The Larkspur Cylinders

The cylinder had been left behind by the man who kept the garret before me. He had gone in the night, owing a fortnight, and had taken his boots and his hat and nothing else. Mr. Wetherby let the room to me on the Tuesday, and on the Wednesday I found the cylinder in the drawer of the washstand, wrapped in a flannel that smelled of camphor and tallow. The label was brown with age. It read, in a thin clerkly hand, *Larkspur, No. 1*.

The phonograph stood on the sill, under the window, its brass horn turned to the room. It had come with the garret, like the damp patch over the bed and the sixth stair that cried out when trodden. I had never wound it. I had my bell to wind, and my father's ledger to puzzle over, and on that night I wanted only to sit and not think of the quarter-day.

The fog had been in the Larkspur since four o'clock. It stood against the glass and gave the lamp a yellow ring, and below me the foghorns on the river called to one another, one low, one lower. I slid the cylinder onto the mandrel. I turned the crank eleven times, because I count what I turn. I lowered the stylus.

First came hissing, and then a breath, taken close.

"Forgive me," said a voice. "Please. I have carried it so long."

It was my voice. I do not say it resembled mine. I know my own voice as I know the weight of the rope in my hands: the flat northern vowels, the catch before a hard consonant. I put my fingers to my throat and felt nothing move there. The speaker went on, tender and low, as a man speaks to a sick child.

"I never meant the water to take him. I held his sleeve as long as I could. You must believe that I held it. Say that you forgive me for the drowning, and I will ask for nothing more."

I stood up. The chair went over behind me. I did not set it right.

There was a silence on the cylinder, and in it the sound of a clock, a slow clock with a loose pendulum, such as hangs in the parlour downstairs. Then a second speaker answered, calm, unhurried, and dry as paper.

"I forgive you, Desmond. Of course I do. Sit down now. It is finished."

It was Mr. Reginald Wetherby. I had heard him on the stairs not two hours before, saying that the gas was not to be wasted. He had said nothing to me of water, or of a sleeve, or of forgiveness. I have never drowned any man. I have never stood on a quay at night and watched a hand go under. I have rung the bell of St. Anselm's every Sunday of my life, and the only thing I have ever dropped into the Mire is a hymn-book.

The stylus ran off the end and clicked, and clicked, and clicked.

I did not lift it. I sat down upon the bed with my hands between my knees and listened to the clicking. The lamp began to gutter. The yellow ring shrank on the glass. And the horn, though it was silent, went on saying *sit down now*.

• • •

I found Mr. Wetherby in the passage by the parlour door the next morning, trimming the wick of the hall lamp with a pair of small silver scissors. I had not slept. I had carried the cylinder down in my coat pocket and I held it out to him in my palm, as one holds out a coin to a beggar one does not trust.

"Someone has been at my machine," I said. "There is a voice on this. It is mine. It speaks of a drowning."

He did not look at the cylinder. He looked at my face, and then he smiled, slowly, with the lips only, and set the scissors down upon the shelf beside the barometer.

"You are pale, Mr. Marchbanks. The fog gets into the sleeping-rooms. I have always said so." He took out his watch and opened it. "The quarter-day is the twenty-fifth. Your father's sum stands at forty-one pounds, six shillings, and I am a patient man, but I am not a charitable one. Good morning."

He went into the parlour. The clock with the loose pendulum began its slow knocking behind the door, and I stood in the passage with the cylinder in my hand until the lamp, which he had trimmed, burned smokeless and steady.

The next night there was another on the sill. It lay in the dust beside the window-catch, brown and fine-ribbed, and the window was latched from within. I told myself I would not play it. I played it before the church clock struck eleven.

It was my voice again, and quieter. It said that the sexton, old Pettigrew, would cough three times during the Tuesday matins, and that the third cough would break the Creed. It said that Mr. Wetherby would stop me on the stairs at noon and name forty-three pounds, not forty-one, for the interest. Then it said, *I did not mean him to go under, Reginald. I took hold of his sleeve. It was wet wool, and it came away in my hand.*

On Tuesday Pettigrew coughed three times, and the third broke the Creed. At noon, on the stairs, a hand touched my elbow, and a dry voice said, "Forty-three pounds, Mr. Marchbanks." I did not answer. I went up and found the fourth cylinder waiting.

So it went for seven days. Each night a brown cylinder; each day its prophecy, kept as faithfully as a tide-table. The cooper's dog; the broken rung of the belfry ladder; the very word Wetherby used for my lateness, which was *negligent*. And between the prophecies the drowning grew. It had a quay now, and a lantern, and the name of the Mire's lock-keeper. It had a boy's cap floating. My own tongue spoke of the hand going under with such tenderness that I caught myself, on the sixth night, with my palm laid flat against the horn as against a cheek.

On the seventh night I did not wind the machine. I sat in the dark and waited, and the stylus lowered itself into the wax of its own accord.

• • •

I carried all seven cylinders to Fothergill's door in the crook of my arm, wrapped in my muffler like a litter of something sickly, and knocked with my knee. It was past one in the morning. He opened at once, in his shirtsleeves, with a pen still in his hand, as though he had been expecting me and had not minded the wait.

"Marchbanks," he said, in the low voice he used for everything, even for the weather. "Come in. You look like a man who has been bailing."

His room was the twin of mine, but warmer. He had a rag rug, a kettle on the hob, and on the table, under a square of green baize, a machine of his own with a japanned horn. I set the cylinders down in a row. I told him what was on them. I told it badly, out of order, the lock-keeper before the cap and the cap before the quay, and he listened with his head a little to one side, nodding, and poured me tea I did not drink.

"Play them," I said. "Play any. Tell me whose voice it is."

He played the first. I watched his face while the wax turned, and there was nothing in it but patience. When the drowning began, the tender plea of Desmond Marchbanks asking pardon, he closed his eyes as a man does at a hymn. Then he lifted the stylus and played the fourth, and the sixth, and let the seventh run until the wet sleeve came away in my hand.

"It is you," he said gently. "I will not pretend otherwise. But think, my dear fellow. Who wound the machine? Who set the cylinder to the horn? Wetherby's is an old man's voice, and an old man's voice is an easy thing to dream."

"Pettigrew coughed three times," I said. "The Creed broke."

"Pettigrew coughs three times every Tuesday. So does the Mire, I sometimes think." He smiled, and laid his hand on the baize. "You walk, Desmond. I have heard your boots on the landing at three in the morning, and your talk through the wall, going on and on. The Larkspur has always made its lodgers strange. The man who had your room before you kept a hat-box of teeth. Sleep, and eat something, and leave the machine alone."

I wanted to believe him. I believed him all the way down the passage, with the muffler empty on my arm, for he had kept the cylinders, saying he would listen to them again by daylight and tell me what he made of it. The key turned stiffly in my door. The lamp, when I lit it, burned low and yellow, and I lay on the bed in my coat with the damp of the Mire coming up through the floorboards.

I did not sleep. Toward four I rose to ease my head against the cold of the window, and the lamp swung my shadow across the room, and I saw the phonograph as I had not seen it in nine days. The brass horn did not point to the room. It lay turned against the wall, its mouth pressed to the paper, canted a hand's breadth out of true, as if it had been set there to listen.

Beneath it, on the boards, lay a small grey drift of plaster dust, fine and fresh and unswept.

I knelt. I put my finger in it. It was still faintly damp.

• • •

I took the horn in both hands and pulled. It came away from the paper with a small dry sound, and a crust of plaster fell across my knuckles. Behind it, where the wall should have been solid, there was a hole the width of a florin, and in the hole the dull gleam of a tin tube, wired to a lath with a twist of copper. I put my ear to it. The tube was cold. It breathed up at me the smell of a coal fire and of tobacco gone stale in a pipe, and from far below, very faint, came the tick of a clock I knew. It was the clock on Wetherby's parlour mantel, the one with the cracked enamel face that he wound each Sunday after chapel.

I stayed there on my knees, and I counted the ticks as I have counted the strokes of the great tenor on a feast day, and somewhere past two hundred I understood.

He had been listening. Not for nine days, but for months. Every night that I had lain in this bed and spoken to my father, or to the water, or to nobody, the tube had carried it down to him, and he had sat in his chair and written it out. I thought of the mornings I had woken with my tongue dry and my throat raw, and had put it down to the damp. I thought of the plea on the cylinder, tender and wheedling: forgive me, Desmond, say you forgive me, say you remember. I knew at last who had spoken it, because I heard it again in my head with the soft vowels laid bare. It was the gentle, patient, reasonable manner of the man who had just sent me to bed with a kind word and my own muffler empty on my arm. Alec Fothergill had begged me to remember. He had begged so sweetly that I had almost obliged him.

I did not weep, and I did not shout. I remember being surprised at how orderly my hands were. I rose, and I took off my boots and set them side by side under the bed, as a man does who means to be back. Then I put my hand into the breast of my coat and drew out the bell-rope knife.

It had a short blade, bone-handled, worn thin as a leaf on the whetstone. I had cut a thousand ends of rope with it, and I had never once held it for any other purpose. I held it now. I turned it to the window and the grey began to lie along the edge, and I said aloud, quite quietly, "I have drowned nobody," and the tube in the wall took the words and carried them down.

I unlocked the door and opened it on its stiff hinge, a half-inch at a time. The stair ran down into the dark, and I went down it in my stockings, one hand on the wall, the knife held against my thigh. The sixth tread cried out and I stood on it, and stood, until the house settled. Below me, under the parlour door, lay a long thin line of lamplight.

He was awake. At four in the morning, in a house of sleepers, Reginald Wetherby was awake, and waiting, and I heard him turn a page.

• • •

I pushed the door, and it went inward without a sound, as if it had been oiled for the purpose.

The parlour was warm. A fire of sea-coal burned low in the grate, and the lamp stood on the table at his elbow, turned up high and trimmed clean. Reginald Wetherby sat in the horsehair chair with a ledger open across his knee and a cup of tea going cold on the arm. He did not rise. He did not so much as lift the hand that held the page. He looked at the knife, and then at my stockinged feet, and then he sighed, as a man sighs at a clock that has been wrongly wound.

"You will want to put that down, Mr. Marchbanks, before you cut yourself on your own conclusions. Sit, if you like. The chair by the dresser is sound."

I did not sit. I said, "You have been listening to me sleep."

"Eleven months," said Wetherby. "You talk a great deal, for a quiet man. Your father's debt, the bell, a boat, the black water off the Mire stairs. Mr. Fothergill has a gift for arrangement. He took what you gave us and made it speak in order."

"There was no drowning."

"There was a confession." He turned a leaf. "Your father's note is a curious instrument, Mr. Marchbanks. It may be called in from a ringer of St. Anselm's only if that ringer has stood convicted, or confessed, of a crime. I did not draw it. I merely hold it. A man must be patient, and then he must be helpful."

"I never signed anything."

"You signed on the fourteenth, in the vestry, a receipt for the new sally. You were very tired. The paper beneath it was a fair copy of what you had dictated to us, in your own voice, every night since Michaelmas. Mr. Fothergill read it into the horn and you answered, and I wrote it down." He closed the ledger on his finger. "It was sold to the magistrate yesterday afternoon. He is an early man. He will be here at dawn."

I think I raised the knife. I know that Wetherby watched it rise, and that he did not move. The fire ticked in the grate. I understood, with perfect orderly clearness, that he was not afraid, because there was nothing left in me that he needed to fear.

I ran. The sixth tread cried out and I did not stop for it. I reached the landing, and the garret door stood open as I had left it. I had one foot across the sill when I heard the stair behind me take a slow, deliberate weight, and the door came away from my hand and shut. The key turned. I heard it go round twice, and then withdrawn, and then the steady descent of a man who has no reason to hurry.

I sat on the bed. The window had gone the colour of old pewter, and the fog pressed its face to the glass. I laid the knife in my lap, blade toward my knees. On the sill the phonograph clicked. The stylus lifted from its rest, swung out, and dropped by itself into the wax, and my own voice, tender and ruined, began once more to say how sorry I was for the drowning.