross-stay of timber upon which she lay prone. There was no reason why the affair should be made public, and it was not. It was suppressed into one of those secrets which embed themselves in the histories of families, and after two or three generations blossom into romantic legends of appropriate circumstantial detail. Lionel Woolley spent a woeful night at his rooms. He did not know what to do, and on the following day May Lawton encountered him again, and proved by her demeanor that the episode of the previous afternoon had caused no estrangement. Lionel vacillated. The sway of the school mistress was almost restored, and it would have been restored fully, and he not been preoccupied by a feverish curiosity. The curiosity to know whether or not Maydine was dead. He felt that she must indeed be dead, and he lived through the day expectant of the news of her sudden decease. Towards night his state of mind was such that he was obliged to call at the deans. May heard him, and insisted upon seeing him; more she insisted on seeing him alone in the breakfast-room, where she reclined, interestingly white, on the sofa. Her father and brothers objected strongly to the interview, but they yielded, afraid that a refusal might induce hysteria and worse things. And when Lionel Woolley came into the room, May, steeped in felicity, related to him the story of her impulsive crime. "I was so happy," she said, "when I knew that Miss Lawton had deceived me, and before he could inquire what she meant," she continued rapidly, "I must have been unconscious, but I felt you were there, and something of me went towards you. And oh, the answer to your question! I heard your question, the real me heard it, but that something could not speak." "My question?" "You asked the question, didn't you?" she faltered, sitting up. He hesitated, and then surrendered himself to her immense love, and sank into it, and forgot May Lawton. "Yes," he said. "The answer is yes; oh, you must have known the answer would be yes. You did know, didn't you?" He nodded, grandly. She sighed with delicious and overwhelming joy. In the ecstasy of the achievement of her desire, the girl gave little thought to the psychic aspect of the possible unique wooing. As for Lionel, he refused to dwell on it even in thought, and so that strange, magic, yearning effluents of a soul into a visible projection and shape was ignored, slurred over, and after ten years of domesticity in the bank premises is gradually being forgotten. He is a man of business, and she, with her fading beauty, her ardent, continuous worship of the idol, her half-dozen small children, the eldest of whom is only eight, and the white window curtains to change every week because of the smuts. Do you suppose that she has time or inclination to ponder upon the theory of the subliminal consciousness and kindred mysteries? End of Phantom by Arnold Bennett You're listening to Tuesday Terrors on the Mutual Audio Network. Tomorrow is our weekly anthology for science fiction and fantasy, as Lothar Tuppen brings you Wednesday Wonders. Subscribe to the full Mutual Audio Network feed for every day of amazing audio, or find the Wednesday Wonders feed in your favorite podcast player. And thank you for listening, everybody! (bright music)
We continue with our third horror collection from Librivox. This week it's "Phantom" by Arnold Bennett.
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