I say that for fear that
you should.”

I found a match when we arrived at the club-house, and Roderick
strolled away to the goal of his observations. Half an hour afterwards
I found him watching with criminally ecstatic joy the soaring drives
that, in the teeth of the great wind, were arrested and blown back into
the unholiest bunker in all the world or the low clever balls that
never rose to the height of the shored-up cliff of sand. The couple
in front of my partner and me were sarcastic dogs, and bade us wait
only till they had delved themselves over the ridge, and then we might
follow as soon as we chose. After violent deeds in the bunker they
climbed over the big dune, thirty yards beyond which lay the green on
which they would now be putting. As soon as they had disappeared, Roderick snatched my driver from my
hand. “I can’t bear it,” he said. “I must hit a ball again. Tee it low,
caddie.... No, no tee at all.”

He hit a superb shot, just high enough to carry the ridge, and not so
high that it caught the opposing wind and was stopped towards the end
of its flight. He gave a loud croak of laughter. “That’ll teach them not to insult my friend,” he said. “It must have
been pitched right among their careful puttings. And now I shall read
his ghost-stories.”

I have recorded this athletic incident because better than any analysis
of his attitude towards life and death it conveys just what that
attitude was. He knew perfectly well that any swift exertion might be
fatal to him, but he wanted to hit a golf ball again as sweetly and as
hard as it could be hit. He had done it: he had scored off death. And
as I went on my way I felt perfectly confident that if, with that brisk
free effort, he had fallen dead on the tee, he would have thought it
well worth while, provided only that he had made that irreproachable
shot. While alive, he proposed to partake in the pleasures of life,
amongst which he had always reckoned that of hitting golf balls, not
caring, though he liked to be alive, whether the immediate consequence
was death, just because he did not in the least object to being dead. The choice was of such little consequence.... The history of that I was
to know that evening. The stories which Roderick had taken to read were designed to be of
an uncomfortable type: one concerned a vampire, one an elemental, the
third the reincarnation of a certain execrable personage, and as we sat
in the garden-room after tea, he with these pages on his knees, I had
the pleasure of seeing him give hasty glances round, as he read, as if
to assure himself that there was nothing unusual in the dimmer corners
of the room.... I liked that; he was doing as I intended that a reader
should. Before long he came to the last page. “And are you intending to make a book of them?” he asked. “What are the
other stories like?”

“Worse,” said I, with the complacency of the horror-monger. “Then--did you ask for criticism? I shall give it in any case--you will
make a book that not only is inartistic, all shadows and no light, but
a false book. Fiction can be false, you know, inherently false. You
play godfather to your stories, you see: you tell them in the first
person, those at least that I have read, and that, though it need not
be supposed that those experiences were actually yours, yet gives a
sort of guarantee that you believe the borderland of which you write to
be entirely terrible. But it isn’t: there are probably terrors there--I
think for instance that I believe in elemental spirits, of some ghastly
kind--but I am sure that I believe that the borderland, for the most
part, is almost inconceivably delightful. I’ve got the best of reasons
for believing that.”

“I’m willing to be convinced,” said I. Again, as he looked at the fire, his eye sparkled, not with the
reflected flame, but with the brightness of some interior vision. “Well, there’s an hour yet before dinner,” he said, “and my story won’t
take half of that. It’s about my previous experience of this house;
what I saw, in fact, in the room which I now occupy. It was because of
that, naturally, that I wanted the same room again. Here goes, then. “For the twenty years of Margaret’s married life,” he said, “I never
saw her except quite accidentally and casually. Casually, like that,
I had seen her at theatres and what not with her two boys whom thus I
knew by sight. But I had never spoken to either of them, nor, after her
marriage, to their mother. I knew, as all the world knew, that she had
a terrible life, but circumstances being what they were, I could not
bring myself to her notice, the more so because she made no sign or
gesture of wanting me. But I am sure that no day passed on which I did
not long to be able to show her that my love and sympathy were hers. Only, so I thought, I had to know that she wanted them. “I heard, of course, of the death of her sons. They were both killed
in France within a few days of each other; one was eighteen, the other
nineteen. I wrote to her then formally, so long had we been strangers,
and she answered formally. After that, she took this house, where she
lived alone. A year later, I was told that she had now for some months
been suffering from a malignant and disfiguring disease. “I was in London, strolling down Piccadilly when my companion mentioned
it, and I at once became aware that I must go to see her, not to-morrow
or soon, but now. It is difficult to describe the quality of that
conviction, or tell you how instinctive and over-mastering it was. There are some things which you can’t help doing, not exactly because
you desire to do them, but because they must be done. If, for instance,
you are in the middle of the road, and see a motor coming towards you
at top-speed, you have to step to the side of the road, unless you
deliberately choose to commit suicide. It was just like that; unless I
intended to commit a sort of spiritual suicide there was no choice. “A few hours later I was at your door here, asked to see her, and was
told that she was desperately ill and could see nobody. But I got her
maid to take the message that I was here, and presently her nurse came
down to tell me that she would see me. I should find Margaret, she
said, wearing a veil so as to conceal from me the dreadful ravages
which the disease had inflicted on her face, and the scars of the two
operations which she had undergone. Very likely she would not speak to
me, for she had great difficulty in speaking at all, and in any case
I was not to stay for more than a few minutes. Probably she could not
live many hours: I had only just come in time. And at that moment I
wished I had done anything rather than come here, for though instinct
had driven me here, yet instinct now recoiled with unspeakable horror. The flesh wars against the spirit, you know, and under its stress I
now suggested that it was better perhaps that I should not see her....