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night he had ever gone
the rounds before his death, for in the morning as he came off guard he
killed himself, and the story went about among the drivers that
sometimes on stable guard in the thick of the night, when you watched
all alone by the lantern (with your three comrades asleep in the straw of
an empty stall), your blood would stop and your skin tauten at the
sound of a loose spur dragging on the far side of the stable, in the dark.
But though many had heard the story, and though some had pretended
to find proof for it, I never knew a man to feel and know it except this
man Frocot on that night. I remember him at the foot of my bed with
his lantern waking me from the rooted sleep of bodily fatigue, standing
there in his dark blue driver's coat and staring with terrible eyes. He had
undoubtedly heard and seen, but whether of himself from within,
imagining, or, as I rather believe, from without and influenced, it is
impossible to say. He was rough and poor, and he came from the Forest
of Ardennes.
The reason I remember him and write of him at this season is not,
however, this particular and dreadful visitation of his, but a folly or a
vision that befell him at this time of the year, now seventeen years ago;
for he had Christmas leave and was on his way from garrison to his
native place, and he was walking the last miles of the wood. It was the
night before Christmas. It was clear, and there was no wind, but the sky
was overcast with level clouds and the evening was very dark. He
started unfed since the first meal of the day; it was dark three hours
before he was up into the high wood. He met no one during all these
miles, and his body and his mind were lonely; he hoped to press on and
be at his father's door before two in the morning or perhaps at one. The
night was so still that he heard no noise in the high wood, not even the
rustling of a leaf or a twig crackling, and no animal ran in the

undergrowth. The moss of the ride was silent under his heavy tread, but
now and then the steel of his side-arm clicked against a metal button of
the great cloak he wore. This sharp sound made him so conscious of
himself that he seemed to fill that forest with his own presence and to
be all that was, there or elsewhere. He was in a mood of unreal and not
holy things. The mood, remaining, changed its aspect, and now he was
so far from alone that all the trunks around him and the glimmers of
sky between bare boughs held each a spirit of its own, and with the
powerful imagination of the unlearned he could have spoken and held
communion with the trees; but it would have an evil communion, for he
felt this mood of his take on a further phase as he went deeper and
deeper still into these forests. He felt about him uneasily the sense of
doom. He was in that exaltation of fancy or dream when faint appeals
are half heard far off, but not by our human ears, and when whatever
attempts to pierce the armour of our mortality appeals to us by wailing
and by despairing sighs. It seemed to him that most unhappy things
passed near him in the air, and that the wood about him was full of
sobbing. Then, again, he felt his own mind within him begin to be
occupied by doubtful troubles worse than these terrors, an anxious
straining for ill news, for bitter and dreadful news, mixed with a
confused certitude that such news had come indeed, disturbed and
haunted him; and all the while about him in that stillness the rushing of
unhappy spirits went like a secret storm. He was clouded with the
mingled emotions of apprehension and of fatal mourning; he attempted
to remember the expectations that had failed him, friends untrue, and
the names of parents dead; but he was now the victim of this strange
night and unable (whether from hunger or fatigue, or from that unique
power of his to discern things beyond the world) to remember his life
or his definite aims at all, or even his own name. He was mixed with
the whole universe about him, and was suffering some loss so grievous
that very soon the gait of his march and his whole being were informed
by a large and final despair.
It was in this great and universal mood (granted to him as a seer,