Schwartz: A History | Page 2

night, when the long day's work at last was over, he hung his intrusive head over my shoulder and stared into the moderate glass of much-watered whisky which kept a final pipe in company.
He had grown already into an unutterable bore, and when he insisted upon passing the night with me I could--but for the obvious inutility of the thing--have lost my temper fairly. He took his place at the bed-head, and kept it till I fell asleep. He was there when I awoke in the night, and probably because the darkness, the quiet, and the sense of solitude were favourable to him he began to grow clearer. Quite suddenly, and with a momentary but genuine thrill of fear, I made a discovery about him. He carried an axe. This weapon was edged like a razor, but was unusually solid and weighty at the back. From the moment at which I first became aware of it to that happy hour when my phantom bore departed and took his weapon with him, there was never a conscious second in which the axe was not in act to fall, and yet it never fell. It was always going to strike and never struck.
'You cannot be supposed to know it, my phantom nuisance,' I said, being ready to seek any means by which I might discredit the dreadful rapidity with which he seemed to be growing real;' you cannot be supposed to know it, but one of these days you will furnish excellent copy. As a literary man's companion you are not quite without your uses. One of these days I will haunt a rascal with you, and he shall sweat and shiver at you, as I decline to sweat and shiver. You observe I take you gaily. I am very much inclined to think that if I took you any other way that axe might fall, and sever something which might be difficult to mend. So long as you choose to stay, I mean to make a study of you.'
Most happily I was able to adhere to that resolve, but I solemnly declare it made him no less dreadful. Sometimes I tried to ignore him, but that was a sheer impossibility. Very often I flouted him and jeered at him, mocked him with his own unreality, and dared him to carry out his constant threat and strike. But all day and every day, and in all the many sleepless watches of my nights, he kept me company, and every hour the threatened blow of the razor-edged axe seemed likelier to fall. But at last--thank Heaven--the work was done, I touched the two or three hundred pounds which paid for it, and I was free to take a holiday.
We had grown too accustomed to each other to part on a sudden, even then. I never saw him, for he was always behind me (and even when I stood before a mirror he was invisible but there), but he was no longer featureless. His eyes shone through a black vizard with one unwinking, glittering, ceaseless threat. He wore a slashed doublet with long hose reaching to the upper thigh, and he had a rosette on each instep. I can see quite clearly now the peculiar dull cold gleam the razor-edged axe wore as he stood in some shadowed place behind me, and the brighter gleam it had in daylight in the streets.
When I had borne with him until I felt that I could bear with him no longer, I took him, being back in town again, to a London physician of some eminence. The doctor took him somewhat gravely, insisted upon absolute mental rest, prescribed a tonic, laid down certain rules about diet, certain restrictions upon wine and tobacco, and ordered immediate change of scene.
To begin with I went to Antwerp, thence to Brussels, and thence, by the merest chance in the world, to Janenne, a little village in the Belgian Ardennes, at no great distance from the French frontier. I had no idea of staying there, and on the surface of things there was no reason why I should have prolonged my stay beyond a day or two. People visit Janenne in the summer time, and suppose themselves to have exhausted its limited attractions in four-and-twenty hours. There is nothing at first sight to keep the stranger longer, but if he will only stay for a week he will inevitably want to stay for a fortnight, and if once he has stayed for a fortnight, his business is done, and he is in love with Janenne for the rest of his natural life. Rural quiet has made her home in Janenne, and contentment dwells with her, sleepy-eyed.
Even in the first week of December, the russet and amber-coloured leaves still cling to the branches