A Book of Ghosts: 9
Author: Various authors
Date: 1866-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
– 9 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.

Contents were originally published 1869 ~ 1916. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- Kentucky’s Ghost   –1869
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
(1844–1911)

- The Flayed Hand  –1875
by Guy de Maupassant
(1850–1893)

- From the Tomb  –1884
by Guy de Maupassant
(1850–1893)

- At the End of the Passage  –1890
by Rudyard Kipling
(1865–1936)

- The Dark Shadow  –1895
by Wirt Gerrare
(1862–1935)

- Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You,
My Lad  –1904
by Montague Rhodes James
(1862–1936)

- The Stranger  –1909
by Ambrose Bierce
(1842–1914)

- The Waiting Place  –1910
by Sarah Orne Jewett
(1849–1909)

- The Room in the Tower  –1912
by E. F. Benson
(1867–1940)

- The Armless Man  –1916
by W. G. Litt
(?–?)

KENTUCKY’S GHOST

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

1869

True? Every syllable.

That was a very fair yarn of yours, Tom Brown, very fair for a landsman, but I’ll bet you a doughnut I can beat it.

It was somewhere about twenty years ago that we were laying in for that particular trip to Madagascar.

We cleared from Long Wharf in the ship Madonna – which they tell me means, My Lady, and a pretty name it was; it was apt to give me that gentle kind of feeling when I spoke it, which is surprising when you consider what a dull old hull she was, never logging over ten knots, and uncertain at that. It may have been because of Moll’s coming down once in a while in the days that we lay at dock, bringing the boy with her, and sitting up on deck in a little white apron, knitting. She was a very good-looking woman, was my wife, in those days, and I felt proud of her – natural, with the lads looking on.

I used to speak my thought about the name sometimes, when the lads weren’t particularly noisy, but they laughed at me mostly. I was rough enough and bad enough in those days; as rough as the rest, and as bad as the rest, I suppose, but yet I seemed to have my notions a little different from the others. “Jake’s poetry”, they called ’em.

We were loading for the East Shore trade. There isn’t much of the genuine, old-fashioned trade left in these days, except the whisky branch. We had a little whisky in the hold, I remember, that trip, with a good stock of knives, red flannel, hand-saws, nails, and cotton. We were hoping to be at home again within the year. We were well-provisioned, and Dodd the cook made about as fair coffee as you’re likely to find in the galley of a trader. As for our officers, when I say the less said of them the better, it ain’t so much that I mean to be disrespectful as that I mean to put it tenderly. Officers in the merchant service, especially if it happens to be the African service, are quite often brutal men, and about as fit for their positions as if they’d been imported for the purpose a little indirect from Davy Jones’s locker.

Well; we weighed, along the last of the month, in pretty good spirits. The Madonna was as seaworthy as any eight-hundred-tonner in the harbour, even if she was clumsy; we turned in, some sixteen of us or thereabouts, into the fo’castle – a jolly set, mostly old messmates, and well content with one another; and the breeze was stiff from the west, with a fair sky.

The night before we were off, Molly and I took a walk upon the wharves after supper. I carried the baby. A boy, sitting on some boxes, pulled my sleeve as we went by, and asked me, pointing to the Madonna, if I would tell him the name of the ship.

“Find out for yourself,” said I, not overpleased to be interrupted.

“Don’t be cross with him,” says Molly. The baby threw a kiss at the boy, and Molly smiled at him through the dark. I don’t suppose I should ever have remembered the lubber from that day to this, except that I liked the looks of Molly smiling at him through the dark.

My wife and I said good-bye the next morning in a little sheltered place among the lumber on the wharf; she was one of your women who never like to do their crying before folks.

She climbed on the pile of lumber and sat down, a little flushed and quivery, to watch us off. I remember seeing her there with the baby till we were well down the channel. I remember noticing the bay as it grew cleaner, and thinking that I would break off swearing; and I remember cursing Bob Smart like a pirate within an hour.

The breeze held steadier than we’d looked for, and we’d made a good offing and discharged the pilot by nightfall. Mr. Whitmarsh, the mate, was aft with the captain. The boys were singing a little; the smell of the coffee was coming up, hot and homelike, from the galley. I was up in the maintop when all at once there came a cry and a shout; and, when I touched deck, I saw a crowd around the fore-hatch.

“What’s all this noise for?” says Mr. Whitmarsh, coming up and scowling.

“A stowaway, sir! A boy stowed away!” said Bob, catching the officer’s tone quick enough. He jerked the poor fellow out of the hold, and pushed him along to the mate’s feet.

I say “poor fellow”, and you’d never wonder why if you’d seen as much of stowing away as I have.

I’d as lief see a son of mine in a Carolina slave-gang as to see him lead the life of a stowaway. What with the officers feeling that they’ve been taken in, and the men, who catch their cue from their superiors, and the spite of the lawful boy who was hired in the proper way, he don’t have what you may call a tender time.

This chap was a little fellow, slight for his years, which might have been fifteen. He was palish, with a jerk of thin hair on his forehead. He was hungry, and homesick, and frightened. He looked about on all our faces, and then he cowered a little, and lay still just as Bob had thrown him.

“We – ell,” says Whitmarsh, very slow, “if you don’t repent your bargain before you go ashore, my fine fellow – me, if I’m mate of the Madonna! And take that for your pains!”

Upon that he kicks the poor little lubber from quarterdeck to bowsprit and goes down to his supper. The men laugh a little, then they whistle a little, then they finish their song quite gay and well acquainted, with the coffee steaming away in the galley. Nobody has a word for the boy – bless you, no!

I’ll venture he wouldn’t have had a mouthful that night if it had not been for me; and I can’t say as I should have bothered myself about him, if it had not come across me sudden, while he sat there rubbing his eyes quite violent, that I had seen the lad before; then I remembered walking on the wharves, and him on the box, and Molly saying softly that I was cross to him.

Seeing that my wife had smiled at him, and my baby thrown a kiss at him, it went against me not to look after the little rascal a bit that night.

“But you’ve got no business here, you know,” said I; “nobody wants you.”

“I wish I was ashore!” said he – “I wish I was ashore!”

With that he begins to rub his eyes so very violent that I stopped. There was good stuff in him too; for he choked and winked at me, and made out that the sun was on the water and he had a cold in the head.

I don’t know whether it was on account of being taken a little notice of that night, but the lad always hung about me afterwards; chased me round with his eyes in a way he had, and did odd jobs for me without the asking.

One night before the first week was out, he hauled alongside of me on the windlass. I was trying a new pipe so I didn’t give him much notice for a while.

“You did this job up shrewd, Kent,” said I, by and by; “how did you steer in?” – for it did not often happen that the Madonna got out of port with a stowaway in her hold.

“Watch was drunk; I crawled down ahind the whisky. It was hot and dark. I lay and thought how hungry I was,” says he.

“Friends at home?” says I.

Upon that he gives me a nod, very short, and gets up and walks off whistling.

The first Sunday out that chap didn’t know any more what to do with himself than a lobster just put on to boil. Sunday’s cleaning day at sea, you know. The lads washed up, and sat round, little knots of them, mending their trousers. Bob got out his cards. Me and a few mates took it comfortable under the to’gallant fo’castle (I being on watch below), reeling off the stiffest yarns we had in tow. Kent looked on a while, then listened to us a while, then walked off.

By and by says Bob, “Look over there!” and there was Kent, sitting curled away in a heap under the stern of the longboat. He had a book. Bob crawls behind and snatches it up, unbeknown, out of his hands; then he falls to laughing as if he would strangle, and gives the book a toss to me. It was a bit of Testament, black and old. There was writing on the yellow leaf which ran:

Kentucky Hodge,
from his Affecshunate mother
who prays, For you evry day, Amen.

The boy turned red, then white, and straightened up quite sudden, but he never said a word, only sat down again, and let us laugh it out. I’ve lost my reckoning if he ever heard the last of it. He told me one day how he came by the name, but I forget exactly. Something about an old uncle died in Kentucky, and the name was moniment-like, you see. He used to seem cut up a bit about it at first, for the lads took to it famously; but he got used to it in a week or two, and seeing as they meant him no unkindness, took it quite cheery.

One other thing I noticed was that he never had the book about after that. He fell into our ways next Sunday more easy.

They don’t take the Bible as a general thing, sailors don’t; though I will say that I never saw the man at sea who didn’t give it the credit of being an uncommon good yarn.

But I tell you, Tom Brown, I felt sorry for that boy. It’s punishment enough for a little scamp like him leaving the honest shore, and folks at home that were a bit tender of him maybe, to rough it on a trader, learning how to slush down a back-stay, or tie knots with frozen fingers in a snow-squall.

But that’s not the worst of it, by no means. If ever there was a cold-blooded, cruel man, with a wicked eye and a fist like a mallet, it was Job Whitmarsh. And I believe, of all the trips I’ve taken, him being mate of the Madonna, Kentucky found him at his worst. Bradley the second mate was none too gentle in his ways, but he never held a candle to Mr. Whitmarsh. He took a spite to the boy from the first, and he kept it up to the last.

I’ve seen him beat that boy till the blood run down in little pools on deck; then send him up, all wet and red, to clear the to’sail halliards; and when, what with the pain and faintness, he dizzied a little, and clung to the ratlines, half blind, he would have him down and flog him till the cap’n interfered – which would happen occasionally on a fair day when he had taken just enough to be good-natured. He used to rack his brains for the words he slung at the boy working quiet enough beside him. If curses had been a marketable article, Whitmarsh would have made his fortune. Then he used to kick the lad down the fo’castle ladder; he used to work him, sick or well, as he wouldn’t have worked a dray-horse; he used to chase him all about the deck at the rope’s end; he used to mast-head him for hours on the stretch; he used to starve him out in the hold. It didn’t come in my line to be over-tender, but I turned sick at heart, Tom, more than once, looking on helpless, and me a great stout fellow.

I remember a thing McCallum said one night; McCallum was a Scot – an old fellow with grey hair; told the best yarns on the fo’castle.

“Mark my words, shipmates,” says he. “When Job Whitmarsh’s time comes to go as straight to hell as Judas, that boy will bring his summons. Dead or alive, that boy will bring his summons.”

One day I recollect that the lad was sick with fever, and took to his hammock. Whitmarsh drove him on deck, and ordered him aloft. I was standing near by, trimming the spanker. Kentucky staggered for’ard a little and sat down. There was a rope’s-end there, knotted three times. The mate struck him.

“I’m very weak, sir,” says he.

He struck him again. He struck him twice more. The boy fell over a little, and lay where he fell.

I don’t know what ailed me, but all of a sudden I seemed to be lying off Long Wharf, with Molly in a white apron with her shining needles, and the baby a-play in his red stockings about the deck.

“Think if it was him!” says she, or she seems to say – “think if it was him!”

And the next I knew I’d let slip my tongue in a jiffy, and given it to the mate in a way I’ll bet Whitmarsh never got before. And the next I knew after that they had the irons on me.

“Sorry about that, eh?” said he, the day before they took ’em off.

“No, sir,” says I. And I never was. Kentucky never forgot that. I had helped him occasional in the beginning – learned him how to veer and haul a brace, let go or belay a sheet – but let him alone generally speaking, and went about my own business. That week in irons I really believe the lad never forgot.

One Saturday night, when the mate had been uncommon furious that week – Kentucky turned on him, very pale and slow (I was up in the mizzen-top, and heard him quite distinct).

“Mr. Whitmarsh,” says he – “Mr. Whitmarsh,” – he draws his breath in – “Mr. Whitmarsh,” – three times – “you’ve got the power and you know it, and so do the gentlemen who put you here; and I’m only a stowaway boy, and things are all in a tangle, but you’ll be sorry yet for every time you’ve laid your hands on me!”

He hadn’t a pleasant look about the eyes either, when he said it.

Fact was, that first month on the Madonna had done the lad no good. He had a surly, sullen way with him, some’at like what I’ve seen about a chained dog. At the first, his talk had been clean as my baby’s, and he would blush like any girl at Bob Smart’s stories; but he got used to Bob, and pretty good, in time, at small swearing.

I don’t think I should have noticed it so much if it had not been for seeming to see Molly and the knitting-needles, and the child upon the deck, and hearing her say, “Think if it was him!”

Well, things went along just about so with us till we neared the Cape. It’s not a pretty place, the Cape, on a winter’s voyage. I can’t say as I ever was what you may call scared after the first time rounding it, but it’s not a pretty place.

I don’t seem to remember much about Kent till there come a Friday at the first of December. It was a still day, with a little haze, like white sand sifted across a sunbeam on a kitchen table. The lad was quiet-like all day, chasing me about with his eyes.

“Sick?” says I.

“No,” says he.

“Whitmarsh drunk?” says I.

“No,” says he.

A little after dark I was lying on a coil of ropes, napping it. The boys were having the Bay of Biscay quite lively, and I waked up on the jump in the choruses. Kent came up. He was not singing. He sat down beside me, and first I thought I wouldn’t trouble myself about him, and then I thought I would.

So I opens one eye at him encouraging. He crawls up a little closer to me. It was rather dark where we sat, with a great greenish shadow dropping from the mainsail. The wind was up a little, and the light at helm looked flickery and red.

“Jake,” says he all at once, “where’s your mother?”

“In – heaven!” says I, all taken aback.

“Oh!” says he. “Got any women-folks at home that miss you?” asks he, by and by.

Said I, “Shouldn’t wonder.”

After that he sits still a little with his elbows on his knees; then he peers at me sidewise a while; then said he, “I s’pose I’ve got a mother to home. I ran away from her.”

That was the first time he had ever spoke about his folks since he came aboard.

“She was asleep down in the south chamber,” says he. “I got out the window. There was one white shirt she’d made for meetin’ and such. I’ve never worn it out here. I hadn’t the heart. It has a collar and some cuffs, you know. She had a headache making of it. She’s been follering me round all day, sewing that shirt. When I come in she would look up bright-like and smiling. Father’s dead. There ain’t anybody but me. All day long she’s been follering of me round.”

So then he gets up, and joins the lads, and tries to sing a little; but he comes back very still and sits down. We could see the flickery light upon the boys’ faces, and on the rigging, and on the cap’n, who was damning the bosun a little aft.

“Jake,” says he, quite low, “look here. I’ve been thinking. Do you reckon there’s a chap here – just one, perhaps – who’s said his prayers since he came aboard?”

“No!” said I, quite short: for I’d have bet my head on it.

I can remember, as if it was this morning, just how the question sounded, and the answer. I can’t seem to put it into words how it came all over me. The wind was turning brisk, and we’d just eased her with a few reefs; Bob Smart, out furling the flying jib, got soaked; me and the boy sitting silent, were spattered. I remember watching the curve of the great swells, mahogany colour, with the tip of white, and thinking how like it was to a big creature hissing and foaming at the mouth, and thinking all at once something about Him holding of the sea in a balance, and not a word bespoke to beg His favour respectful since we weighed our anchor, and the cap’n yonder calling on Him just that minute to send the Madonna to the bottom, if the bosun hadn’t disobeyed his orders about the squaring of the after-yards.

“From his Affecshunate mother who prays. For you evry day. Amen,” whispers Kentucky, presently, very soft, “The book’s tore up. Mr. Whitmarsh wadded his old gun with it. But I remember.”

Then said he; “It’s almost bedtime at home. She’s setting in a little rocking-chair – green one. There’s a fire, and the dog. She sets all by herself.”

Then he begins again: “She has to bring in her own wood now. There’s a grey ribbon on her cap. When she goes to meetin’ she wears a grey bonnet. She’s drawed the curtains and the door is locked. But she thinks I’ll be coming home sorry someday – I’m sure she thinks I’ll be coming home sorry.”

Just then there comes the order, “Port watch ahoy! Tumble up there lively!” so I turns out, and the lad turns in, and the night settles down a little black, and my hands and head are full. Next day, it blows a clean, all but a bank of grey, very thin and still which lay just abeam of us.

The sea looked like a great purple pincushion, with a mast or two stuck in on the horizon for the pins. “Jake’s poetry”, the boys said that was.

By noon that little grey bank had grown up thick, like a wall. By sundown the cap’n let his liquor alone, and kept the deck. By night we were in chop-seas, with a very ugly wind.

“Steer small, there!” cries Whitmarsh, growing hot about the face – for we made a terribly crooked wake, with a broad sheer, and the old hull strained heavily – “steer small there, I tell you! Mind your eye now, McCallum, with your fore-sail! Furl the royals! Send down the royals! Cheerily, men! Where’s that lubber Kent? Up with you, lively now!”

Kentucky sprang for’ard at the order, then stopped short. Anybody as knows a royal from an anchor wouldn’t have blamed the lad. It’s no play for an old tar, stout and full in size, sending down the royals in a gale like that; let alone a boy of fifteen years on his first voyage.

But the mate takes to swearing and Kent shoots away up – the great mast swinging like a pendulum to and fro, and the reef-points snapping, and the blocks creaking, and the sails flapping to that extent as you wouldn’t consider possible unless you’d been before the mast yourself. It reminded me of evil birds I’ve read of, that stun a man with their wings.

Kent stuck bravely as far as the cross-trees. There he slipped and struggled and clung in the dark and noise a while, then comes sliding down the back-stay.

“I’m not afraid, sir,” says he; “but I cannot do it.”

For answer Whitmarsh takes to the rope’s-end. So Kentucky is up again, and slips and struggles and clings again, and then lays down again.

At this the men begin to grumble a little.

“Will you kill the lad?” said I. I get a blow for my pains, that sends me off my feet none too easy; and when I rub the stars out of my eyes the boy is up again, and the mate behind him with the rope. Whitmarsh stopped when he’d gone far enough. The lad climbed on. Once he looked back. He never opened his lips; he just looked back. If I’ve seen him once since – in my thinking, I’ve seen him twenty times – up in the shadow of the great grey wings, looking back.

After that there was only a cry, and a splash, and the Madonna racing along with the gale at twelve knots. If it had been the whole crew overboard, she could never have stopped for them that night.

“Well,” said the cap’n, “you’ve done it now.”

Whitmarsh turned his back.

By and by, when the wind fell, and the hurry was over, and I had the time to think a steady thought, being in the morning watch, I seemed to see the old lady in the grey bonnet setting by the fire. And the dog. And the green rocking-chair. And the front door, with the boy walking in on a sunny afternoon to take her by surprise.

Then I remember leaning over to look down, and wondering if the lad were thinking of it too, and what had happened to him now, these two hours back, and just about where he was, and how he liked his new quarters, and many other strange and curious things.

And while I sat there thinking, the Sunday-morning stars cut through the clouds, and the solemn Sunday-morning light began to break upon the sea.

•   •   •   •   •

We had a quiet run of it, after that, into port, where we lay about a couple of months or so, trading off for a fair stock of palm-oil, ivory, and hides. The days were hot and purple and still. We hadn’t what you might call a blow till we rounded the Cape again, heading for home.

It was just about the spot that we lost the boy that we fell upon the worst gale of the trip. It struck us quite sudden. Whitmarsh was a little high. He wasn’t apt to be drunk in a gale, if it gave him warning sufficient.

Well, somebody had to furl the main-royal again, and he pitched on to McCallum. McCallum hadn’t his beat for fighting out the royal in a blow.

So he piled away lively, up to the to’-sail yard. There, all of a sudden, he stopped. Next we knew he was down like lightning.

His face had gone very white.

“What’s up with you?” roared Whitmarsh.

Said McCallum, “There’s somebody up there, sir.”

Screamed Whitmarsh, “You’re an idiot!”

Said McCallum, very quiet and distinct: “There’s somebody up there, sir. I saw him quite plain. He saw me. I called up. He called down. Says he, ‘Don’t you come up!’ and hang me if I’ll stir a step for you or any other man tonight!”

I never saw the face of any man alive go the turn that mate’s face went. If he wouldn’t have relished knocking the Scotchman dead before his eyes, I’ve lost my guess. Can’t say what he would have done to the old fellow, if there’d been any time to lose.

He’d the sense left to see there wasn’t overmuch, so he orders out Bob Smart direct.

Bob goes up steady, with a quid in his cheek and a cool eye. Half-way amid to’-sail and to’gallant he stops, and down he comes, spinning.

“Be drowned if there ain’t!” said he. “He’s sitting square upon the yard. I never see the boy Kentucky, if he isn’t sitting on that yard. ‘Don’t you come up!’ he cries out – ‘don’t you come up!’”

“Bob’s drunk, and McCallum’s a fool!” said Jim Welch, standing by. So Welch volunteers up, and takes Jaloffe with him. They were a couple of the coolest hands aboard – Welch and Jaloffe. So up they goes, and down they comes like the rest, by the run.

“He beckoned of me back!” says Welch. “He hollered not to come up! not to come up!”

After that there wasn’t a man of us would stir aloft, not for love nor money.

Well, Whitmarsh he stamped, and he swore, and he knocked us about furious; but we sat and looked at one another’s eyes, and never stirred. Something cold, like a frost-bite, seemed to crawl along from man to man, looking into one another’s eyes.

“I’ll shame ye all, then, for a set of cowardly lubbers!” cries the mate; and what with the anger and the drink he was as good as his word, and up the ratlines in a twinkle.

In a flash we were after him – he was our officer, you see, and we felt ashamed – me at the head, and the lads following after.

I got to the futtock shrouds, and there I stopped, for I saw him myself – a palish boy, with a jerk of thin hair on his forehead; I’d have known him anywhere in this world or t’other. I saw him just as distinct as I see you, Tom Brown, sitting on that yard quite steady with the royal flapping like to flap him off.

I reckon I’ve had as much experience fore and aft, in the course of fifteen years at sea, as any man that ever tied a reef-point in a nor’easter; but I never saw a sight like that, not before nor since.

I won’t say that I didn’t wish myself on deck; but I stuck to the shrouds, and looked on steady.

Whitmarsh, swearing that that royal should be furled, went on and went up.

It was after that I hear the voice. It came from the figure of the boy upon the upper yard.

But this time it says, “Come up! Come up!” And then, a little louder, “Come up! Come up! Come up!” So he goes up, and next I knew there was a cry – and next a splash – and then I saw the royal flapping from the empty yard, and the mate was gone, and the boy.

Job Whitmarsh was never seen again.

THE FLAYED HAND

Guy de Maupassant

1875

One evening about eight months ago I met with some college comrades at the lodgings of our friend Louis R. We drank punch and smoked, talked of literature and art, and made jokes like any other company of young men. Suddenly the door flew open, and one who had been my friend since boyhood burst in like a hurricane.

“Guess where I come from?” he cried.

“I bet on the Mabille,” responded one. “No,” said another, “you are too gay; you come from borrowing money, from burying a rich uncle, or from pawning your watch.”  “You are getting sober,” cried a third, “and, as you scented the punch in Louis’ room, you came up here to get drunk again.”

“You are all wrong,” he replied. “I come from P., in Normandy, where I have spent eight days, and whence I have brought one of my friends, a great criminal, whom I ask permission to present to you.”

With these words he drew from his pocket a long, black hand, from which the skin had been stripped. It had been severed at the wrist. Its dry and shriveled shape, and the narrow, yellowed nails still clinging to the fingers, made it frightful to look upon. The muscles, which showed that its first owner had been possessed of great strength, were bound in place by a strip of parchment-like skin.

“Just fancy,” said my friend, “the other day they sold the effects of an old sorcerer, recently deceased, well known in all the country. Every Saturday night he used to go to witch gatherings on a broomstick; he practised the white magic and the black, gave blue milk to the cows, and made them wear tails like that of the companion of Saint Anthony. The old scoundrel always had a deep affection for this hand, which, he said, was that of a celebrated criminal, executed in 1736 for having thrown his lawful wife head first into a well – for which I do not blame him – and then hanging in the belfry the priest who had married him. After this double exploit he went away, and, during his subsequent career, which was brief but exciting, he robbed twelve travelers, smoked a score of monks in their monastery, and made a seraglio of a convent.”

“But what are you going to do with this horror?” we cried.

“Eh! parbleu! I will make it the handle to my doorbell and frighten my creditors.”

“My friend,” said Henry Smith, a big, phlegmatic Englishman, “I believe that this hand is only a kind of Indian meat, preserved by a new process; I advise you to make bouillon of it.”

“Rail not, messieurs,” said, with the utmost sang froid, a medical student who was three-quarters drunk, “but if you follow my advice, Pierre, you will give this piece of human debris Christian burial, for fear lest its owner should come to demand it. Then, too, this hand has acquired some bad habits, for you know the proverb, ‘Who has killed will kill.’”

“And who has drank will drink,” replied the host as he poured out a big glass of punch for the student, who emptied it at a draught and slid dead drunk under the table. His sudden dropping out of the company was greeted with a burst of laughter, and Pierre, raising his glass and saluting the hand, cried:

“I drink to the next visit of thy master.”

Then the conversation turned upon other subjects, and shortly afterward each returned to his lodgings.

•   •   •   •   •

About two o’clock the next day, as I was passing Pierre’s door, I entered and found him reading and smoking.

“Well, how goes it?” said I. “Very well,” he responded. “And your hand?” “My hand? Did you not see it on the bell-pull? I put it there when I returned home last night. But, apropos of this, what do you think? Some idiot, doubtless to play a stupid joke on me, came ringing at my door towards midnight. I demanded who was there, but as no one replied, I went back to bed again, and to sleep.”

At this moment the door opened and the landlord, a fat and extremely impertinent person, entered without saluting us.

“Sir,” said he, “I pray you to take away immediately that carrion which you have hung to your bell-pull. Unless you do this I shall be compelled to ask you to leave.”

“Sir,” responded Pierre, with much gravity, “you insult a hand which does not merit it. Know you that it belonged to a man of high breeding?”

The landlord turned on his heel and made his exit, without speaking. Pierre followed him, detached the hand and affixed it to the bell-cord hanging in his alcove.

“That is better,” he said. “This hand, like the ‘Brother, all must die,’ of the Trappists, will give my thoughts a serious turn every night before I sleep.”

At the end of an hour I left him and returned to my own apartment.

I slept badly the following night, was nervous and agitated, and several times awoke with a start. Once I imagined, even, that a man had broken into my room, and I sprang up and searched the closets and under the bed. Towards six o’clock in the morning I was commencing to doze at last, when a loud knocking at my door made me jump from my couch. It was my friend Pierre’s servant, half dressed, pale and trembling.

“Ah, sir!” cried he, sobbing, “my poor master. Someone has murdered him.”

I dressed myself hastily and ran to Pierre’s lodgings. The house was full of people disputing together, and everything was in a commotion. Everyone was talking at the same time, recounting and commenting on the occurrence in all sorts of ways. With great difficulty I reached the bedroom, made myself known to those guarding the door and was permitted to enter. Four agents of police were standing in the middle of the apartment, pencils in hand, examining every detail, conferring in low voices and writing from time to time in their note-books. Two doctors were in consultation by the bed on which lay the unconscious form of Pierre. He was not dead, but his face was fixed in an expression of the most awful terror. His eyes were open their widest, and the dilated pupils seemed to regard fixedly, with unspeakable horror, something unknown and frightful. His hands were clinched. I raised the quilt, which covered his body from the chin downward, and saw on his neck, deeply sunk in the flesh, the marks of fingers. Some drops of blood spotted his shirt. At that moment one thing struck me. I chanced to notice that the shriveled hand was no longer attached to the bell-cord. The doctors had doubtless removed it to avoid the comments of those entering the chamber where the wounded man lay, because the appearance of this hand was indeed frightful. I did not inquire what had become of it.

I now clip from a newspaper of the next day the story of the crime with all the details that the police were able to procure:

“A frightful attempt was made yesterday on the life of young M. Pierre B., student, who belongs to one of the best families in Normandy. He returned home about ten o’clock in the evening, and excused his valet, Bouvin, from further attendance upon him, saying that he felt fatigued and was going to bed. Towards midnight Bouvin was suddenly awakened by the furious ringing of his master’s bell. He was afraid, and lighted a lamp and waited. The bell was silent about a minute, then rang again with such vehemence that the domestic, mad with fright, flew from his room to awaken the concierge, who ran to summon the police, and, at the end of about fifteen minutes, two policemen forced open the door. A horrible sight met their eyes. The furniture was overturned, giving evidence of a fearful struggle between the victim and his assailant. In the middle of the room, upon his back, his body rigid, with livid face and frightfully dilated eyes, lay, motionless, young Pierre B., bearing upon his neck the deep imprints of five fingers. Dr. Bourdean was called immediately, and his report says that the aggressor must have been possessed of prodigious strength and have had an extraordinarily thin and sinewy hand, because the fingers left in the flesh of the victim five holes like those from a pistol ball, and had penetrated until they almost met. There is no clue to the motive of the crime or to its perpetrator. The police are making a thorough investigation.”

The following appeared in the same newspaper next day:

“M. Pierre B., the victim of the frightful assault of which we published an account yesterday, has regained consciousness after two hours of the most assiduous care by Dr. Bourdean. His life is not in danger, but it is strongly feared that he has lost his reason. No trace has been found of his assailant.”

My poor friend was indeed insane. For seven months I visited him daily at the hospital where we had placed him, but he did not recover the light of reason. In his delirium strange words escaped him, and, like all madmen, he had one fixed idea: he believed himself continually pursued by a spectre. One day they came for me in haste, saying he was worse, and when I arrived I found him dying. For two hours he remained very calm, then, suddenly, rising from his bed in spite of our efforts, he cried, waving his arms as if a prey to the most awful terror: “Take it away! Take it away! It strangles me! Help! Help!” Twice he made the circuit of the room, uttering horrible screams, then fell face downward, dead.

•   •   •   •   •

As he was an orphan I was charged to take his body to the little village of P., in Normandy, where his parents were buried. It was the place from which he had arrived the evening he found us drinking punch in Louis R.’s room, when he had presented to us the flayed hand. His body was enclosed in a leaden coffin, and four days afterwards I walked sadly beside the old curé, who had given him his first lessons, to the little cemetery where they dug his grave. It was a beautiful day, and sunshine from a cloudless sky flooded the earth. Birds sang from the blackberry bushes where many a time when we were children we had stolen to eat the fruit. Again I saw Pierre and myself creeping along behind the hedge and slipping through the gap that we knew so well, down at the end of the little plot where they bury the poor. Again we would return to the house with cheeks and lips black with the juice of the berries we had eaten. I looked at the bushes; they were covered with fruit; mechanically I picked some and bore it to my mouth. The curé had opened his breviary, and was muttering his prayers in a low voice. I heard at the end of the walk the spades of the grave-diggers who were opening the tomb. Suddenly they called out, the curé closed his book, and we went to see what they wished of us. They had found a coffin; in digging a stroke of the pickaxe had started the cover, and we perceived within a skeleton of unusual stature, lying on its back, its hollow eyes seeming yet to menace and defy us. I was troubled, I know not why, and almost afraid.

“Hold!” cried one of the men, “look there! One of the rascal’s hands has been severed at the wrist. Ah, here it is!” and he picked up from beside the body a huge withered hand, and held it out to us.

“See,” cried the other, laughing, “see how he glares at you, as if he would spring at your throat to make you give him back his hand.”

“Go,” said the curé, “leave the dead in peace, and close the coffin. We will make poor Pierre’s grave elsewhere.”

The next day all was finished, and I returned to Paris, after having left fifty francs with the old curé for masses to be said for the repose of the soul of him whose sepulchre we had troubled.

FROM THE TOMB

Guy De Maupassant

1884

The guests filed slowly into the hotel’s great dining-hall and took their places, the waiters began to serve them leisurely, to give the tardy ones time to arrive and to save themselves the bother of bringing back the courses; and the old bathers, the yearly habitues, with whom the season was far advanced, kept a close watch on the door each time it opened, hoping for the coming of new faces.

New faces! the single distraction of all pleasure resorts. We go to dinner chiefly to canvass the daily arrivals, to wonder who they are, what they do and what they think. A restless desire seems to have taken possession of us, a longing for pleasant adventures, for friendly acquaintances, perhaps, for possible lovers. In this elbow-to-elbow life our unknown neighbors become of paramount importance. Curiosity is piqued, sympathy on the alert and the social instinct doubly active.

We have hatreds for a week, friendships for a month, and view all men with the special eyes of watering-place intimacy. Sometimes during an hour’s chat after dinner, under the trees of the park, where ripples a healing spring, we discover men of superior intellect and surprising merit, and a month later have wholly forgotten these new friends, so charming at first sight.

There, too, more specially than elsewhere, serious and lasting ties are formed. We see each other every day, we learn to know each other very soon, and in the affection that springs up so rapidly between us there is mingled much of the sweet abandon of old and tried intimates. And later on, how tender are the memories cherished of the first hours of this friendship, of the first communion in which the soul came to light, of the first glances that questioned and responded to the secret thoughts and interrogatories the lips have not dared yet to utter, of the first cordial confidence and delicious sensation of opening one’s heart to someone who has seemed to lay bare to you his own! The very dullness of the hours, as it were, the monotony of days all alike, but renders more complete the rapid budding and blooming of friendship’s flower.

That evening, then, as on every evening, we awaited the appearance of unfamiliar faces.

There came only two, but very peculiar ones, those of a man and a woman – father and daughter. They seemed to have stepped from the pages of some weird legend; and yet there was an attraction about them, albeit an unpleasant one, that made me set them down at once as the victims of some fatality.

The father was tall, spare, a little bent, with hair blanched white; too white for his still young countenance, and in his manner and about his person the sedate austerity of carriage that bespeaks the Puritan. The daughter was, possibly, some twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. She was very slight, emaciated, her exceedingly pale countenance bearing a languid, spiritless expression; one of those people whom we sometimes encounter, apparently too weak for the cares and tasks of life, too feeble to move or do the things that we must do every day. Nevertheless the girl was pretty, with the ethereal beauty of an apparition. It was she, undoubtedly, who came for the benefit of the waters.

They chanced to be placed at table immediately opposite to me; and I was not long in noticing that the father, too, had a strange affection, something wrong about the nerves it seemed. Whenever he was going to reach for anything, his hand, with a jerky twitch, described a sort of fluttering zig-zag, before he was able to grasp what he was after. Soon, the motion disturbed me so much, I kept my head turned in order not to see it. But not before I had also observed that the young girl kept her glove on her left hand while she ate.

Dinner ended, I went out as usual for a turn in the grounds belonging to the establishment. A sort of park, I might say, stretching clear to the little station of Auvergne, Chatel-Guyon, nestling in a gorge at the foot of the high mountain, from which flowed the sparkling, bubbling springs, hot from the furnace of an ancient volcano. Beyond us there, the domes, small extinct craters – of which Chatel-Guyon is the starting point – raised their serrated heads above the long chain; while beyond the domes came two distinct regions, one of them, needle-like peaks, the other of bold, precipitous mountains.

It was very warm that evening, and I contented myself with pacing to and fro under the rustling trees, gazing at the mountains and listening to the strains of the band, pouring from the Casino, situated on a knoll that overlooked the grounds.

Presently, I perceived the father and daughter coming toward me with slow steps. I bowed to them in that pleasant Continental fashion with which one always salutes his hotel companions. The gentleman halted at once.

“Pardon me, sir,” said he, “but may I ask if you can direct us to a short walk, easy and pretty, if possible?”

“Certainly,” I answered, and offered to lead them myself to the valley through which the swift river flows – a deep, narrow cleft between two great declivities, rocky and wooded.

They accepted, and as we walked, we naturally discussed the virtue of the mineral waters. They had, as I had surmised, come there on his daughter’s account.

“She has a strange malady,” said he, “the seat of which her physicians cannot determine. She suffers from the most inexplicable nervous symptoms. Sometimes they declare her ill of a heart disease; sometimes of a liver complaint; again of a spinal trouble. At present they attribute it to the stomach – that great motor and regulator of the body – this Protean disease of a thousand forms, a thousand modes of attack. It is why we are here. I, myself, think it is her nerves. In any case it is sad.”

This reminded me of his own jerking hand.

“It may be hereditary,” said I, “your own nerves are a little disturbed, are they not?”

“Mine?” he answered, tranquilly. “Not at all, I have always possessed the calmest nerves.” Then, suddenly, as if bethinking himself:

“For this,” touching his hand, “is not nerves, but the result of a shock, a terrible shock that I suffered once. Fancy it, sir, this child of mine has been buried alive!”

I could find nothing to say, I was dumb with surprise.

“Yes,” he continued, “buried alive; but hear the story, it is not long. For some time past Juliette had seemed affected with a disordered action of the heart. We were finally certain that the trouble was organic and feared the worst. One day it came, she was brought in lifeless – dead. She had fallen dead while walking in the garden. Physicians came in haste, but nothing could be done. She was gone. For two days and nights I watched beside her myself, and with my own hands placed her in her coffin, which I followed to the cemetery and saw placed in the family vault. This was in the country, in the province of Lorraine.

“It had been my wish, too, that she should be buried in her jewels, bracelets, necklace and rings, all presents that I had given her, and in her first ball dress. You can imagine, sir, the state of my heart in returning home. She was all that I had left, my wife had been dead for many years. I returned, in truth, half mad, shut myself alone in my room and fell into my chair dazed, unable to move, merely a miserable, breathing wreck.

“Soon my old valet, Prosper, who had helped me place Juliette in her coffin and lay her away for her last sleep, came in noiselessly to see if he could not induce me to eat. I shook my head, answering nothing. He persisted:

“‘Monsieur is wrong; this will make him ill. Will monsieur allow me, then, to put him to bed?’

“‘No, no,’ I answered. ‘Let me alone.’

“He yielded and withdrew.

“How many hours passed I do not know. What a night! What a night! It was very cold; my fire of logs had long since burned out in the great fireplace; and the wind, a wintry blast, charged with an icy frost, howled and screamed about the house and strained at my windows with a curiously sinister sound.

“Long hours, I say, rolled by. I sat still where I had fallen, prostrated, overwhelmed; my eyes wide open, but my body strengthless, dead; my soul drowned in despair. Suddenly the great bell gave a loud peal.

“I gave such a leap that my chair cracked under me. The slow, solemn sound rang through the empty house. I looked at the clock.

“It was two in the morning. Who could be coming at such an hour?

“Twice again the bell pulled sharply. The servants would never answer, perhaps never hear it. I took up a candle and made my way to the door. I was about to demand:

“‘Who is there?’ but, ashamed of the weakness, nerved myself and drew back the bolts. My heart throbbed, my pulse beat, I threw back the panel brusquely and there, in the darkness, saw a shape like a phantom, dressed in white.

“I recoiled, speechless with anguish, stammering:

“‘Who – who are you?’

“A voice answered:

“‘It is I, father.’

“It was my child, Juliette.

“Truly, I thought myself mad. I shuddered, shrinking backward before the spectre as it advanced, gesticulating with my hand to ward off the apparition. It is that gesture which has never left me.

“Again the phantom spoke:

“‘Father, father! See, I am not dead. Someone came to rob me of my jewels – they cut off my finger – the – the flowing blood revived me.’

“And I saw then that she was covered with blood. I fell to my knees panting, sobbing, laughing, all in one. As soon as I regained my senses, but still so bewildered I scarcely comprehended the happiness that had come to me, I took her in my arms, carried her to her room, and rang frantically for Prosper to rekindle the fire, bring a warm drink for her, and go for the doctor.

“He came running, entered, gazed a moment at my daughter in the chair – gave a gasp of fright and horror and fell back – dead.

“It was he who had opened the vault, who had wounded and robbed my child, and then abandoned her; for he could not efface all trace of his deed; and he had not even taken the trouble to return the coffin to its niche; sure, besides, of not being suspected by me, who trusted him so fully. We are truly very unfortunate people, monsieur.”

He was silent.

Meanwhile the night had come on, enveloping in the gloom the still and solitary little valley; a sort of mysterious dread seemed to fall upon me in presence of these strange beings – this corpse come to life, and this father with his painful gestures.

“Let us return,” said I, “the night has grown chill.”

And still in silence, we retraced our steps back to the hotel, and I shortly afterward returned to the city. I lost all further knowledge of the two peculiar visitors to my favorite summer resort.

AT THE END OF THE PASSAGE

Rudyard Kipling

1890

The sky is lead and our faces are red,

And the gates of Hell are opened and riven,

And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven,

And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven,

And the clouds come down in a fiery sheet,

Heavy to raise and hard to be borne.

And the soul of man is turned from his meat,

Turned from the trifles for which he has striven

Sick in his body, and heavy hearted,

And his soul flies up like the dust in the sheet

Breaks from his flesh and is gone and departed,

As the blasts they blow on the cholera-horn.

—Himalayan

Four men, each entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” sat at a table playing whist. The thermometer marked – for them – one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke. Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.

From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without wind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops of the parched trees, and came down again. Then a-whirling dust-devil would scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall outward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low line of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts made of mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squat four-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a section of the Gaudhari State line then under construction.

The four, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert since the night before; Lowndes of the Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished native State whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight hours while he associated with white men once more. Hummil, the assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast and received his friends thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them failed to appear, he would send a telegram to his last address, in order that he might know whether the defaulter were dead or alive. There are very many places in the East where it is not good or kind to let your acquaintances drop out of sight even for one short week.

The players were not conscious of any special regard for each other. They squabbled whenever they met; but they ardently desired to meet, as men without water desire to drink. They were lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness. They were all under thirty years of age – which is too soon for any man to possess that knowledge.

“Pilsener?” said Spurstow, after the second rubber, mopping his forehead.

“Beer’s out, I’m sorry to say, and there’s hardly enough soda-water for tonight,” said Hummil.

“What filthy bad management!” Spurstow snarled.

“Can’t help it. I’ve written and wired; but the trains don’t come through regularly yet. Last week the ice ran out – as Lowndes knows.”

“Glad I didn’t come. I could ha’ sent you some if I had known, though. Phew! it’s too hot to go on playing bumblepuppy.” This with a savage scowl at Lowndes, who only laughed. He was a hardened offender.

Mottram rose from the table and looked out of a chink in the shutters.

“What a sweet day!” said he.

The company yawned all together and betook themselves to an aimless investigation of all Hummil’s possessions – guns, tattered novels, saddlery, spurs, and the like. They had fingered them a score of times before, but there was really nothing else to do.

“Got anything fresh?” said Lowndes.

“Last week’s Gazette of India, and a cutting from a home paper. My father sent it out. It’s rather amusing.”

“One of those vestrymen that call ’emselves M.P.s again, is it?” said Spurstow, who read his newspapers when he could get them.

“Yes. Listen to this. It’s to your address, Lowndes. The man was making a speech to his constituents, and he piled it on. Here’s a sample, ‘And I assert unhesitatingly that the Civil Service in India is the preserve – the pet preserve – of the aristocracy of England. What does the democracy – what do the masses – get from that country, which we have step by step fraudulently annexed? I answer, nothing whatever. It is farmed with a single eye to their own interests by the scions of the aristocracy. They take good care to maintain their lavish scale of incomes, to avoid or stifle any inquiries into the nature and conduct of their administration, while they themselves force the unhappy peasant to pay with the sweat of his brow for all the luxuries in which they are lapped.’” Hummil waved the cutting above his head. “’Ear! ’ear!” said his audience.

Then Lowndes, meditatively, “I’d give – I’d give three months’ pay to have that gentleman spend one month with me and see how the free and independent native prince works things. Old Timbersides” – this was his flippant title for an honoured and decorated feudatory prince – “has been wearing my life out this week past for money. By Jove, his latest performance was to send me one of his women as a bribe!”

“Good for you! Did you accept it?” said Mottram.

“No. I rather wish I had, now. She was a pretty little person, and she yarned away to me about the horrible destitution among the king’s women-folk. The darlings haven’t had any new clothes for nearly a month, and the old man wants to buy a new drag from Calcutta – solid silver railings and silver lamps, and trifles of that kind. I’ve tried to make him understand that he has played the deuce with the revenues for the last twenty years and must go slow. He can’t see it.”

“But he has the ancestral treasure-vaults to draw on. There must be three millions at least in jewels and coin under his palace,” said Hummil.

“Catch a native king disturbing the family treasure! The priests forbid it except as the last resort. Old Timbersides has added something like a quarter of a million to the deposit in his reign.”

“Where the mischief does it all come from?” said Mottram.

“The country. The state of the people is enough to make you sick. I’ve known the taxmen wait by a milch-camel till the foal was born and then hurry off the mother for arrears. And what can I do? I can’t get the court clerks to give me any accounts; I can’t raise anything more than a fat smile from the commander-in-chief when I find out the troops are three months in arrears; and old Timbersides begins to weep when I speak to him. He has taken to the King’s Peg heavily, liqueur brandy for whisky, and Heidsieck for soda-water.”

“That’s what the Rao of Jubela took to. Even a native can’t last long at that,” said Spurstow. “He’ll go out.”

“And a good thing, too. Then I suppose we’ll have a council of regency, and a tutor for the young prince, and hand him back his kingdom with ten years’ accumulations.”

“Whereupon that young prince, having been taught all the vices of the English, will play ducks and drakes with the money and undo ten years’ work in eighteen months. I’ve seen that business before,” said Spurstow. “I should tackle the king with a light hand if I were you, Lowndes. They’ll hate you quite enough under any circumstances.

“That’s all very well. The man who looks on can talk about the light hand; but you can’t clean a pigsty with a pen dipped in rose-water. I know my risks; but nothing has happened yet. My servant’s an old Pathan, and he cooks for me. They are hardly likely to bribe him, and I don’t accept food from my true friends, as they call themselves. Oh, but it’s weary work! I’d sooner be with you, Spurstow. There’s shooting near your camp.”

“Would you? I don’t think it. About fifteen deaths a day don’t incite a man to shoot anything but himself. And the worst of it is that the poor devils look at you as though you ought to save them. Lord knows, I’ve tried everything. My last attempt was empirical, but it pulled an old man through. He was brought to me apparently past hope, and I gave him gin and Worcester sauce with cayenne. It cured him; but I don’t recommend it.”

“How do the cases run generally?” said Hummil.

“Very simply indeed. Chlorodyne, opium pill, chlorodyne, collapse, nitre, bricks to the feet, and then – the burning-ghaut. The last seems to be the only thing that stops the trouble. It’s black cholera, you know. Poor devils! But, I will say, little Bunsee Lal, my apothecary, works like a demon. I’ve recommended him for promotion if he comes through it all alive.”

“And what are your chances, old man?” said Mottram.

“Don’t know; don’t care much; but I’ve sent the letter in. What are you doing with yourself generally?”

“Sitting under a table in the tent and spitting on the sextant to keep it cool,” said the man of the survey. “Washing my eyes to avoid ophthalmia, which I shall certainly get, and trying to make a sub-surveyor understand that an error of five degrees in an angle isn’t quite so small as it looks. I’m altogether alone, y’ know, and shall be till the end of the hot weather.”

“Hummil’s the lucky man,” said Lowndes, flinging himself into a long chair. “He has an actual roof – torn as to the ceiling-cloth, but still a roof-over his head. He sees one train daily. He can get beer and soda-water and ice ’em when God is good. He has books, pictures – they were torn from the Graphic – and the society of the excellent sub-contractor Jevins, besides the pleasure of receiving us weekly.”

Hummil smiled grimly. “Yes, I’m the lucky man, I suppose. Jevins is luckier.”

“How? Not—”

“Yes. Went out. Last Monday.”

“By his own hand?” said Spurstow quickly, hinting the suspicion that was in everybody’s mind. There was no cholera near Hummil’s section. Even fever gives a man at least a week’s grace, and sudden death generally implied self-slaughter.

“I judge no man this weather,” said Hummil. “He had a touch of the sun, I fancy; for last week, after you fellows had left, he came into the verandah and told me that he was going home to see his wife, in Market Street, Liverpool, that evening.

“I got the apothecary in to look at him, and we tried to make him lie down. After an hour or two he rubbed his eyes and said he believed he had had a fit, hoped he hadn’t said anything rude. Jevins had a great idea of bettering himself socially. He was very like Chucks in his language.”

“Well?”

“Then he went to his own bungalow and began cleaning a rifle. He told the servant that he was going to shoot buck in the morning. Naturally he fumbled with the trigger, and shot himself through the head – accidentally. The apothecary sent in a report to my chief; and Jevins is buried somewhere out there. I’d have wired to you, Spurstow, if you could have done anything.”

“You’re a queer chap,” said Mottram. “If you’d killed the man yourself you couldn’t have been more quiet about the business.”

“Good Lord! what does it matter?” said Hummil calmly. “I’ve got to do a lot of his overseeing work in addition to my own. I’m the only person that suffers. Jevins is out of it, by pure accident, of course, but out of it. The apothecary was going to write a long screed on suicide. Trust a babu to drivel when he gets the chance.”

“Why didn’t you let it go in as suicide?” said Lowndes.

“No direct proof. A man hasn’t many privileges in his country, but he might at least be allowed to mishandle his own rifle. Besides, someday I may need a man to smother up an accident to myself. Live and let live. Die and let die.”

“You take a pill,” said Spurstow, who had been watching Hummil’s white face narrowly. “Take a pill, and don’t be an ass. That sort of talk is skittles. Anyhow, suicide is shirking your work. If I were Job ten times over, I should be so interested in what was going to happen next that I’d stay on and watch.”

“Ah! I’ve lost that curiosity,” said Hummil.

“Liver out of order?” said Lowndes feelingly.

“No. Can’t sleep. That’s worse.”

“By Jove, it is!” said Mottram. “I’m that way every now and then, and the fit has to wear itself out. What do you take for it?”

“Nothing. What’s the use? I haven’t had ten minutes’ sleep since Friday morning.”

“Poor chap! Spurstow, you ought to attend to this,” said Mottram. “Now you mention it, your eyes are rather gummy and swollen.”

Spurstow, still watching Hummil, laughed lightly. “I’ll patch him up, later on. Is it too hot, do you think, to go for a ride?”

“Where to?” said Lowndes wearily. “We shall have to go away at eight, and there’ll be riding enough for us then. I hate a horse when I have to use him as a necessity. Oh, heavens! what is there to do?”

“Begin whist again, at chick points [“a chick” is supposed to be eight shillings] and a gold mohur on the rub,” said Spurstow promptly.

“Poker. A month’s pay all round for the pool – no limit – and fifty-rupee raises. Somebody would be broken before we got up,” said Lowndes.

“Can’t say that it would give me any pleasure to break any man in this company,” said Mottram. “There isn’t enough excitement in it, and it’s foolish.” He crossed over to the worn and battered little camp-piano – wreckage of a married household that had once held the bungalow – and opened the case.

“It’s used up long ago,” said Hummil. “The servants have picked it to pieces.”

The piano was indeed hopelessly out of order, but Mottram managed to bring the rebellious notes into a sort of agreement, and there rose from the ragged keyboard something that might once have been the ghost of a popular music-hall song. The men in the long chairs turned with evident interest as Mottram banged the more lustily.

“That’s good!” said Lowndes. “By Jove! the last time I heard that song was in ’79, or thereabouts, just before I came out.”

“Ah!” said Spurstow with pride, “I was home in ’8o.” And he mentioned a song of the streets popular at that date.

Mottram executed it roughly. Lowndes criticized and volunteered emendations. Mottram dashed into another ditty, not of the music-hall character, and made as if to rise.

“Sit down,” said Hummil. “I didn’t know that you had any music in your composition. Go on playing until you can’t think of anything more. I’ll have that piano tuned up before you come again. Play something festive.”

Very simple indeed were the tunes to which Mottram’s art and the limitations of the piano could give effect, but the men listened with pleasure, and in the pauses talked all together of what they had seen or heard when they were last at home. A dense dust-storm sprung up outside, and swept roaring over the house, enveloping it in the choking darkness of midnight, but Mottram continued unheeding, and the crazy tinkle reached the ears of the listeners above the flapping of the tattered ceiling-cloth.

In the silence after the storm he glided from the more directly personal songs of Scotland, half humming them as he played, into the Evening Hymn.

“Sunday,” said he, nodding his head.

“Go on. Don’t apologize for it,” said Spurstow.

Hummil laughed long and riotously. “Play it, by all means. You’re full of surprises today. I didn’t know you had such a gift of finished sarcasm. How does that thing go?”

Mottram took up the tune.

“Too slow by half. You miss the note of gratitude,” said Hummil. “It ought to go to the ‘Grasshopper’s Polka’ – this way.” And he chanted, prestissimo,

“Glory to thee, my God, this night,

For all the blessings of the light.

That shows we really feel our blessings. How does it go on?—

If in the night I sleepless lie,

My soul with sacred thoughts supply;

May no ill dreams disturb my rest,—

Quicker, Mottram!—

Or powers of darkness me molest!”

“Bah! what an old hypocrite you are!”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Lowndes. “You are at full liberty to make fun of anything else you like, but leave that hymn alone. It’s associated in my mind with the most sacred recollections—”

“Summer evenings in the country, stained-glass window, light going out, and you and she jamming your heads together over one hymnbook,” said Mottram.

“Yes, and a fat old cockchafer hitting you in the eye when you walked home. Smell of hay, and a moon as big as a bandbox sitting on the top of a haycock; bats, roses, milk and midges,” said Lowndes.

“Also mothers. I can just recollect my mother singing me to sleep with that when I was a little chap,” said Spurstow.

The darkness had fallen on the room. They could hear Hummil squirming in his chair.

“Consequently,” said he testily, “you sing it when you are seven fathom deep in Hell! It’s an insult to the intelligence of the Deity to pretend we’re anything but tortured rebels.”

“Take two pills,” said Spurstow; “that’s tortured liver.”

“The usually placid Hummil is in a vile bad temper. I’m sorry for his coolies tomorrow,” said Lowndes, as the servants brought in the lights and prepared the table for dinner.

As they were settling into their places about the miserable goat-chops, and the smoked tapioca pudding, Spurstow took occasion to whisper to Mottram, “Well done, David!”

“Look after Saul, then,” was the reply.

“What are you two whispering about?” said Hummil suspiciously.

“Only saying that you are a damned poor host. This fowl can’t be cut,” returned Spurstow with a sweet smile. “Call this a dinner?”

“I can’t help it. You don’t expect a banquet, do you?”

Throughout that meal Hummil contrived laboriously to insult directly and pointedly all his guests in succession, and at each insult Spurstow kicked the aggrieved persons under the table; but he dared not exchange a glance of intelligence with either of them. Hummil’s face was white and pinched, while his eyes were unnaturally large. No man dreamed for a moment of resenting his savage personalities, but as soon as the meal was over they made haste to get away.

“Don’t go. You’re just getting amusing, you fellows. I hope I haven’t said anything that annoyed you. You’re such touchy devils.” Then, changing the note into one of almost abject entreaty, Hummil added, “I say, you surely aren’t going?”

“In the language of the blessed Jorrocks, where I dines I sleeps,” said Spurstow. “I want to have a look at your coolies tomorrow, if you don’t mind. You can give me a place to lie down in, I suppose?”

The others pleaded the urgency of their several duties next day, and, saddling up, departed together, Hummil begging them to come next Sunday. As they jogged off, Lowndes unbosomed himself to Mottram—

“… And I never felt so like kicking a man at his own table in my life. He said I cheated at whist, and reminded me I was in debt! Told you you were as good as a liar to your face! You aren’t half indignant enough over it.”

“Not I,” said Mottram. “Poor devil! Did you ever know old Hummy behave like that before or within a hundred miles of it?”

“That’s no excuse. Spurstow was hacking my shin all the time, so I kept a hand on myself. Else I should have—”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’d have done as Hummy did about Jevins; judge no man this weather. By Jove! the buckle of my bridle is hot in my hand! Trot out a bit, and ’ware rat-holes.”

Ten minutes’ trotting jerked out of Lowndes one very sage remark when he pulled up, sweating from every pore—

“Good thing Spurstow’s with him tonight.”

“Ye-es. Good man, Spurstow. Our roads turn here. See you again next Sunday, if the sun doesn’t bowl me over.”

“S’pose so, unless old Timbersides’ finance minister manages to dress some of my food. Goodnight, and – God bless you!”

“What’s wrong now?”

“Oh, nothing.” Lowndes gathered up his whip, and, as he flicked Mottram’s mare on the flank, added, “You’re not a bad little chap, that’s all.” And the mare bolted half a mile across the sand, on the word.

In the assistant engineer’s bungalow Spurstow and Hummil smoked the pipe of silence together, each narrowly watching the other. The capacity of a bachelor’s establishment is as elastic as its arrangements are simple. A servant cleared away the dining-room table, brought in a couple of rude native bedsteads made of tape strung on a light wood frame, flung a square of cool Calcutta matting over each, set them side by side, pinned two towels to the punkah so that their fringes should just sweep clear of the sleeper’s nose and mouth, and announced that the couches were ready.

The men flung themselves down, ordering the punkah-coolies by all the powers of Hell to pull. Every door and window was shut, for the outside air was that of an oven. The atmosphere within was only 104 degrees, as the thermometer bore witness, and heavy with the foul smell of badly-trimmed kerosene lamps; and this stench, combined with that of native tobacco, baked brick, and dried earth, sends the heart of many a strong man down to his boots, for it is the smell of the Great Indian Empire when she turns herself for six months into a house of torment. Spurstow packed his pillows craftily so that he reclined rather than lay, his head at a safe elevation above his feet. It is not good to sleep on a low pillow in the hot weather if you happen to be of thick-necked build, for you may pass with lively snores and gugglings from natural sleep into the deep slumber of heat-apoplexy.

“Pack your pillows,” said the doctor sharply, as he saw Hummil preparing to lie down at full length.

The night-light was trimmed; the shadow of the punkah wavered across the room, and the “flick” of the punkah-towel and the soft whine of the rope through the wall-hole followed it. Then the punkah flagged, almost ceased. The sweat poured from Spurstow’s brow. Should he go out and harangue the coolie? It started forward again with a savage jerk, and a pin came out of the towels. When this was replaced, a tomtom in the coolie-lines began to beat with the steady throb of a swollen artery inside some brain-fevered skull. Spurstow turned on his side and swore gently. There was no movement on Hummil’s part. The man had composed himself as rigidly as a corpse, his hands clinched at his sides. The respiration was too hurried for any suspicion of sleep. Spurstow looked at the set face. The jaws were clinched, and there was a pucker round the quivering eyelids.

“He’s holding himself as tightly as ever he can,” thought Spurstow. “What in the world is the matter with him? – Hummil!”

“Yes,” in a thick constrained voice.

“Can’t you get to sleep?”

“No.”

“Head hot? Throat feeling bulgy? or how?”

“Neither, thanks. I don’t sleep much, you know.”

“Feel pretty bad?”

“Pretty bad, thanks. There is a tomtom outside, isn’t there? I thought it was my head at first.… Oh, Spurstow, for pity’s sake give me something that will put me asleep, sound asleep, if it’s only for six hours!” He sprang up, trembling from head to foot. “I haven’t been able to sleep naturally for days, and I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”

“Poor old chap!”

“That’s no use. Give me something to make me sleep. I tell you I’m nearly mad. I don’t know what I say half my time. For three weeks I’ve had to think and spell out every word that has come through my lips before I dared say it. Isn’t that enough to drive a man mad? I can’t see things correctly now, and I’ve lost my sense of touch. My skin aches – my skin aches! Make me sleep. Oh, Spurstow, for the love of God make me sleep sound. It isn’t enough merely to let me dream. Let me sleep!”

“All right, old man, all right. Go slow; you aren’t half as bad as you think.”

The flood-gates of reserve once broken, Hummil was clinging to him like a frightened child. “You’re pinching my arm to pieces.”

“I’ll break your neck if you don’t do something for me. No, I didn’t mean that. Don’t be angry, old fellow.” He wiped the sweat off himself as he fought to regain composure. “I’m a bit restless and off my oats, and perhaps you could recommend some sort of sleeping mixture – bromide of potassium.”

“Bromide of skittles! Why didn’t you tell me this before? Let go of my arm, and I’ll see if there’s anything in my cigarette-case to suit your complaint.” Spurstow hunted among his day-clothes, turned up the lamp, opened a little silver cigarette-case, and advanced on the expectant Hummil with the daintiest of fairy squirts.

“The last appeal of civilization,” said he, “and a thing I hate to use. Hold out your arm. Well, your sleeplessness hasn’t ruined your muscle; and what a thick hide it is! Might as well inject a buffalo subcutaneously. Now in a few minutes the morphia will begin working. Lie down and wait.”

A smile of unalloyed and idiotic delight began to creep over Hummil’s face. “I think,” he whispered, – “I think I’m going off now. Gad! it’s positively heavenly! Spurstow, you must give me that case to keep; you—” The voice ceased as the head fell back.

“Not for a good deal,” said Spurstow to the unconscious form. “And now, my friend, sleeplessness of your kind being very apt to relax the moral fibre in little matters of life and death, I’ll just take the liberty of spiking your guns.”

He paddled into Hummil’s saddle-room in his bare feet and uncased a twelve-bore rifle, an express, and a revolver. Of the first he unscrewed the nipples and hid them in the bottom of a saddlery-case; of the second he abstracted the lever, kicking it behind a big wardrobe. The third he merely opened, and knocked the doll-head bolt of the grip up with the heel of a riding-boot.

“That’s settled,” he said, as he shook the sweat off his hands. “These little precautions will at least give you time to turn. You have too much sympathy with gun-room accidents.”

And as he rose from his knees, the thick muffled voice of Hummil cried in the doorway, “You fool!”

Such tones they use who speak in the lucid intervals of delirium to their friends a little before they die.

Spurstow started, dropping the pistol. Hummil stood in the doorway, rocking with helpless laughter.

“That was awf’ly good of you, I’m sure,” he said, very slowly, feeling for his words. “I don’t intend to go out by my own hand at present. I say, Spurstow, that stuff won’t work. What shall I do? What shall I do?” And panic terror stood in his eyes.

“Lie down and give it a chance. Lie down at once.”

“I daren’t. It will only take me half-way again, and I shan’t be able to get away this time. Do you know it was all I could do to come out just now? Generally I am as quick as lightning; but you had clogged my feet. I was nearly caught.”

“Oh yes, I understand. Go and lie down.”

“No, it isn’t delirium; but it was an awfully mean trick to play on me. Do you know I might have died?”

As a sponge rubs a slate clean, so some power unknown to Spurstow had wiped out of Hummil’s face all that stamped it for the face of a man, and he stood at the doorway in the expression of his lost innocence. He had slept back into terrified childhood.

“Is he going to die on the spot?” thought Spurstow. Then, aloud, “All right, my son. Come back to bed, and tell me all about it. You couldn’t sleep; but what was all the rest of the nonsense?”

“A place, a place down there,” said Hummil, with simple sincerity. The drug was acting on him by waves, and he was flung from the fear of a strong man to the fright of a child as his nerves gathered sense or were dulled.

“Good God! I’ve been afraid of it for months past, Spurstow. It has made every night hell to me; and yet I’m not conscious of having done anything wrong.”

“Be still, and I’ll give you another-dose. We’ll stop your nightmares, you unutterable idiot!”

“Yes, but you must give me so much that I can’t get away. You must make me quite sleepy, not just a little sleepy. It’s so hard to run then.”

“I know it; I know it. I’ve felt it myself. The symptoms are exactly as you describe.”

“Oh, don’t laugh at me, confound you! Before this awful sleeplessness came to me I’ve tried to rest on my elbow and put a spur in the bed to sting me when I fell back. Look!”

“By Jove! the man has been rowelled like a horse! Ridden by the nightmare with a vengeance! And we all thought him sensible enough. Heaven send us understanding! You like to talk, don’t you?”

“Yes, sometimes. Not when I’m frightened. Then I want to run. Don’t you?”

“Always. Before I give you your second dose try to tell me exactly what your trouble is.”

Hummil spoke in broken whispers for nearly ten minutes, whilst Spurstow looked into the pupils of his eyes and passed his hand before them once or twice.

At the end of the narrative the silver cigarette-case was produced, and the last words that Hummil said as he fell back for the second time were, “Put me quite to sleep; for if I’m caught I die, I die!”

“Yes, yes; we all do that sooner or later, thank Heaven who has set a term to our miseries,” said Spurstow, settling the cushions under the head. “It occurs to me that unless I drink something I shall go out before my time. I’ve stopped sweating, and – I wear a seventeen-inch collar.” He brewed himself scalding hot tea, which is an excellent remedy against heat-apoplexy if you take three or four cups of it in time. Then he watched the sleeper.

“A blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes, a blind face that chases him down corridors! H’m! Decidedly, Hummil ought to go on leave as soon as possible; and, sane or otherwise, he undoubtedly did rowel himself most cruelly. Well, Heaven send us understanding!”

At midday Hummil rose, with an evil taste in his mouth, but an unclouded eye and a joyful heart.

“I was pretty bad last night, wasn’t I?” said he.

“I have seen healthier men. You must have had a touch of the sun. Look here: if I write you a swinging medical certificate, will you apply for leave on the spot?”

“No.”

“Why not? You want it.”

“Yes, but I can hold on till the weather’s a little cooler.”

“Why should you, if you can get relieved on the spot?”

“Burkett is the only man who could be sent; and he’s a born fool.”

“Oh, never mind about the line. You aren’t so important as all that. Wire for leave, if necessary.”

Hummil looked very uncomfortable.

“I can hold on till the Rains,” he said evasively.

“You can’t. Wire to headquarters for Burkett.”

“I won’t. If you want to know why, particularly, Burkett is married, and his wife’s just had a kid, and she’s up at Simla, in the cool, and Burkett has a very nice billet that takes him into Simla from Saturday to Monday. That little woman isn’t at all well. If Burkett was transferred she’d try to follow him. If she left the baby behind she’d fret herself to death. If she came – and Burkett’s one of those selfish little beasts who are always talking about a wife’s place being with her husband – she’d die. It’s murder to bring a woman here just now. Burkett hasn’t the physique of a rat. If he came here he’d go out; and I know she hasn’t any money, and I’m pretty sure she’d go out too. I’m salted in a sort of way, and I’m not married. Wait till the Rains, and then Burkett can get thin down here. It’ll do him heaps of good.”

“Do you mean to say that you intend to face – what you have faced, till the Rains break?”

“Oh, it won’t be so bad, now you’ve shown me a way out of it. I can always wire to you. Besides, now I’ve once got into the way of sleeping, it’ll be all right. Anyhow, I shan’t put in for leave. That’s the long and the short of it.”

“My great Scott! I thought all that sort of thing was dead and done with.”

“Bosh! You’d do the same yourself. I feel a new man, thanks to that cigarette-case. You’re going over to camp now, aren’t you?”

“Yes; but I’ll try to look you up every other day, if I can.”

“I’m not bad enough for that. I don’t want you to bother. Give the coolies gin and ketchup.”

“Then you feel all right?”

“Fit to fight for my life, but not to stand out in the sun talking to you. Go along, old man, and bless you!”

Hummil turned on his heel to face the echoing desolation of his bungalow, and the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself. He had met a similar apparition once before, when he was suffering from overwork and the strain of the hot weather.

“This is bad – already,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “If the thing slides away from me all in one piece, like a ghost, I shall know it is only my eyes and stomach that are out of order. If it walks – my head is going.”

He approached the figure, which naturally kept at an unvarying distance from him, as is the use of all spectres that are born of overwork. It slid through the house and dissolved into swimming specks within the eyeball as soon as it reached the burning light of the garden. Hummil went about his business till even. When he came in to dinner he found himself sitting at the table. The vision rose and walked out hastily. Except that it cast no shadow it was in all respects real.

No living man knows what that week held for Hummil. An increase of the epidemic kept Spurstow in camp among the coolies, and all he could do was to telegraph to Mottram, bidding him go to the bungalow and sleep there. But Mottram was forty miles away from the nearest telegraph, and knew nothing of anything save the needs of the survey till he met, early on Sunday morning, Lowndes and Spurstow heading towards Hummil’s for the weekly gathering.

“Hope the poor chap’s in a better temper,” said the former, swinging himself off his horse at the door. “I suppose he isn’t up yet.”

“I’ll just have a look at him,” said the doctor. “If he’s asleep there’s no need to wake him.”

And an instant later, by the tone of Spurstow’s voice calling upon them to enter, the men knew what had happened. There was no need to wake him.

The punkah was still being pulled over the bed, but Hummil had departed this life at least three hours.

The body lay on its back, hands clinched by the side, as Spurstow had seen it lying seven nights previously. In the staring eyes was written terror beyond the expression of any pen.

Mottram, who had entered behind Lowndes, bent over the dead and touched the forehead lightly with his lips. “Oh, you lucky, lucky devil!” he whispered.

But Lowndes had seen the eyes, and withdrew shuddering to the other side of the room.

“Poor chap! poor old chap! Arid the last time I met him I was angry. Spurstow, we should have watched him. Has he—?”

Deftly Spurstow continued his investigations, ending by a search round the room.

“No, he hasn’t,” he snapped. “There’s no trace of anything. Call the servants.”

They came, eight or ten of them, whispering and peering over each other’s shoulders.

“When did your Sahib go to bed?” said Spurstow.

“At eleven or ten, we think,” said Hummil’s personal servant.

“He was well then? But how should you know?”

“He was not ill, as far as our comprehension extended. But he had slept very little for three nights. This I know, because I saw him walking much, and specially in the heart of the night.”

As Spurstow was arranging the sheet, a big straight-necked hunting-spur tumbled on the ground. The doctor groaned. The personal servant peeped at the body.

“What do you think, Chuma?” said Spurstow, catching the look on the dark face.

“Heaven-born, in my poor opinion, this that was my master has descended into the Dark Places, and there has been caught because he was not able to escape with sufficient speed. We have the spur for evidence that he fought with Fear. Thus have I seen men of my race do with thorns when a spell was laid upon them to overtake them in their sleeping hours and they dared not sleep.”

“Chuma, you’re a mud-head. Go out and prepare seals to be set on the Sahib’s property.”

“God has made the Heaven-born. God has made me. Who are we, to enquire into the dispensations of God? I will bid the other servants hold aloof while you are reckoning the tale of the Sahib’s property. They are all thieves, and would steal.”

“As far as I can make out, he died from – oh, anything; stoppage of the heart’s action, heat-apoplexy, or some other visitation,” said Spurstow to his companions. “We must make an inventory of his effects, and so on.”

“He was scared to death,” insisted Lowndes. “Look at those eyes! For pity’s sake don’t let him be buried with them open!”

“Whatever it was, he’s clear of all the trouble now,” said Mottram softly.

Spurstow was peering into the open eyes.

“Come here,” said he. “Can you see anything there?”

“I can’t face it!” whimpered Lowndes. “Cover up the face! Is there any fear on earth that can turn a man into that likeness? It’s ghastly. Oh, Spurstow, cover it up!”

“No fear – on earth,” said Spurstow. Mottram leaned over his shoulder and looked intently.

“I see nothing except some grey blurs in the pupil. There can be nothing there, you know.”

“Even so. Well, let’s think. It’ll take half a day to knock up any sort of coffin; and he must have died at midnight. Lowndes, old man, go out and tell the coolies to break ground next to Jevins’s grave. Mottram, go round the house with Chuma and see that the seals are put on things. Send a couple of men to me here, and I’ll arrange.”

The strong-armed servants when they returned to their own kind told a strange story of the doctor Sahib vainly trying to call their master back to life by magic arts – to wit, the holding of a little green box that clicked to each of the dead man’s eyes, and of a bewildered muttering on the part of the doctor Sahib, who took the little green box away with him.

The resonant hammering of a coffin-lid is no pleasant thing to hear, but those who have experience maintain that much more terrible is the soft swish of the bed-linen, the reeving and unreeving of the bed-tapes, when he who has fallen by the roadside is apparelled for burial, sinking gradually as the tapes are tied over, till the swaddled shape touches the floor and there is no protest against the indignity of hasty disposal.

At the last moment Lowndes was seized with scruples of conscience. “Ought you to read the service, from beginning to end?” said he to Spurstow.

“I intend to. You’re my senior as a civilian. You can take it if you like.”

“I didn’t mean that for a moment. I only thought if we could get a chaplain from somewhere, I’m willing to ride anywhere, and give poor Hummil a better chance. That’s all.”

“Bosh!” said Spurstow, as he framed his lips to the tremendous words that stand at the head of the burial service.

•   •   •   •   •

After breakfast they smoked a pipe in silence to the memory of the dead. Then Spurstow said absently—

“’Tisn’t medical science.”

“What?”

“Things in a dead man’s eye.”

“For goodness’ sake leave that horror alone!” said Lowndes. “I’ve seen a native die of pure fright when a tiger chivied him. I know what killed Hummil.”

“The deuce you do! I’m going to try to see.” Arid the doctor retreated into the bathroom with a Kodak camera. After a few minutes there was the sound of something being hammered to pieces, and he emerged, very white indeed.

“Have you got a picture?” said Mottram. “What does the thing look like?”

“It was impossible, of course. You needn’t look, Mottram. I’ve torn up the films. There was nothing there. It was impossible.”

“That,” said Lowndes, very distinctly, watching the shaking hand striving to relight the pipe, “is a damned lie.”

Mottram laughed uneasily. “Spurstow’s right,” he said. “We’re all in such a state now that we’d believe anything. For pity’s sake let’s try to be rational.”

There was no further speech for a long time. The hot wind whistled without, and the dry trees sobbed. Presently the daily train, winking brass, burnished steel, and spouting steam, pulled up panting in the intense glare. “We’d better go on that,” said Spurstow. “Go back to work. I’ve written my certificate. We can’t do any more good here, and work’ll keep our wits together. Come on.”

No one moved. It is not pleasant to face railway journeys at midday in June. Spurstow gathered up his hat and whip, and, turning in the doorway, said—

“There may be Heaven-there must be Hell.

Meantime, there is our life here. We-ell?”

Neither Mottram nor Lowndes had any answer to the question.

THE DARK SHADOW

Wirt Gerrare

1895

In November, 1888, I was ordered to relieve Nurse Rose at Bracknal House, Ebery, where she had been her full term of six weeks. It was a hopeless case, and I had of late had so many that I felt disheartened, and was so dismayed at the cheerless aspect of the deserted, straggling village, and more particularly of the lonely house on its outskirts, that I was inclined to sacrifice my career and return forthwith to Kyrwick with Nurse Rose: many times since I have wished that I had done so. Nurse Rose was not long in getting away; a farmer drove her to the station. I watched the spring-cart as long as it was in sight, then shut the heavy iron gate in the old high wall, and burst out crying.

I walked slowly up the weedy path through the neglected and desolate garden, with its dark gloomy evergreens and leafless old trees. It was already becoming dark, and I saw, or thought I saw, something like a human figure, dimly discernible, crouching behind some overgrown and gnarled espaliers at the far end of the garden. I hastened to the front door, which I had left ajar; but it closed with a bang before I reached it, and no sooner had the echo it produced died out than I heard an ominous chuckle; it seemed close at my side. There was nothing for it but to make my way round by the espaliers to the other door, and this I did with face averted and as fast as my legs could take me. The little village girl, our sole establishment, was astonished to see me out of breath and sobbing in her kitchen; my manner frightened her, and she never got over her aversion, which was unfortunate, for she and her mother, who came once or twice to char, were the only people to speak to.

My unfortunate patient, however, required constant care. Poor woman, I hardly knew how to take her at first; she was so importunate, so querulous, so insistent upon constant and immediate attention, that I thought she would weary me to death; but I found that it was because she was afraid to be alone, and not that she had determined to have the full value of her money in service, as it is the manner of some coarse natures to exact. For fifty years she had lived alone and uncared for in that dreary village, unloving and unloved; there appeared to be no relative to solace her age, or comfort her dying moments with sympathy. To the doctor also she was almost a stranger, and although she suffered from a wondrous number of diseases, not one had the merit of being uncommon or interesting. Chronic bronchitis, with dropsy, a sphacelitic limb and senile atrophy, are merely troublesome and hopeless.

It was indeed a dreadful time. The close, stuffy sickroom with bronchitis-kettle always steaming, and the air reeking of iodoform, nauseous compounds, and the ever-prevailing odour of death; the huge four-post bedstead and its heavy curtains; the heavy, well-polished press; the equally substantial and inelegant chest-upon-chest; the dirty and foxed engravings in their worm-eaten frames; the badly-polished bare floor and rush-bottomed, cruelly angular, and impossible chairs; these and other reminders of that age when people regarded hardship, torture, and agony as daily necessaries, all added to the prevailing gloom – a gloom which was not enlivened by such glimpses of day as one obtained through the small latticed window, o’er-shadowed by the huge arms of an elm from which the vigour of youth had long since departed.

Then the doctor, a grumpy, dried-up, ill-at-ease old bachelor, whom nothing could please, barely noticed me – I suppose I have Nurse Rose to thank for that – and had nothing to say to his patient. Then the mild-faced, soulless curate, who was a sort of hereditary incumbent, nephew to a vicar who invariably wintered in the South and passed the summer in Scotland. The charwoman, Kate’s mother, a grasping, cruel, bargain-driving peasant woman, and a young, very boorish, taciturn farmer, who drove me back to the station at Soltun-in-the-Marsh, were the only other persons to whom I spoke except the village lawyer, Mr. Shum. He came but once, ostensibly to see Mrs. Bailey, and assure me that the nursing-fee would be paid; really I think to see me; for he asked me to visit him at Frog Hall – what a name for a house! – on Sunday afternoon and try his Madeira. A would-be waggish and not at all nice man, Mr. Shum. I was glad when his visit ended.

Then out-of-doors dull November; dead leaves strewn thickly over dank grass, and muddy roads, rotten sticks which cracked, and bursting acorns which crunched beneath one’s feet; a sleepy village, with dirty cottages, dilapidated church, and a barn for a school; pools of water in fields and roads, and ponds hidden by dead rushes; drizzle, fog, the churchyard smell of Nature in extremis; no paint, no life, no colour, no solidity anywhere visible; rather decrepit walls, worn-out thatch, cracking boughs, huge, waving black poplars – their sooty trunks at every angle but a right one – moist leaves and skeletons of leaves; old withered hags; children of stunted growth; dejected curs too ill to yelp; heavy-limbed, leaden-eyed, listless men; lazy pigs rooting for offal. Such are my recollections of Ebery.

All through, the house was cheerless. In the damp, unused hall an old mildewed hunting-whip hung against the wall over the head of a mangy fox, which, cut off close behind the ears, and with only one glass eye, grinned like a death’s head at a moth-eaten jay perched in a broken case over the door. The rooms were even more gloomy: threadbare carpets, the furniture rickety and angular and scant; the curtains thin, colourless, and patched; the linen blinds of mousy Isabella hue and full of holes, and the ceiling cracked and dirty, and ornamented with long-deserted cobwebs; and peering into the gloom of the corners one noticed tiny heaps of wood dust and the shrivelled-up corpses of insects long since dead. There was no sign of life, neither cat, nor dog, neither mouse nor fly; a stray reptile which had wandered from the congenial dampness of the moss-covered yard had yielded its low life, and lay mummified on the flagged floor at the edge of a mat too rotten to raise.

•   •   •   •   •

On the second day, Kate, our tiny, juvenile maid-of-all-work, told me that on the third floor, in the room farthest from that in which my patient lay, a man lived. “The woman’s son,” she said,“a poor creature, but evil disposed; at enmity with his dying mother, and barely able to keep life in his own body.” Kate attended to him, but he mostly foraged for himself when she was absent from the kitchen, for he possessed the cunning common to those whose intellect has only in part developed.

For more than a fortnight my life there was simply dull. There was no change in the condition of the patient; she was not only resigned to death, but anxious for a termination to her suffering. The little girl attended to us as she was able, but was an unconscionable time on her errands. The doctor came in and hummed and hahed; the curate called thrice, the postman called once – with a note for me from the matron – and time dragged on, my odd hours being spent in reading aloud Paley’s Evidences, or Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying, to my listless patient.

The monotony was becoming dreadful; it wanted but a month to Christmas, and it seemed possible that I should have to while it away amidst the infestivity of Ebery.

In the middle drawer of the chest-upon-chest was a little store of money upon which we drew for our daily supplies. As I saw it dwindle to very small proportions, I fear I longed for it to become exhausted; only in order to see where the next supply, if any, would come from; everything was so insulse. My patient, I thought, took very little interest in it, until one day she accidentally lisped something which made me more careful of her trifling hoard; she was not a lovable object, barely likeable, but really I felt more for her than for many who were far more interesting.

On the last Friday in November I noticed a change; there could be no doubt she was sinking fast. This the doctor corroborated; she had repeatedly asked him when the end would come. He was now able to tell her. “At four o’clock today,” he said shortly. He bade her a more kindly farewell than I thought him capable of, gave me a few final instructions, bade me goodbye, and went.

My patient seemed much relieved; she would not allow me to send for the curate, “Not again, nurse, not again – you will stay with me – tell no one,” she whispered. Of course I reassured her, and I told no one.

“When’s her goin’ to die” asked Kate bluntly, the next time I entered the kitchen.

I answered as kindly as I could.

“’Cos I ain’t a goin’ to stay here while her’s dyin’. Mother says I needn’t.”

“What has your mother to do with it?”

“D’yer think I’d be here now if ’twarn’t fur mother? Her’d thrape me if I went whum, but her sed I needn’t stay while her’s dyin’.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Afeared! A course I’m afeared, so you’ll be by-and-by. I suppose you dursen’t leave?”

“I should not think of leaving, nor must you,” I replied, and I escaped quickly from the kitchen, for there was something in the girl’s manner which alarmed me.

Slowly the hours went by, the silence broken only by the often reiterated “How long?” or “What time is it now?” of my patient, in whose condition there was no change. As it grew dusk I put the clock on half an hour and lit my small lamp. Four o’clock came; five o’clock; my patient grew restless. Six; seven; she accused me of deceiving her. And so on until midnight, when she fell into a troubled sleep. In the morning she seemed stronger, but depressed in spirits, and I could not rouse her.

On Saturdays Kate’s mother went to char at Frog Hall. No one came to Bracknal House. Hour after hour crawled slowly by. My patient besought me to end her suffering; if only I would give her a treble dose of medicine, or snatch from under her the pillows on which she was propped; anything which would snap the slender thread which held her to this world. These requests were so earnest, so often repeated, the state of the patient so piteous, that I fear I became somewhat unnerved. Once only I looked out of the window; and saw an old man with his spade over his shoulder limping towards the churchyard. I turned quickly away, and my patient recommenced. She upbraided me with want of heart; reproached me for my attentions to her, and cried at my refusal to do her wish. “If I only had more money to give, you would do it, you know you would,” she gasped exasperatingly, and all I could do was to sit at the dressing table, with my back towards her, my head upon my hand, and bear with it. All through that long Saturday, all through the long, long dreary night, I had to hear it; often with hands clenched and grinding teeth, and my heart listening to what I could not shut my ears to.

At last day broke. My patient was worn, and I half mad; our solitude was unbearable. I told Kate she would have to sit with my patient, and I – went to church: made my way through the thick fog which hung over the village, but cleared to show me a newly-dug grave yawning beneath the dripping yew. Everyone knew that Mrs. Bailey was dead; the doctor had told them so. They appeared, too, surprised to see me, but after service no one spoke to me except the doctor.

“Why has not Shum sent up his man to take you to the station?” he asked. I told him it was probably because his patient was not yet dead.

“She died at four o’clock on Friday afternoon,” he said. “Confound it, won’t you understand?”

“I am afraid I do not.”

The doctor fumed. “The thing is done!” he said. “I made out the certificate yesterday, Fluck has it now, he’ll be round for the body tomorrow. You understand, don’t you?”

“I think it will be best for you to come with me now,” I answered.

“I? Oh, no, not again. I can do nothing. Good morning.”

I went back alone, Kate seemed stupefied with terror at having been left so long; in an hour or so things resumed their usual course.

As soon as possible I shut out the heavy day, but I could not make the room cheery; even my lamp refused to burn, and had to be replaced with snuffy candles. As I turned over the words of the doctor, and looked at the patient, I thought it strange that the woman was not dead. “Why could she not die?”

Perhaps I spoke the question; at any rate the patient understood; she groaned. “I will tell you, nurse, I will tell you. I shall not die today unless you – ah, you won’t! but listen to me.”

I drew a chair near, and bent over to hear her story, told in short gasps: painfully, disconnectedly, but understandable.

More than fifty years ago, she said, she had loved the man who owned the house in which we were. During his absence she was faithless, or rather was coerced into marrying Mr. Bailey, a man of fierce temper and violent disposition, and who was both cruel and resentful. When her lover returned he committed suicide, “here in this room,” she gasped – “with a saddle-pistol – at dead of night, on the last day of November, fifty years ago.”

“And your husband?”

“He swore that I had been false, and left me, but vowed that – in fifty years – dead or alive – he would return and be avenged on me. ‘When your dead lover will no longer be able to protect you,’ as he said.”

“But your husband is dead?”

“Yes, yes, dead.”

“And your son?”

“That thing! He hates me – hates me – more than his father did.”

“But you have not injured him?”

“No, but – I could not love – him – and he has – cursed me.”

“What can you fear? None can hurt you.”

“What can you know, child? For fifty years I have never been outside but ill befell me, it is only here – in the house where he died – that there is peace – for I am forgiven by him; I must join him before the other returns,”

“No, no,” I replied quickly, “you will soon be at peace; where nought can trouble you more.”

“No. It is not true.”

The deathbed is no place for argument. My patient was terribly agitated, so anxious did she appear to hear my answer, that her look frightened me. I took her hard, wrinkled hand in mine, and kneeling prayed for her earnestly, and as I prayed I heard short mocking laughs, and at each she clutched at my hand convulsively as if in terror. I dared not look up, my tongue was stilled, I shook with fright. Then all was silent except the heavy short breathing of the patient, her broken sobs and bronchial hiss. In time I gained sufficient courage to look up. Her terror-stricken gaze filled me with despair; I would have prayed but could not.

My patient was the first to speak.

“You are afraid.”

“No, no,” I answered.

“Then pray,”

I could not. I passed my hand over my face, tried to persuade myself that I was only weak, nervous from long watching, that really I was not afraid; but I got up from the bedside, and said that I would call Kate to serve tea – that I felt faint. The look of anguish on my patient’s face as I made these poor excuses was heart-rending, and filled me with shame. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding her piteous appeal to remain with her, I went along the corridor to the head of the stairs, and called Kate. There was no answer. I went down to the kitchen; it was empty, and the fire had burned out. I called again and again, but obtained no reply. Loneliness brought back the feeling of fright, and I turned upstairs eager for companionship – even that of my dying patient.

I paused at the top of the stairs, determining to regain courage. Everything was explicable. Kate had run away home. There was nothing to fear; no harm could come to me. I ought to be ashamed of my cowardice. I was too familiar with death for that to frighten me, and these and kindred thoughts resolved me to be brave; but my newly-recovered courage quickly left me, when, as I neared the bedroom door, I heard sounds which my patient, bedridden as she was, could not possibly have made. Footsteps were audible, the drawing out of drawers, angry exclamations, splutterings, mingled with the groans of my patient. I remember peering into the room and seeing the strange form of a man, at the head of the bed, bending over it. I drew hastily back. Then came a faint cry, “Nurse! Nurse!” I fear that I staggered rather than walked into the room. Something told me that it was only the son; and with any living creature I felt able to deal.

This strange creature was gesticulating violently a few inches from his mother’s face, muttering incoherently, occasionally spluttering words which were half intelligible, “Papersh – crrsse.”

“What is it you want?” I asked firmly. He turned his face towards me, a small, pinched-up hairless face, with eyes deep sunken, and lips drawn tightly across broken teeth. He was wretchedly clothed, and his ill-shapen form thin to attenuation; his limbs were long, but his body bowed – a wasted, fleshless, cretinous creature who might have been seventeen or seventy for all one could tell, but evidently weak and unable to control his movements.

He hissed a reply, the import of which I did not understand.

“You must go, if you please,” I said. “I have to attend to my patient.”

He understood, for he expostulated energetically.

“At once, please,” I said, holding the door.

I never saw a face so full of evil, perfectly demoniacal in its malignance. “Crsse womssh,” he hissed; but he did not go.

Unfortunately I could not hear my patient, nor could I approach closer whilst he was there. I therefore grasped him firmly by the arm, thinking to remove him; but as my fingers closed I felt that he was as strong and unyielding as one in a cataleptic fit, and instinctively my fingers relaxed until there was but the slightest pressure. “You must go now, please,” I said. “Come again if you wish – in an hour.”

Somewhat to my surprise he yielded, reluctantly it is true, and with jerky movements made his way to the door, hissing and muttering and gesticulating wildly with his hands. No sooner had he passed the threshold than I sprang to the door, shut it upon him, and locked it.

He turned in a terrific fury, hammered at the door, and made the house echo with weird, horrible noises. I appreciated the mistake I had made, and opened the door, but blocked the entrance by confronting him.

“Have you forgotten anything?” I asked as calmly as I could.

A grimace was his only reply.

“Come when you will after eight o’clock,” I continued, “but come quietly; you must go now.” I tendered him a candle, pretending it was that he had forgotten. He motioned that he did not need it, and turned away. “The door will be unlocked after eight, but do not trouble us without cause,” I called after him.

The poor patient was decidedly worse. I comforted her as well as circumstances permitted. I must confess that I was elated at the success of my encounter with the intruder. After I had made and taken tea, and thought the matter over, I concluded that my senses had been deceived, and that I had frightened myself needlessly; in short, I recovered my nerve, and awaited composedly to carry out whatever wishes my patient might express. She requested that I should read to her, and this I did. It seemed to distract her attention from herself, but not for long; then she made me promise that I would not leave her again that night for anything; to this I agreed. I sat close to the bed and kept her hand in mine, only loosing it when I needed both to minister to her wants. I remember well looking into her face, and trying to trace in the coarse features the beauty which half a century before had attracted two men, and years before that had doubtless been the happy, smiling face of a child. I was not very successful, for surely never were human lineaments so brutalised by selfishness and fear; but I felt an intimacy as of years. What little there was in her life I knew, and I remember that I felt puzzled then, as I am puzzled now, as to what useful purpose such an existence as hers had been could serve.

She regarded me as her sole hope, gazed at me with a look of longing that was akin to love, and listened to every trifling thing I said, as though her salvation depended upon understanding it. No one, I am sure, had extended sympathy to her, and it was that she lacked. My talk was of such trifling matters as are distinctly human, and she became so far interested as to forget her immediate state. I was pleased that I had calmed her terrors, and she appeared to be so grateful for the relation of the few trifling private occurrences which concerned only myself, that I ventured to tell her of a weightier matter, one which I approached with some diffidence, and blushing like a school girl; a matter I would have confided to a loving mother, perhaps to one other; but its relation to this poor dying woman was as pleasing to her as it was surprising to me. How I came to say so much I do not know; perhaps because I knew she was dying, and would keep my poor little secret. Of course I was crying when my story finished, and the tears were rolling down her fat, furrowed cheeks too. It was unutterably silly, but I kissed her; then dried my eyes, and stood at the foot of the bed looking at her confusedly.

“God bless you, dear,” she whispered, and turned her face away. Perhaps I had touched a chord which the orthodox and usual conversation would have missed.

Then I sat down at the table and wrote for a short time in my journal; read again to my patient, but she seemed to wish to chat. She complimented me upon the prettiness of our uniform, expressed herself as satisfied with the white cuffs and the long streamers to the cap. I wished to humour her, and crossed over and snuffed the candle, that she could see better, and she told me that I was really handsome and carried my ——— odd years like a girl of seventeen. I just bowed my head and replaced the snuffers, and when I looked up I saw a man’s face staring at me out of the highly polished wood of the wardrobe. I remember that I drew a very quick breath, and the face, which had anything but a pleasing expression upon it, slowly died away from view as I looked.

I did not cry out; I do not think that I betrayed my fear by any tremor. I could not trust myself to speak, nor should I have spoken of what I had seen; but the very silence seemed to convey a knowledge of all to the dying woman.

“What time?” she murmured.

“A quarter past twelve,” I replied.

“No. You are fast.”

I remembered then that I had put on my clock fully thirty minutes ahead on the day upon which she was to have died.

“Perhaps,” I replied.

“Yes, yes. Do not leave me – you do not know.” Then came some terrible gasps, and she was shaken with convulsive tremors.

I made a supreme effort to be calm; I felt that I must see something beyond that terrible room. I went to the window, and pulling aside the blind looked out into the night. I was surprised to see that the fog had lifted, the moon shone brightly, the whole garden from the house to the gate was clearly visible. There was of course no one stirring; the silence was only broken by the dripping of the fog-damp from the boughs. As I gazed at the gate I distinctly heard it clang as though pushed to in haste, but it had not stirred. There was something coming along the path, for I heard the footsteps as of a person stealing, as on tip-toe, towards the house; it was clearer than day, but I could see no one – no thing.

“Nurse – nurse – it comes!”

I went to the bed, and took the woman’s hand in mine; she clung to it with all the strength of her feeble grasp.

“I will not leave you,” I stammered.

Again that face appeared in the wardrobe – was there when I looked, and faded away before my gaze.

The head of the bedstead was towards the door. I stood with my back to the door, facing the fireplace; on my left, the window; on the right, the bed; and beyond it, at the foot, the table, with the candle burning brightly upon it. I am thus particular because the occurrences of that night can be set down only as I remember them, not perhaps in the order of their exact sequence.

First (of that I am sure) the son came into the room, staggering, staring blindly, and ever blinking his strange deeply-sunk eyes. He groped his way to the wardrobe, opened it, and passed his hands along the upper shelves; brought from there a small bundle of yellow papers, waved them above his head in an unmeaning fashion, and with them tottered from the room. His young-old wizened face, his terribly emaciated frame, and his expression of wicked cunning, I can see now as plainly as though he stood before me as he did then, and as I write I hear the peculiar chuckle, the only sound he made then.

His footsteps died away in the corridor. All around, in the house and out of it, everything was still – still as the dreadful calm before the hurricane. The silence was broken by two sharp blows, as though struck with a withy switch on the windowpane. There was a firmer grip of my hand, a muttered cry of “Help!” and I reeled as I saw glide into the room a shapeless, shadowy pillar of sooty blackness, larger than human size, but with a form no better defined than that of a huge cactus: without marks, or lines, or excrescences.

It passed round to the foot of the bed, my gaze firmly riveted upon it. For a moment it passed between me and the candle, and obscured the light, and I remember noticing that the bronchitis-kettle on the fire ceased to emit its tiny puff of steam; then it again moved to the foot of the bed, and the room instantly and perceptibly darkened, just like the darkening of the stage at a second-rate theatre, when they alter the scene from noonday to dusk. Then this thing extended; as it were a shapeless shadowy arm, or limb was stretching from one side and closing the door of the wardrobe; then instantly another, like the trunk of an elephant, reached out to the candle, enveloped and extinguished it; all in very much less time than I can recall the memory. Then, in the glow of the fire and the dim light of the moon shining through the dirty, stained blinds, this sooty shadow extended upwards, bent under the canopy of the bedstead, reached in a straight line from the head to the foot of the bed immediately above the dying woman, then spread out in breadth and descended. There was a bright flash of light, a loud shriek from the corridor, a convulsive tug at my hand; voices, the hurrying of many feet, low groans, ear-piercing yells, sobs, stifled cries – but I had swooned.

When I recovered, the room was still dark, and I was alone. The candle had burned out in the socket; there was a dull, red glow from the lower bars of the grate, and all was still, the silence broken only by the almost inaudible slow ticking of my clock.

I knew that my patient was dead.

There is very little more to tell. The affairs of the dead are no concern of mine, and the little I said to the doctor next day elicited only the fact that Mrs. Bailey had occupied the house at a peppercorn rent for fifty years. The lease ended, strange to say, the day of her death; and as she appeared to be very poor, it is possible that this may have made her anxious to quit the world when she did.

My stay at the house of the dark shadow almost terminated my career as a nurse. My nerve was shattered, and for a long time I was too ill to undertake any duty. However, twelve months amid the brighter surroundings of a convalescent home have assisted my recovery, although, I am sure, the events will never fade from my memory, nor, I fancy, will their freshness be impaired by new adventures.

OH, WHISTLE
AND I’LL COME TO YOU,
MY LAD

M. R. James

1904

“I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over, Professor,” said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James’s College.

The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

“Yes,” he said; “my friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast – in point of fact to Burnstow – (I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off tomorrow.”

“Oh, Parkins,” said his neighbour on the other side, “if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’ preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer.”

It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need to give his entitlements.

“Certainly,” said Parkins, the Professor: “if you will describe to me whereabouts the site is, I will do my best to give you an idea of the lie of the land when I get back; or I could write to you about it, if you would tell me where you are likely to be.”

“Don’t trouble to do that, thanks. It’s only that I’m thinking of taking my family in that direction in the Long [summer vacation], and it occurred to me that, as very few of the English preceptories have ever been properly planned, I might have an opportunity of doing something useful on off-days.”

The Professor rather sniffed at the idea that planning out a preceptory could be described as useful. His neighbour continued:

“The site – I doubt if there is anything showing above ground – must be down quite close to the beach now. The sea has encroached tremendously, as you know, all along that bit of coast. I should think, from the map, that it must be about three-quarters of a mile from the Globe Inn, at the north end of the town. Where are you going to stay?”

“Well, at the Globe Inn, as a matter of fact,” said Parkins; “I have engaged a room there. I couldn’t get in anywhere else; most of the lodging-houses are shut up in winter, it seems; and, as it is, they tell me that the only room of any size I can have is really a double-bedded one, and that they haven’t a corner in which to store the other bed, and so on. But I must have a fairly large room, for I am taking some books down, and mean to do a bit of work; and though I don’t quite fancy having an empty bed – not to speak of two – in what I may call for the time being my study, I suppose I can manage to rough it for the short time I shall be there.”

“Do you call having an extra bed in your room roughing it, Parkins?” said a bluff person opposite. “Look here, I shall come down and occupy it for a bit; it’ll be company for you.”

The Professor quivered, but managed to laugh in a courteous manner.

“By all means, Rogers; there’s nothing I should like better. But I’m afraid you would find it rather dull; you don’t play golf, do you?”

“No, thank Heaven!” said rude Mr. Rogers.

“Well, you see, when I’m not writing I shall most likely be out on the links, and that, as I say, would be rather dull for you, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I don’t know! There’s certain to be somebody I know in the place; but, of course, if you don’t want me, speak the word, Parkins; I shan’t be offended. Truth, as you always tell us, is never offensive.”

Parkins was, indeed, scrupulously polite and strictly truthful. It is to be feared that Mr. Rogers sometimes practised upon his knowledge of these characteristics. In Parkins’s breast there was a conflict now raging, which for a moment or two did not allow him to answer. That interval being over, he said:

“Well, if you want the exact truth, Rogers, I was considering whether the room I speak of would really be large enough to accommodate us both comfortably; and also whether (mind, I shouldn’t have said this if you hadn’t pressed me) you would not constitute something in the nature of a hindrance to my work.”

Rogers laughed loudly.

“Well done, Parkins!” he said. “It’s all right. I promise not to interrupt your work; don’t you disturb yourself about that. No, I won’t come if you don’t want me; but I thought I should do so nicely to keep the ghosts off.” Here he might have been seen to wink and to nudge his next neighbour. Parkins might also have been seen to become pink. “I beg pardon, Parkins,” Rogers continued; “I oughtn’t to have said that. I forgot you didn’t like levity on these topics.”

“Well,” Parkins said, “as you have mentioned the matter, I freely own that I do not like careless talk about what you call ghosts. A man in my position,” he went on, raising his voice a little, “cannot, I find, be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such subjects. As you know, Rogers, or as you ought to know; for I think I have never concealed my views—”

“No, you certainly have not, old man,” put in Rogers sotto voce.

“ – I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred. But I’m afraid I have not succeeded in securing your attention.”

“Your undivided attention, was what Dr. Blimber actually said,” Rogers interrupted, with every appearance of an earnest desire for accuracy. [Mr. Rogers was wrong, see “Dombey and Son,” chapter xii.] “But I beg your pardon, Parkins: I’m stopping you.”

“No, not at all,” said Parkins. “I don’t remember Blimber; perhaps he was before my time. But I needn’t go on. I’m sure you know what I mean.”

“Yes, yes,” said Rogers, rather hastily – “just so. We’ll go into it fully at Burnstow, or somewhere.”

In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman – rather henlike, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect. Whether or not the reader has gathered so much, that was the character which Parkins had.

•   •   •   •   •

On the following day Parkins did, as he had hoped, succeed in getting away from his college, and in arriving at Burnstow. He was made welcome at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange his materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which occupied the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by windows looking out seaward; that is to say, the central window looked straight out to sea, and those on the left and right commanded prospects along the shore to the north and south respectively. On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a strip – not considerable – of rough grass, dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach. Whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and the sea, not more than sixty yards now separated them.

The rest of the population of the inn was, of course, a golfing one, and included few elements that call for a special description. The most conspicuous figure was, perhaps, that of an ancien militaire, secretary of a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible strength, and of views of a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were apt to find utterance after his attendance upon the ministrations of the Vicar, an estimable man with inclinations towards a picturesque ritual, which he gallantly kept down as far as he could out of deference to East Anglian tradition.

Professor Parkins, one of whose principal characteristics was pluck, spent the greater part of the day following his arrival at Burnstow in what he had called improving his game, in company with this Colonel Wilson: and during the afternoon – whether the process of improvement were to blame or not, I am not sure – the Colonel’s demeanour assumed a colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking home with him from the links. He determined, after a short and furtive look at that bristling moustache and those incarnadined features, that it would be wiser to allow the influences of tea and tobacco to do what they could with the Colonel before the dinner-hour should render a meeting inevitable.

“I might walk home tonight along the beach,” he reflected – “yes, and take a look – there will be light enough for that – at the ruins of which Disney was talking. I don’t exactly know where they are, by the way; but I expect I can hardly help stumbling on them.”

This he accomplished, I may say, in the most literal sense, for in picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught, partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went. When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a patch of somewhat broken ground covered with small depressions and mounds. These latter, when he came to examine them, proved to be simply masses of flints embedded in mortar and grown over with turf. He must, he quite rightly concluded, be on the site of the preceptory he had promised to look at. It seemed not unlikely to reward the spade of the explorer; enough of the foundations was probably left at no great depth to throw a good deal of light on the general plan. He remembered vaguely that the Templars, to whom this site had belonged, were in the habit of building round churches, and he thought a particular series of the humps or mounds near him did appear to be arranged in something of a circular form. Few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously. Our Professor, however, if he felt something of this mean desire, was also truly anxious to oblige Mr. Disney. So he paced with care the circular area he had noticed, and wrote down its rough dimensions in his pocket-book. Then he proceeded to examine an oblong eminence which lay east of the centre of the circle, and seemed to his thinking likely to be the base of a platform or altar. At one end of it, the northern, a patch of the turf was gone – removed by some boy or other creature ferae naturae [of wild nature]. It might, he thought, be as well to probe the soil here for evidences of masonry, and he took out his knife and began scraping away the earth. And now followed another little discovery: a portion of soil fell inward as he scraped, and disclosed a small cavity. He lighted one match after another to help him to see of what nature the hole was, but the wind was too strong for them all. By tapping and scratching the sides with his knife, however, he was able to make out that it must be an artificial hole in masonry. It was rectangular, and the sides, top, and bottom, if not actually plastered, were smooth and regular. Of course it was empty. No! As he withdrew the knife he heard a metallic clink, and when he introduced his hand it met with a cylindrical object lying on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked it up, and when he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see that it, too, was of man’s making – a metal tube about four inches long, and evidently of some considerable age.

By the time Parkins had made sure that there was nothing else in this odd receptacle, it was too late and too dark for him to think of undertaking any further search. What he had done had proved so unexpectedly interesting that he determined to sacrifice a little more of the daylight on the morrow to archaeology. The object which he now had safe in his pocket was bound to be of some slight value at least, he felt sure.

Bleak and solemn was the view on which he took a last look before starting homeward. A faint yellow light in the west showed the links, on which a few figures moving towards the clubhouse were still visible, the squat martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden groynings, the dim and murmuring sea. The wind was bitter from the north, but was at his back when he set out for the Globe. He quickly rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand, upon which, but for the groynings which had to be got over every few yards, the going was both good and quiet. One last look behind, to measure the distance he had made since leaving the ruined Templars’ church, showed him a prospect of company on his walk, in the shape of a rather indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any, progress. I mean that there was an appearance of running about his movements, but that the distance between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen. So, at least, Parkins thought, and decided that he almost certainly did not know him, and that it would be absurd to wait until he came up. For all that, company, he began to think, would really be very welcome on that lonely shore, if only you could choose your companion. In his unenlightened days he had read of meetings in such places which even now would hardly bear thinking of. He went on thinking of them, however, until he reached home, and particularly of one which catches most people’s fancy at some time of their childhood. “Now I saw in my dream that Christian had gone but a very little way when he saw a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him.”  “What should I do now,” he thought, “if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings? I wonder whether I should stand or run for it. Luckily, the gentleman behind is not of that kind, and he seems to be about as far off now as when I saw him first. Well, at this rate, he won’t get his dinner as soon as I shall; and, dear me! it’s within a quarter of an hour of the time now. I must run!”

Parkins had, in fact, very little time for dressing. When he met the Colonel at dinner, Peace – or as much of her as that gentleman could manage – reigned once more in the military bosom; nor was she put to flight in the hours of bridge that followed dinner, for Parkins was a more than respectable player. When, therefore, he retired towards twelve o’clock, he felt that he had spent his evening in quite a satisfactory way, and that, even for so long as a fortnight or three weeks, life at the Globe would be supportable under similar conditions – “especially,” thought he, “if I go on improving my game.”

As he went along the passages he met the boots of the Globe, who stopped and said:

“Beg your pardon, sir, but as I was abrushing your coat just now there was something fell out of the pocket. I put it on your chest of drawers, sir, in your room, sir – a piece of a pipe or somethink of that, sir. Thank you, sir. You’ll find it on your chest of drawers, sir – yes, sir. Good night, sir.”

The speech served to remind Parkins of his little discovery of that afternoon. It was with some considerable curiosity that he turned it over by the light of his candles. It was of bronze, he now saw, and was shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle; in fact it was – yes, certainly it was – actually no more nor less than a whistle. He put it to his lips, but it was quite full of a fine, caked-up sand or earth, which would not yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a knife. Tidy as ever in his habits, Parkins cleared out the earth on to a piece of paper, and took the latter to the window to empty it out. The night was clear and bright, as he saw when he had opened the casement, and he stopped for an instant to look at the sea and note a belated wanderer stationed on the shore in front of the inn. Then he shut the window, a little surprised at the late hours people kept at Burnstow, and took his whistle to the light again. Why, surely there were marks on it, and not merely marks, but letters! A very little rubbing rendered the deeply-cut inscription quite legible, but the Professor had to confess, after some earnest thought, that the meaning of it was as obscure to him as the writing on the wall to Belshazzar. There were legends both on the front and on the back of the whistle. The one read thus:

FLA

FUR               BIS

FLE

The other:

QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT

“I ought to be able to make it out,” he thought; “but I suppose I am a little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of it, I don’t believe I even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem simple enough. It ought to mean: ‘Who is this who is coming?’ Well, the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him.”

He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure – how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of a seabird’s wing somewhere outside the dark panes.

The sound of the whistle had so fascinated him that he could not help trying it once more, this time more boldly. The note was little, if at all, louder than before, and repetition broke the illusion – no picture followed, as he had half hoped it might. “But what is this? Goodness! what force the wind can get up in a few minutes! What a tremendous gust! There! I knew that window-fastening was no use! Ah! I thought so – both candles out. It is enough to tear the room to pieces.”

The first thing was to get the window shut. While you might count twenty Parkins was struggling with the small casement, and felt almost as if he were pushing back a sturdy burglar, so strong was the pressure. It slackened all at once, and the window banged to and latched itself. Now to relight the candles and see what damage, if any, had been done. No, nothing seemed amiss; no glass even was broken in the casement. But the noise had evidently roused at least one member of the household: the Colonel was to be heard stumping in his stockinged feet on the floor above, and growling. Quickly as it had risen, the wind did not fall at once. On it went, moaning and rushing past the house, at times rising to a cry so desolate that, as Parkins disinterestedly said, it might have made fanciful people feel quite uncomfortable; even the unimaginative, he thought after a quarter of an hour, might be happier without it.

Whether it was the wind, or the excitement of golf, or of the researches in the preceptory that kept Parkins awake, he was not sure. Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I often do myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that it was going to stop work every moment, and would entertain grave suspicions of his lungs, brain, liver, etc. – suspicions which he was sure would be dispelled by the return of daylight, but which until then refused to be put aside. He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed, too.

The next stage was that Parkins shut his eyes and determined to give sleep every chance. Here again over-excitement asserted itself in another form – that of making pictures. Experto crede [believe one who knows], pictures do come to the closed eyes of one trying to sleep, and are often so little to his taste that he must open his eyes and disperse them.

Parkins’s experience on this occasion was a very distressing one. He found that the picture which presented itself to him was continuous. When he opened his eyes, of course, it went; but when he shut them once more it framed itself afresh, and acted itself out again, neither quicker nor slower than before. What he saw was this:

A long stretch of shore – shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the water – a scene, in fact, so like that of his afternoon’s walk that, in the absence of any landmark, it could not be distinguished therefrom. The light was obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor was visible. Then, in the distance, a bobbing black object appeared; a moment more, and it was a man running, jumping, clambering over the groynes, and every few seconds looking eagerly back. The nearer he came the more obvious it was that he was not only anxious, but even terribly frightened, though his face was not to be distinguished. He was, moreover, almost at the end of his strength. On he came; each successive obstacle seemed to cause him more difficulty than the last. “Will he get over this next one?” thought Parkins; “it seems a little higher than the others.” Yes; half climbing, half throwing himself, he did get over, and fell all in a heap on the other side (the side nearest to the spectator). There, as if really unable to get up again, he remained crouching under the groyne, looking up in an attitude of painful anxiety.

So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself towards the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. The moment came when the pursuer was hovering about from left to right only a few yards beyond the groyne where the runner lay in hiding. After two or three ineffectual castings hither and thither it came to a stop, stood upright, with arms raised high, and then darted straight forward towards the groyne.

It was at this point that Parkins always failed in his resolution to keep his eyes shut. With many misgivings as to incipient failure of eyesight, overworked brain, excessive smoking, and so on, he finally resigned himself to light his candle, get out a book, and pass the night waking, rather than be tormented by this persistent panorama, which he saw clearly enough could only be a morbid reflection of his walk and his thoughts on that very day.

The scraping of match on box and the glare of light must have startled some creatures of the night – rats or what not – which he heard scurry across the floor from the side of his bed with much rustling. Dear, dear! the match is out! Fool that it is! But the second one burnt better, and a candle and book were duly procured, over which Parkins pored till sleep of a wholesome kind came upon him, and that in no long space. For about the first time in his orderly and prudent life he forgot to blow out the candle, and when he was called next morning at eight there was still a flicker in the socket and a sad mess of guttered grease on the top of the little table.

After breakfast he was in his room, putting the finishing touches to his golfing costume – fortune had again allotted the Colonel to him for a partner – when one of the maids came in.

“Oh, if you please,” she said, “would you like any extra blankets on your bed, sir?”

“Ah! thank you,” said Parkins. “Yes, I think I should like one. It seems likely to turn rather colder.”

In a very short time the maid was back with the blanket.

“Which bed should I put it on, sir?” she asked.

“What? Why, that one – the one I slept in last night,” he said, pointing to it.

“Oh yes! I beg your pardon, sir, but you seemed to have tried both of ’em; leastways, we had to make ’em both up this morning.”

“Really? How very absurd!” said Parkins. “I certainly never touched the other, except to lay some things on it. Did it actually seem to have been slept in?”

“Oh yes, sir!” said the maid. “Why, all the things was crumpled and throwed about all ways, if you’ll excuse me, sir – quite as if anyone ’adn’t passed but a very poor night, sir.”

“Dear me,” said Parkins. “Well, I may have disordered it more than I thought when I unpacked my things. I’m very sorry to have given you the extra trouble, I’m sure. I expect a friend of mine soon, by the way – a gentleman from Cambridge – to come and occupy it for a night or two. That will be all right, I suppose, won’t it?”

“Oh yes, to be sure, sir. Thank you, sir. It’s no trouble, I’m sure,” said the maid, and departed to giggle with her colleagues.

Parkins set forth, with a stern determination to improve his game.

I am glad to be able to report that he succeeded so far in this enterprise that the Colonel, who had been rather repining at the prospect of a second day’s play in his company, became quite chatty as the morning advanced; and his voice boomed out over the flats, as certain also of our own minor poets have said, “like some great bourdon in a minster tower”.

“Extraordinary wind, that, we had last night,” he said. “In my old home we should have said someone had been whistling for it.”

“Should you, indeed!” said Perkins. “Is there a superstition of that kind still current in your part of the country?”

“I don’t know about superstition,” said the Colonel. “They believe in it all over Denmark and Norway, as well as on the Yorkshire coast; and my experience is, mind you, that there’s generally something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for generations. But it’s your drive” (or whatever it might have been: the golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper intervals).

When conversation was resumed, Parkins said, with a slight hesitancy:

“A propos of what you were saying just now, Colonel, I think I ought to tell you that my own views on such subjects are very strong. I am, in fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called the ‘supernatural’.”

“What!” said the Colonel, “do you mean to tell me you don’t believe in second-sight, or ghosts, or anything of that kind?”

“In nothing whatever of that kind,” returned Parkins firmly.

“Well,” said the Colonel, “but it appears to me at that rate, sir, that you must be little better than a Sadducee.”

Parkins was on the point of answering that, in his opinion, the Sadducees were the most sensible persons he had ever read of in the Old Testament; but feeling some doubt as to whether much mention of them was to be found in that work, he preferred to laugh the accusation off.

“Perhaps I am,” he said; “but – Here, give me my cleek, boy! – Excuse me one moment, Colonel.” A short interval. “Now, as to whistling for the wind, let me give you my theory about it. The laws which govern winds are really not at all perfectly known – to fisherfolk and such, of course, not known at all. A man or woman of eccentric habits, perhaps, or a stranger, is seen repeatedly on the beach at some unusual hour, and is heard whistling. Soon afterwards a violent wind rises; a man who could read the sky perfectly or who possessed a barometer could have foretold that it would. The simple people of a fishing-village have no barometers, and only a few rough rules for prophesying weather. What more natural than that the eccentric personage I postulated should be regarded as having raised the wind, or that he or she should clutch eagerly at the reputation of being able to do so? Now, take last night’s wind: as it happens, I myself was whistling. I blew a whistle twice, and the wind seemed to come absolutely in answer to my call. If anyone had seen me—”

The audience had been a little restive under this harangue, and Parkins had, I fear, fallen somewhat into the tone of a lecturer; but at the last sentence the Colonel stopped.

“Whistling, were you?” he said. “And what sort of whistle did you use? Play this stroke first.” Interval.

“About that whistle you were asking, Colonel. It’s rather a curious one. I have it in my – No; I see I’ve left it in my room. As a matter of fact, I found it yesterday.”

And then Parkins narrated the manner of his discovery of the whistle, upon hearing which the Colonel grunted, and opined that, in Parkins’s place, he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belonged to a set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be affirmed that you never knew what they might not have been up to. From this topic he diverged to the enormities of the Vicar, who had given notice on the previous Sunday that Friday would be the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, and that there would be service at eleven o’clock in the church. This and other similar proceedings constituted in the Colonel’s view a strong presumption that the Vicar was a concealed Papist, if not a Jesuit; and Parkins, who could not very readily follow the Colonel in this region, did not disagree with him. In fact, they got on so well together in the morning that there was not talk on either side of their separating after lunch.

Both continued to play well during the afternoon, or at least, well enough to make them forget everything else until the light began to fail them. Not until then did Parkins remember that he had meant to do some more investigating at the preceptory; but it was of no great importance, he reflected. One day was as good as another; he might as well go home with the Colonel.

As they turned the corner of the house, the Colonel was almost knocked down by a boy who rushed into him at the very top of his speed, and then, instead of running away, remained hanging on to him and panting. The first words of the warrior were naturally those of reproof and objurgation, but he very quickly discerned that the boy was almost speechless with fright. Inquiries were useless at first. When the boy got his breath he began to howl, and still clung to the Colonel’s legs. He was at last detached, but continued to howl.

“What in the world is the matter with you? What have you been up to? What have you seen?” said the two men.

“Ow, I seen it wyve at me out of the winder,” wailed the boy, “and I don’t like it.”

“What window?” said the irritated Colonel. “Come pull yourself together, my boy.”

“The front winder it was, at the ’otel,” said the boy.

At this point Parkins was in favour of sending the boy home, but the Colonel refused; he wanted to get to the bottom of it, he said; it was most dangerous to give a boy such a fright as this one had had, and if it turned out that people had been playing jokes, they should suffer for it in some way. And by a series of questions he made out this story: The boy had been playing about on the grass in front of the Globe with some others; then they had gone home to their teas, and he was just going, when he happened to look up at the front winder and see it a-wiving at him. “It” seemed to be a figure of some sort, in white as far as he knew – couldn’t see its face; but it wived at him, and it warn’t a right thing – not to say not a right person. Was there a light in the room? No, he didn’t think to look if there was a light. Which was the window? Was it the top one or the second one? The seckind one it was – the big winder what got two little ’uns at the sides.

“Very well, my boy,” said the Colonel, after a few more questions. “You run away home now. I expect it was some person trying to give you a start. Another time, like a brave English boy, you just throw a stone – well, no, not that exactly, but you go and speak to the waiter, or to Mr. Simpson, the landlord, and – yes – and say that I advised you to do so.”

The boy’s face expressed some of the doubt he felt as to the likelihood of Mr. Simpson’s lending a favourable ear to his complaint, but the Colonel did not appear to perceive this, and went on:

“And here’s a sixpence – no, I see it’s a shilling – and you be off home, and don’t think any more about it.”

The youth hurried off with agitated thanks, and the Colonel and Parkins went round to the front of the Globe and reconnoitred. There was only one window answering to the description they had been hearing.

“Well, that’s curious,” said Parkins; “it’s evidently my window the lad was talking about. Will you come up for a moment, Colonel Wilson? We ought to be able to see if anyone has been taking liberties in my room.”

They were soon in the passage, and Parkins made as if to open the door. Then he stopped and felt in his pockets.

“This is more serious than I thought,” was his next remark. “I remember now that before I started this morning I locked the door. It is locked now, and, what is more, here is the key.” And he held it up. “Now,” he went on, “if the servants are in the habit of going into one’s room during the day when one is away, I can only say that – well, that I don’t approve of it at all.” Conscious of a somewhat weak climax, he busied himself in opening the door (which was indeed locked) and in lighting candles. “No,” he said, “nothing seems disturbed.”

“Except your bed,” put in the Colonel.

“Excuse me, that isn’t my bed,” said Parkins. “I don’t use that one. But it does look as if someone had been playing tricks with it.”

It certainly did: the clothes were bundled up and twisted together in a most tortuous confusion. Parkins pondered.

“That must be it,” he said at last. “I disordered the clothes last night in unpacking, and they haven’t made it since. Perhaps they came in to make it, and that boy saw them through the window; and then they were called away and locked the door after them. Yes, I think that must be it.”

“Well, ring and ask,” said the Colonel, and this appealed to Parkins as practical.

The maid appeared, and, to make a long story short, deposed that she had made the bed in the morning when the gentleman was in the room, and hadn’t been there since. No, she hadn’t no other key. Mr. Simpson, he kep’ the keys; he’d be able to tell the gentleman if anyone had been up.

This was a puzzle. Investigation showed that nothing of value had been taken, and Parkins remembered the disposition of the small objects on tables and so forth well enough to be pretty sure that no pranks had been played with them. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson furthermore agreed that neither of them had given the duplicate key of the room to any person whatever during the day. Nor could Parkins, fair-minded man as he was, detect anything in the demeanour of master, mistress, or maid that indicated guilt. He was much more inclined to think that the boy had been imposing on the Colonel.

The latter was unwontedly silent and pensive at dinner and throughout the evening. When he bade goodnight to Parkins, he murmured in a gruff undertone:

“You know where I am if you want me during the night.”

“Why, yes, thank you, Colonel Wilson, I think I do; but there isn’t much prospect of my disturbing you, I hope. By the way,” he added, “did I show you that old whistle I spoke of? I think not. Well, here it is.”

The Colonel turned it over gingerly in the light of the candle.

“Can you make anything of the inscription?” asked Parkins, as he took it back.

“No, not in this light. What do you mean to do with it?”

“Oh, well, when I get back to Cambridge I shall submit it to some of the archaeologists there, and see what they think of it; and very likely, if they consider it worth having, I may present it to one of the museums.”

“M!” said the Colonel. “Well, you may be right. All I know is that, if it were mine, I should chuck it straight into the sea. It’s no use talking, I’m well aware, but I expect that with you it’s a case of live and learn. I hope so, I’m sure, and I wish you a good night.”

He turned away, leaving Parkins in act to speak at the bottom of the stair, and soon each was in his own bedroom.

By some unfortunate accident, there were neither blinds nor curtains to the windows of the Professor’s room. The previous night he had thought little of this, but tonight there seemed every prospect of a bright moon rising to shine directly on his bed, and probably wake him later on. When he noticed this he was a good deal annoyed, but, with an ingenuity which I can only envy, he succeeded in rigging up, with the help of a railway-rug, some safety-pins, and a stick and umbrella, a screen which, if it only held together, would completely keep the moonlight off his bed. And shortly afterwards he was comfortably in that bed. When he had read a somewhat solid work long enough to produce a decided wish to sleep, he cast a drowsy glance round the room, blew out the candle, and fell back upon the pillow.

He must have slept soundly for an hour or more, when a sudden clatter shook him up in a most unwelcome manner. In a moment he realized what had happened: his carefully-constructed screen had given way, and a very bright frosty moon was shining directly on his face. This was highly annoying. Could he possibly get up and reconstruct the screen? or could he manage to sleep if he did not?

For some minutes he lay and pondered over all the possibilities; then he turned over sharply, and with his eyes open lay breathlessly listening. There had been a movement, he was sure, in the empty bed on the opposite side of the room. Tomorrow he would have it moved, for there must be rats or something playing about in it. It was quiet now. No! the commotion began again. There was a rustling and shaking: surely more than any rat could cause.

I can figure to myself something of the Professor’s bewilderment and horror, for I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen; but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed. He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash towards the window, where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped his screen. This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne – he didn’t know why – to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted towards it, and bent and felt over the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time what manner of thing it was.

Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen. What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.

But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins’s face. He could not, though he knew how perilous a sound was – he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon the instant, and the next moment he was half-way through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bedclothes.

Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed; and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed, for the rest of the night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he would have been a day before, and the three of them held a very long consultation in the Professor’s room. At the end of it the Colonel left the hotel door carrying a small object between his finger and thumb, which he cast as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it. Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from the back premises of the Globe.

Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and visitors at the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The Professor was somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of the reputation of a troubled house.

There is not much question as to what would have happened to Parkins if the Colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have fallen out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done than frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it save the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body. The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of the opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

THE STRANGER

Ambrose Bierce

1909

A man stepped out of the darkness into the little illuminated circle about our failing camp-fire and seated himself upon a rock.

“You are not the first to explore this region,” he said gravely.

Nobody controverted his statement; he was himself proof of its truth, for he was not of our party and must have been somewhere near when we camped. Moreover, he must have companions not far away; it was not a place where one would be living or travelling alone. For more than a week we had seen, besides ourselves and our animals, only such living things as rattlesnakes and horned toads. In an Arizona desert one does not long coexist with only such creatures as these: one must have pack animals, supplies, arms – “an outfit.” And all these imply comrades. It was perhaps a doubt as to what manner of men this unceremonious stranger’s comrades might be, together with something in his words interpretable as a challenge that caused every man of our half-dozen “gentlemen adventurers” to rise to a sitting posture and lay his hand upon a weapon – an act signifying, in that time and place, a policy of expectation. The stranger gave the matter no attention and began again to speak in the same deliberate, uninflected monotone in which he had delivered his first sentence:

“Thirty years ago Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent, and Berry Davis, all of Tucson, crossed the Santa Catalina mountains and travelled due west, as nearly as the configuration of the country permitted. We were prospecting and it was our intention, if we found nothing, to push through to the Gila river at some point near Big Bend, where we understood there was a settlement. We had a good outfit, but no guide – just Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent, and Berry Davis.”

The man repeated the names slowly and distinctly, as if to fix them in the memories of his audience, every member of which was now attentively observing him, but with a slackened apprehension regarding his possible companions somewhere in the darkness that seemed to enclose us like a black wall; in the manner of this volunteer historian was no suggestion of an unfriendly purpose. His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishable from mental aberration. A man is like a tree: in a forest of his fellows he will grow as straight as his generic and individual nature permits; alone in the open, he yields to the deforming stresses and tortions that environ him. Some such thoughts were in my mind as I watched the man from the shadow of my hat, pulled low to shut out the firelight. A witless fellow, no doubt, but what could he be doing there in the heart of a desert?

Having undertaken to tell this story, I wish that I could describe the man’s appearance; that would be a natural thing to do. Unfortunately, and somewhat strangely, I find myself unable to do so with any degree of confidence, for afterward no two of us agreed as to what he wore and how he looked; and when I try to set down my own impressions they elude me. Anyone can tell some kind of story; narration is one of the elemental powers of the race. But the talent for description is a gift.

Nobody having broken silence the visitor went on to say:

•   •   •   •   •

This country was not then what it is now. There was not a ranch between the Gila and the Gulf. There was a little game here and there in the mountains, and near the infrequent waterholes grass enough to keep our animals from starvation. If we should be so fortunate as to encounter no Indians we might get through. But within a week the purpose of the expedition had altered from discovery of wealth to preservation of life. We had gone too far to go back, for what was ahead could be no worse than what was behind; so we pushed on, riding by night to avoid Indians and the intolerable heat, and concealing ourselves by day as best we could. Sometimes, having exhausted our supply of wild meat and emptied our casks, we were days without food or drink; then a waterhole or a shallow pool in the bottom of an arroyo so restored our strength and sanity that we were able to shoot some of the wild animals that sought it also. Sometimes it was a bear, sometimes an antelope, a coyote, a cougar – that was as God pleased; all were food.

One morning as we skirted a mountain range, seeking a practicable pass, we were attacked by a band of Apaches who had followed our trail up a gulch – it is not far from here. Knowing that they outnumbered us ten to one, they took none of their usual cowardly precautions, but dashed upon us at a gallop, firing and yelling. Fighting was out of the question: we urged our feeble animals up the gulch as far as there was footing for a hoof, then threw ourselves out of our saddles and took to the chaparral on one of the slopes, abandoning our entire outfit to the enemy. But we retained our rifles, every man – Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent, and Berry Davis.

–   –   –

“Same old crowd,” said the humorist of our party. He was an Eastern man, unfamiliar with the decent observances of social intercourse. A gesture of disapproval from our leader silenced him, and the stranger proceeded with his tale:

–   –   –

The savages dismounted also, and some of them ran up the gulch beyond the point at which we had left it, cutting off further retreat in that direction and forcing us on up the side. Unfortunately the chaparral extended only a short distance up the slope, and as we came into the open ground above we took the fire of a dozen rifles; but Apaches shoot badly when in a hurry, and God so willed it that none of us fell. Twenty yards up the slope, beyond the edge of the brush, were vertical cliffs, in which, directly in front of us, was a narrow opening. Into that we ran, finding ourselves in a cavern about as large as an ordinary room in a house. Here for a time we were safe: a single man with a repeating rifle could defend the entrance against all the Apaches in the land. But against hunger and thirst we had no defence. Courage we still had, but hope was a memory.

Not one of those Indians did we afterward see, but by the smoke and glare of their fires in the gulch we knew that by day and by night they watched with ready rifles in the edge of the bush – knew that if we made a sortie not a man of us would live to take three steps into the open. For three days, watching in turn, we held out before our suffering became insupportable. Then – It was the morning of the fourth day – Ramon Gallegos said:

“Señores, I know not well of the good God and what please Him. I have live without religion, and I am not acquaint with that of you. Pardon, señores, if I shock you, but for me the time is come to beat the game of the Apache.”

He knelt upon the rock floor of the cave and pressed his pistol against his temple. “Madre de Dios,” he said, “comes now the soul of Ramon Gallegos.”

And so he left us – William Shaw, George W. Kent, and Berry Davis.

I was the leader: it was for me to speak.

“He was a brave man,” I said – “he knew when to die, and how. It is foolish to go mad from thirst and fall by Apache bullets, or be skinned alive – it is in bad taste. Let us join Ramon Gallegos.”

“That is right,” said William Shaw.

“That is right,” said George W. Kent.

I straightened the limbs of Ramon Gallegos and put a handkerchief over his face. Then William Shaw said: “I should like to look like that – a little while.”

And George W. Kent said that he felt that way, too.

“It shall be so,” I said: “the red devils will wait a week. William Shaw and George W. Kent, draw and kneel.”

They did so and I stood before them.

“Almighty God, our Father,” said I.

“Almighty God, our Father,” said William Shaw.

“Almighty God, our Father,” said George W. Kent.

“Forgive us our sins,” said I.

“Forgive us our sins,” said they.

“And receive our souls.”

“And receive our souls.”

“Amen!”

“Amen!”

I laid them beside Ramon Gallegos and covered their faces.

•   •   •   •   •

There was a quick commotion on the opposite side of the camp-fire: one of our party had sprung to his feet, pistol in hand.

“And you!” he shouted – “you dared to escape? – you dare to be alive? You cowardly hound, I’ll send you to join them if I hang for it!”

But with the leap of a panther the captain was upon him, grasping his wrist. “Hold it in, Sam Yountsey, hold it in!”

We were now all upon our feet – except the stranger, who sat motionless and apparently inattentive. Someone seized Yountsey’s other arm.

“Captain,” I said, “there is something wrong here. This fellow is either a lunatic or merely a liar – just a plain, everyday liar whom Yountsey has no call to kill. If this man was of that party it had five members, one of whom – probably himself – he has not named.”

“Yes,” said the captain, releasing the insurgent, who sat down, “there is something – unusual. Years ago four dead bodies of white men, scalped and shamefully mutilated, were found about the mouth of that cave. They are buried there; I have seen the graves – we shall all see them tomorrow.”

The stranger rose, standing tall in the light of the expiring fire, which in our breathless attention to his story we had neglected to keep going.

“There were four,” he said – “Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, George W. Kent, and Berry Davis.”

With this reiterated roll-call of the dead he walked into the darkness and we saw him no more. At that moment one of our party, who had been on guard, strode in among us, rifle in hand and somewhat excited.

“Captain,” he said, “for the last half-hour three men have been standing out there on the mesa.” He pointed in the direction taken by the stranger. “I could see them distinctly, for the moon is up, but as they had no guns and I had them covered with mine I thought it was their move. They have made none, but damn it! they have got on to my nerves.”

“Go back to your post, and stay till you see them again,” said the captain. “The rest of you lie down again, or I’ll kick you all into the fire.”

The sentinel obediently withdrew, swearing, and did not return. As we were arranging our blankets the fiery Yountsey said: “I beg your pardon, Captain, but who the devil do you take them to be?”

“Ramon Gallegos, William Shaw, and George W. Kent.”

“But how about Berry Davis? I ought to have shot him.”

“Quite needless; you couldn’t have made him any deader. Go to sleep.”

THE WAITING PLACE
excerpted from
The Country of the Pointed Firs

Sarah Orne Jewett

1910

“How did you manage with the rest of that rough voyage on the Minerva?” I asked.

“I shall be glad to explain to you,” said Captain Littlepage, forgetting his grievances for the moment. “If I had a map at hand I could explain better. We were driven to and fro ’way up toward what we used to call Parry’s Discoveries, and lost our bearings. It was thick and foggy, and at last I lost my ship; she drove on a rock, and we managed to get ashore on what I took to be a barren island, the few of us that were left alive. When she first struck, the sea was somewhat calmer than it had been, and most of the crew, against orders, manned the longboat and put off in a hurry, and were never heard of more. Our own boat upset, but the carpenter kept himself and me above water, and we drifted in. I had no strength to call upon after my recent fever, and laid down to die; but he found the tracks of a man and dog the second day, and got along the shore to one of those far missionary stations that the Moravians support. They were very poor themselves, and in distress; ’twas a useless place. There were but few Esquimaux left in that region. There we remained for some time, and I became acquainted with strange events.”

The captain lifted his head and gave me a questioning glance. I could not help noticing that the dulled look in his eyes had gone, and there was instead a clear intentness that made them seem dark and piercing.

“There was a supply ship expected, and the pastor, an excellent Christian man, made no doubt that we should get passage in her. He was hoping that orders would come to break up the station; but everything was uncertain, and we got on the best we could for a while. We fished, and helped the people in other ways; there was no other way of paying our debts. I was taken to the pastor’s house until I got better; but they were crowded, and I felt myself in the way, and made excuse to join with an old seaman, a Scotchman, who had built him a warm cabin, and had room in it for another. He was looked upon with regard, and had stood by the pastor in some troubles with the people. He had been on one of those English exploring parties that found one end of the road to the north pole, but never could find the other. We lived like dogs in a kennel, or so you’d thought if you had seen the hut from the outside; but the main thing was to keep warm; there were piles of bird-skins to lie on, and he’d made him a good bunk, and there was another for me. ’T was dreadful dreary waitin’ there; we begun to think the supply steamer was lost, and my poor ship broke up and strewed herself all along the shore. We got to watching on the headlands; my men and me knew the people were short of supplies and had to pinch themselves. It ought to read in the Bible, ‘Man cannot live by fish alone,’ if they’d told the truth of things; ’taint bread that wears the worst on you! First part of the time, old Gaffett, that I lived with, seemed speechless, and I didn’t know what to make of him, nor he of me, I dare say; but as we got acquainted, I found he’d been through more disasters than I had, and had troubles that wa’n’t going to let him live a great while. It used to ease his mind to talk to an understanding person, so we used to sit and talk together all day, if it rained or blew so that we couldn’t get out. I’d got a bad blow on the back of my head at the time we came ashore, and it pained me at times, and my strength was broken, anyway; I’ve never been so able since.”

Captain Littlepage fell into a reverie.

“Then I had the good of my reading,” he explained presently. “I had no books; the pastor spoke but little English, and all his books were foreign; but I used to say over all I could remember. The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man. I was well acquainted with the works of Milton, but up there it did seem to me as if Shakespeare was the king; he has his sea terms very accurate, and some beautiful passages were calming to the mind. I could say them over until I shed tears; there was nothing beautiful to me in that place but the stars above and those passages of verse.

“Gaffett was always brooding and brooding, and talking to himself; he was afraid he should never get away, and it preyed upon his mind. He thought when I got home I could interest the scientific men in his discovery: but they ’re all taken up with their own notions; some didn’t even take pains to answer the letters I wrote. You observe that I said this crippled man Gaffett had been shipped on a voyage of discovery. I now tell you that the ship was lost on its return, and only Gaffett and two officers were saved off the Greenland coast, and he had knowledge later that those men never got back to England; the brig they shipped on was run down in the night. So no other living soul had the facts, and he gave them to me. There is a strange sort of a country ’way up north beyond the ice, and strange folks living in it. Gaffett believed it was the next world to this.”

“What do you mean, Captain Littlepage?” I exclaimed. The old man was bending forward and whispering; he looked over his shoulder before he spoke the last sentence.

“To hear old Gaffett tell about it was something awful,” he said, going on with his story quite steadily after the moment of excitement had passed. “’Twas first a tale of dogs and sledges, and cold and wind and snow. Then they begun to find the ice grow rotten; they had been frozen in, and got into a current flowing north, far up beyond Fox Channel, and they took to their boats when the ship got crushed, and this warm current took them out of sight of the ice, and into a great open sea; and they still followed it due north, just the very way they had planned to go. Then they struck a coast that wasn’t laid down or charted, but the cliffs were such that no boat could land until they found a bay and struck across under sail to the other side where the shore looked lower; they were scant of provisions and out of water, but they got sight of something that looked like a great town. ‘For God’s sake, Gaffett!’ said I, the first time he told me. ‘You don’t mean a town two degrees farther north than ships had ever been?’ for he’d got their course marked on an old chart that he’d pieced out at the top; but he insisted upon it, and told it over and over again, to be sure I had it straight to carry to those who would be interested. There was no snow and ice, he said, after they had sailed some days with that warm current, which seemed to come right from under the ice that they’d been pinched up in and had been crossing on foot for weeks.”

“But what about the town?” I asked. “Did they get to the town?”

“They did,” said the captain, “and found inhabitants; ’twas an awful condition of things. It appeared, as near as Gaffett could express it, like a place where there was neither living nor dead. They could see the place when they were approaching it by sea pretty near like any town, and thick with habitations; but all at once they lost sight of it altogether, and when they got close inshore they could see the shapes of folks, but they never could get near them – all blowing gray figures that would pass along alone, or sometimes gathered in companies as if they were watching. The men were frightened at first, but the shapes never came near them – it was as if they blew back; and at last they all got bold and went ashore, and found birds’ eggs and sea fowl, like any wild northern spot where creatures were tame and folks had never been, and there was good water. Gaffett said that he and another man came near one o’ the fog-shaped men that was going along slow with the look of a pack on his back, among the rocks, an’ they chased him; but, Lord! he flittered away out o’ sight like a leaf the wind takes with it, or a piece of cobweb. They would make as if they talked together, but there was no sound of voices, and ‘they acted as if they didn’t see us, but only felt us coming towards them,’ says Gaffett one day, trying to tell the particulars. They couldn’t see the town when they were ashore. One day the captain and the doctor were gone till night up across the high land where the town had seemed to be, and they came back at night beat out and white as ashes, and wrote and wrote all next day in their notebooks, and whispered together full of excitement, and they were sharp-spoken with the men when they offered to ask any questions.

“Then there came a day,” said Captain Littlepage, leaning toward me with a strange look in his eyes, and whispering quickly. “The men all swore they wouldn’t stay any longer; the man on watch early in the morning gave the alarm, and they all put off in the boat and got a little way out to sea. Those folks, or whatever they were, come about ’em like bats; all at once they raised incessant armies, and come as if to drive ’em back to sea. They stood thick at the edge o’ the water like the ridges o’ grim war; no thought o’ flight, none of retreat. Sometimes a standing fight, then soaring on main wing tormented all the air. And when they’d got the boat out o’ reach o’ danger, Gaffett said they looked back, and there was the town again, standing up just as they’d seen it first, comin’ on the coast. Say what you might, they all believed ’twas a kind of waiting-place between this world an’ the next.”

The captain had sprung to his feet in his excitement, and made excited gestures, but he still whispered huskily.

“Sit down, sir,” I said as quietly as I could, and he sank into his chair quite spent.

“Gaffett thought the officers were hurrying home to report and to fit out a new expedition when they were all lost. At the time, the men got orders not to talk over what they had seen,” the old man explained presently in a more natural tone.

“Weren’t they all starving, and wasn’t it a mirage or something of that sort?” I ventured to ask. But he looked at me blankly.

“Gaffett had got so that his mind ran on nothing else,” he went on. “The ship’s surgeon let fall an opinion to the captain, one day, that ’twas some condition o’ the light and the magnetic currents that let them see those folks. ’Twa’n’t a right-feeling part of the world, anyway; they had to battle with the compass to make it serve, an’ everything seemed to go wrong. Gaffett had worked it out in his own mind that they was all common ghosts, but the conditions were unusual favorable for seeing them. He was always talking about the Ge’graphical Society, but he never took proper steps, as I view it now, and stayed right there at the mission. He was a good deal crippled, and thought they’d confine him in some jail of a hospital. He said he was waiting to find the right men to tell, somebody bound north. Once in a while they stopped there to leave a mail or something. He was set in his notions, and let two or three proper explorin’ expeditions go by him because he didn’t like their looks; but when I was there he had got restless, fearin’ he might be taken away or something. He had all his directions written out straight as a string to give the right ones. I wanted him to trust ’em to me, so I might have something to show, but he wouldn’t. I suppose he ’s dead now. I wrote to him, an’ I done all I could. ’T will be a great exploit some o’ these days.”

I assented absent-mindedly, thinking more just then of my companion’s alert, determined look and the seafaring, ready aspect that had come to his face; but at this moment there fell a sudden change, and the old, pathetic, scholarly look returned. Behind me hung a map of North America, and I saw, as I turned a little, that his eyes were fixed upon the northernmost regions and their careful recent outlines with a look of bewilderment.

THE ROOM IN THE TOWER

E. F. Benson

1912

It is probable that everybody who is at all a constant dreamer has had at least one experience of an event or a sequence of circumstances which have come to his mind in sleep being subsequently realised in the material world. But, in my opinion, so far from this being a strange thing, it would be far odder if this fulfilment did not occasionally happen, since our dreams are, as a rule, concerned with people whom we know and places with which we are familiar, such as might very naturally occur in the awake and daylit world. True, these dreams are often broken into by some absurd and fantastic incident, which puts them out of court in regard to their subsequent fulfilment, but on the mere calculation of chances, it does not appear in the least unlikely that a dream imagined by anyone who dreams constantly should occasionally come true. Not long ago, for instance, I experienced such a fulfilment of a dream which seems to me in no way remarkable and to have no kind of psychical significance. The manner of it was as follows.

A certain friend of mine, living abroad, is amiable enough to write to me about once in a fortnight. Thus, when fourteen days or thereabouts have elapsed since I last heard from him, my mind, probably, either consciously or subconsciously, is expectant of a letter from him. One night last week I dreamed that as I was going upstairs to dress for dinner I heard, as I often heard, the sound of the postman’s knock on my front door, and diverted my direction downstairs instead. There, among other correspondence, was a letter from him. Thereafter the fantastic entered, for on opening it I found inside the ace of diamonds, and scribbled across it in his well-known handwriting, “I am sending you this for safe custody, as you know it is running an unreasonable risk to keep aces in Italy.” The next evening I was just preparing to go upstairs to dress when I heard the postman’s knock, and did precisely as I had done in my dream. There, among other letters, was one from my friend. Only it did not contain the ace of diamonds. Had it done so, I should have attached more weight to the matter, which, as it stands, seems to me a perfectly ordinary coincidence. No doubt I consciously or subconsciously expected a letter from him, and this suggested to me my dream. Similarly, the fact that my friend had not written to me for a fortnight suggested to him that he should do so. But occasionally it is not so easy to find such an explanation, and for the following story I can find no explanation at all. It came out of the dark, and into the dark it has gone again.

All my life I have been a habitual dreamer: the nights are few, that is to say, when I do not find on awaking in the morning that some mental experience has been mine, and sometimes, all night long, apparently, a series of the most dazzling adventures befall me. Almost without exception these adventures are pleasant, though often merely trivial. It is of an exception that I am going to speak.

It was when I was about sixteen that a certain dream first came to me, and this is how it befell. It opened with my being set down at the door of a big red-brick house, where, I understood, I was going to stay. The servant who opened the door told me that tea was being served in the garden, and led me through a low dark-panelled hall, with a large open fireplace, on to a cheerful green lawn set round with flower beds. There were grouped about the tea-table a small party of people, but they were all strangers to me except one, who was a schoolfellow called Jack Stone, clearly the son of the house, and he introduced me to his mother and father and a couple of sisters. I was, I remember, somewhat astonished to find myself here, for the boy in question was scarcely known to me, and I rather disliked what I knew of him; moreover, he had left school nearly a year before. The afternoon was very hot, and an intolerable oppression reigned. On the far side of the lawn ran a red-brick wall, with an iron gate in its center, outside which stood a walnut tree. We sat in the shadow of the house opposite a row of long windows, inside which I could see a table with cloth laid, glimmering with glass and silver. This garden front of the house was very long, and at one end of it stood a tower of three stories, which looked to me much older than the rest of the building.

Before long, Mrs. Stone, who, like the rest of the party, had sat in absolute silence, said to me, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.”

Quite inexplicably my heart sank at her words. I felt as if I had known that I should have the room in the tower, and that it contained something dreadful and significant. Jack instantly got up, and I understood that I had to follow him. In silence we passed through the hall, and mounted a great oak staircase with many corners, and arrived at a small landing with two doors set in it. He pushed one of these open for me to enter, and without coming in himself, closed it after me. Then I knew that my conjecture had been right: there was something awful in the room, and with the terror of nightmare growing swiftly and enveloping me, I awoke in a spasm of terror.

Now that dream or variations on it occurred to me intermittently for fifteen years. Most often it came in exactly this form, the arrival, the tea laid out on the lawn, the deadly silence succeeded by that one deadly sentence, the mounting with Jack Stone up to the room in the tower where horror dwelt, and it always came to a close in the nightmare of terror at that which was in the room, though I never saw what it was. At other times I experienced variations on this same theme. Occasionally, for instance, we would be sitting at dinner in the dining-room, into the windows of which I had looked on the first night when the dream of this house visited me, but wherever we were, there was the same silence, the same sense of dreadful oppression and foreboding. And the silence I knew would always be broken by Mrs. Stone saying to me, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.” Upon which (this was invariable) I had to follow him up the oak staircase with many corners, and enter the place that I dreaded more and more each time that I visited it in sleep. Or, again, I would find myself playing cards still in silence in a drawing-room lit with immense chandeliers, that gave a blinding illumination. What the game was I have no idea; what I remember, with a sense of miserable anticipation, was that soon Mrs. Stone would get up and say to me, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.” This drawing-room where we played cards was next to the dining-room, and, as I have said, was always brilliantly illuminated, whereas the rest of the house was full of dusk and shadows. And yet, how often, in spite of those bouquets of lights, have I not pored over the cards that were dealt me, scarcely able for some reason to see them. Their designs, too, were strange: there were no red suits, but all were black, and among them there were certain cards which were black all over. I hated and dreaded those.

As this dream continued to recur, I got to know the greater part of the house. There was a smoking-room beyond the drawing-room, at the end of a passage with a green baize door. It was always very dark there, and as often as I went there I passed somebody whom I could not see in the doorway coming out. Curious developments, too, took place in the characters that peopled the dream as might happen to living persons. Mrs. Stone, for instance, who, when I first saw her, had been black-haired, became grey, and instead of rising briskly, as she had done at first when she said, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower,” got up very feebly, as if the strength was leaving her limbs. Jack also grew up, and became a rather ill-looking young man, with a brown moustache, while one of the sisters ceased to appear, and I understood she was married.

Then it so happened that I was not visited by this dream for six months or more, and I began to hope, in such inexplicable dread did I hold it, that it had passed away for good. But one night after this interval I again found myself being shown out onto the lawn for tea, and Mrs. Stone was not there, while the others were all dressed in black. At once I guessed the reason, and my heart leaped at the thought that perhaps this time I should not have to sleep in the room in the tower, and though we usually all sat in silence, on this occasion the sense of relief made me talk and laugh as I had never yet done. But even then matters were not altogether comfortable, for no one else spoke, but they all looked secretly at each other. And soon the foolish stream of my talk ran dry, and gradually an apprehension worse than anything I had previously known gained on me as the light slowly faded.

Suddenly a voice which I knew well broke the stillness, the voice of Mrs. Stone, saying, “Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.” It seemed to come from near the gate in the red-brick wall that bounded the lawn, and looking up, I saw that the grass outside was sown thick with gravestones. A curious greyish light shone from them, and I could read the lettering on the grave nearest me, and it was, “In evil memory of Julia Stone.” And as usual Jack got up, and again I followed him through the hall and up the staircase with many corners. On this occasion it was darker than usual, and when I passed into the room in the tower I could only just see the furniture, the position of which was already familiar to me. Also there was a dreadful odour of decay in the room, and I woke screaming.

The dream, with such variations and developments as I have mentioned, went on at intervals for fifteen years. Sometimes I would dream it two or three nights in succession; once, as I have said, there was an intermission of six months, but taking a reasonable average, I should say that I dreamed it quite as often as once in a month. It had, as is plain, something of nightmare about it, since it always ended in the same appalling terror, which so far from getting less, seemed to me to gather fresh fear every time that I experienced it. There was, too, a strange and dreadful consistency about it. The characters in it, as I have mentioned, got regularly older, death and marriage visited this silent family, and I never in the dream, after Mrs. Stone had died, set eyes on her again. But it was always her voice that told me that the room in the tower was prepared for me, and whether we had tea out on the lawn, or the scene was laid in one of the rooms overlooking it, I could always see her gravestone standing just outside the iron gate. It was the same, too, with the married daughter; usually she was not present, but once or twice she returned again, in company with a man, whom I took to be her husband. He, too, like the rest of them, was always silent. But, owing to the constant repetition of the dream, I had ceased to attach, in my waking hours, any significance to it. I never met Jack Stone again during all those years, nor did I ever see a house that resembled this dark house of my dream. And then something happened.

I had been in London in this year, up till the end of the July, and during the first week in August went down to stay with a friend in a house he had taken for the summer months, in the Ashdown Forest district of Sussex. I left London early, for John Clinton was to meet me at Forest Row Station, and we were going to spend the day golfing, and go to his house in the evening. He had his motor with him, and we set off, about five of the afternoon, after a thoroughly delightful day, for the drive, the distance being some ten miles. As it was still so early we did not have tea at the club house, but waited till we should get home. As we drove, the weather, which up till then had been, though hot, deliciously fresh, seemed to me to alter in quality, and become very stagnant and oppressive, and I felt that indefinable sense of ominous apprehension that I am accustomed to before thunder. John, however, did not share my views, attributing my loss of lightness to the fact that I had lost both my matches. Events proved, however, that I was right, though I do not think that the thunderstorm that broke that night was the sole cause of my depression.

Our way lay through deep high-banked lanes, and before we had gone very far I fell asleep, and was only awakened by the stopping of the motor. And with a sudden thrill, partly of fear but chiefly of curiosity, I found myself standing in the doorway of my house of dream. We went, I half wondering whether or not I was dreaming still, through a low oak-panelled hall, and out onto the lawn, where tea was laid in the shadow of the house. It was set in flower beds, a red-brick wall, with a gate in it, bounded one side, and out beyond that was a space of rough grass with a walnut tree. The façade of the house was very long, and at one end stood a three-storied tower, markedly older than the rest.

Here for the moment all resemblance to the repeated dream ceased. There was no silent and somehow terrible family, but a large assembly of exceedingly cheerful persons, all of whom were known to me. And in spite of the horror with which the dream itself had always filled me, I felt nothing of it now that the scene of it was thus reproduced before me. But I felt intensest curiosity as to what was going to happen.

Tea pursued its cheerful course, and before long Mrs. Clinton got up. And at that moment I think I knew what she was going to say. She spoke to me, and what she said was:

“Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.”

At that, for half a second, the horror of the dream took hold of me again. But it quickly passed, and again I felt nothing more than the most intense curiosity. It was not very long before it was amply satisfied.

John turned to me.

“Right up at the top of the house,” he said, “but I think you’ll be comfortable. We’re absolutely full up. Would you like to go and see it now? By Jove, I believe that you are right, and that we are going to have a thunderstorm. How dark it has become.”

I got up and followed him. We passed through the hall, and up the perfectly familiar staircase. Then he opened the door, and I went in. And at that moment sheer unreasoning terror again possessed me. I did not know what I feared: I simply feared. Then like a sudden recollection, when one remembers a name which has long escaped the memory, I knew what I feared. I feared Mrs. Stone, whose grave with the sinister inscription, “In evil memory,” I had so often seen in my dream, just beyond the lawn which lay below my window. And then once more the fear passed so completely that I wondered what there was to fear, and I found myself, sober and quiet and sane, in the room in the tower, the name of which I had so often heard in my dream, and the scene of which was so familiar.

I looked around it with a certain sense of proprietorship, and found that nothing had been changed from the dreaming nights in which I knew it so well. Just to the left of the door was the bed, lengthways along the wall, with the head of it in the angle. In a line with it was the fireplace and a small bookcase; opposite the door the outer wall was pierced by two lattice-paned windows, between which stood the dressing-table, while ranged along the fourth wall was the washing-stand and a big cupboard. My luggage had already been unpacked, for the furniture of dressing and undressing lay orderly on the wash-stand and toilet-table, while my dinner clothes were spread out on the coverlet of the bed. And then, with a sudden start of unexplained dismay, I saw that there were two rather conspicuous objects which I had not seen before in my dreams: one a life-sized oil painting of Mrs. Stone, the other a black-and-white sketch of Jack Stone, representing him as he had appeared to me only a week before in the last of the series of these repeated dreams, a rather secret and evil-looking man of about thirty. His picture hung between the windows, looking straight across the room to the other portrait, which hung at the side of the bed. At that I looked next, and as I looked I felt once more the horror of nightmare seize me.

It represented Mrs. Stone as I had seen her last in my dreams: old and withered and white-haired. But in spite of the evident feebleness of body, a dreadful exuberance and vitality shone through the envelope of flesh, an exuberance wholly malign, a vitality that foamed and frothed with unimaginable evil. Evil beamed from the narrow, leering eyes; it laughed in the demon-like mouth. The whole face was instinct with some secret and appalling mirth; the hands, clasped together on the knee, seemed shaking with suppressed and nameless glee. Then I saw also that it was signed in the left-hand bottom corner, and wondering who the artist could be, I looked more closely, and read the inscription, “Julia Stone by Julia Stone.”

There came a tap at the door, and John Clinton entered.

“Got everything you want?” he asked.

“Rather more than I want,” said I, pointing to the picture.

He laughed.

“Hard-featured old lady,” he said. “By herself, too, I remember. Anyhow she can’t have flattered herself much.”

“But don’t you see?” said I. “It’s scarcely a human face at all. It’s the face of some witch, of some devil.”

He looked at it more closely.

“Yes; it isn’t very pleasant,” he said. “Scarcely a bedside manner, eh? Yes; I can imagine getting the nightmare if I went to sleep with that close by my bed. I’ll have it taken down if you like.”

“I really wish you would,” I said. He rang the bell, and with the help of a servant we detached the picture and carried it out onto the landing, and put it with its face to the wall.

“By Jove, the old lady is a weight,” said John, mopping his forehead. “I wonder if she had something on her mind.”

The extraordinary weight of the picture had struck me too. I was about to reply, when I caught sight of my own hand. There was blood on it, in considerable quantities, covering the whole palm.

“I’ve cut myself somehow,” said I.

John gave a little startled exclamation.

“Why, I have too,” he said.

Simultaneously the footman took out his handkerchief and wiped his hand with it. I saw that there was blood also on his handkerchief.

John and I went back into the tower room and washed the blood off; but neither on his hand nor on mine was there the slightest trace of a scratch or cut. It seemed to me that, having ascertained this, we both, by a sort of tacit consent, did not allude to it again. Something in my case had dimly occurred to me that I did not wish to think about. It was but a conjecture, but I fancied that I knew the same thing had occurred to him.

The heat and oppression of the air, for the storm we had expected was still undischarged, increased very much after dinner, and for some time most of the party, among whom were John Clinton and myself, sat outside on the path bounding the lawn, where we had had tea. The night was absolutely dark, and no twinkle of star or moon ray could penetrate the pall of cloud that overset the sky. By degrees our assembly thinned, the women went up to bed, men dispersed to the smoking or billiard room, and by eleven o’clock my host and I were the only two left. All the evening I thought that he had something on his mind, and as soon as we were alone he spoke.

“The man who helped us with the picture had blood on his hand, too, did you notice?” he said.

“I asked him just now if he had cut himself, and he said he supposed he had, but that he could find no mark of it. Now where did that blood come from?”

By dint of telling myself that I was not going to think about it, I had succeeded in not doing so, and I did not want, especially just at bedtime, to be reminded of it.

“I don’t know,” said I, “and I don’t really care so long as the picture of Mrs. Stone is not by my bed.”

He got up.

“But it’s odd,” he said. “Ha! Now you’ll see another odd thing.”

A dog of his, an Irish terrier by breed, had come out of the house as we talked. The door behind us into the hall was open, and a bright oblong of light shone across the lawn to the iron gate which led on to the rough grass outside, where the walnut tree stood. I saw that the dog had all his hackles up, bristling with rage and fright; his lips were curled back from his teeth, as if he was ready to spring at something, and he was growling to himself. He took not the slightest notice of his master or me, but stiffly and tensely walked across the grass to the iron gate. There he stood for a moment, looking through the bars and still growling. Then of a sudden his courage seemed to desert him: he gave one long howl, and scuttled back to the house with a curious crouching sort of movement.

“He does that half-a-dozen times a day.” said John. “He sees something which he both hates and fears.”

I walked to the gate and looked over it. Something was moving on the grass outside, and soon a sound which I could not instantly identify came to my ears. Then I remembered what it was: it was the purring of a cat. I lit a match, and saw the purrer, a big blue Persian, walking round and round in a little circle just outside the gate, stepping high and ecstatically, with tail carried aloft like a banner. Its eyes were bright and shining, and every now and then it put its head down and sniffed at the grass.

I laughed.

“The end of that mystery, I am afraid.” I said. “Here’s a large cat having Walpurgis night all alone.”

“Yes, that’s Darius,” said John. “He spends half the day and all night there. But that’s not the end of the dog mystery, for Toby and he are the best of friends, but the beginning of the cat mystery. What’s the cat doing there? And why is Darius pleased, while Toby is terror-stricken?”

At that moment I remembered the rather horrible detail of my dreams when I saw through the gate, just where the cat was now, the white tombstone with the sinister inscription. But before I could answer the rain began, as suddenly and heavily as if a tap had been turned on, and simultaneously the big cat squeezed through the bars of the gate, and came leaping across the lawn to the house for shelter. Then it sat in the doorway, looking out eagerly into the dark. It spat and struck at John with its paw, as he pushed it in, in order to close the door.

Somehow, with the portrait of Julia Stone in the passage outside, the room in the tower had absolutely no alarm for me, and as I went to bed, feeling very sleepy and heavy, I had nothing more than interest for the curious incident about our bleeding hands, and the conduct of the cat and dog. The last thing I looked at before I put out my light was the square empty space by my bed where the portrait had been. Here the paper was of its original full tint of dark red: over the rest of the walls it had faded. Then I blew out my candle and instantly fell asleep.

My awaking was equally instantaneous, and I sat bolt upright in bed under the impression that some bright light had been flashed in my face, though it was now absolutely pitch dark. I knew exactly where I was, in the room which I had dreaded in dreams, but no horror that I ever felt when asleep approached the fear that now invaded and froze my brain. Immediately after a peal of thunder crackled just above the house, but the probability that it was only a flash of lightning which awoke me gave no reassurance to my galloping heart. Something I knew was in the room with me, and instinctively I put out my right hand, which was nearest the wall, to keep it away. And my hand touched the edge of a picture-frame hanging close to me.

I sprang out of bed, upsetting the small table that stood by it, and I heard my watch, candle, and matches clatter onto the floor. But for the moment there was no need of light, for a blinding flash leaped out of the clouds, and showed me that by my bed again hung the picture of Mrs. Stone. And instantly the room went into blackness again. But in that flash I saw another thing also, namely a figure that leaned over the end of my bed, watching me. It was dressed in some close-clinging white garment, spotted and stained with mold, and the face was that of the portrait.

Overhead the thunder cracked and roared, and when it ceased and the deathly stillness succeeded, I heard the rustle of movement coming nearer me, and, more horrible yet, perceived an odour of corruption and decay. And then a hand was laid on the side of my neck, and close beside my ear I heard quick-taken, eager breathing. Yet I knew that this thing, though it could be perceived by touch, by smell, by eye and by ear, was still not of this earth, but something that had passed out of the body and had power to make itself manifest. Then a voice, already familiar to me, spoke.

“I knew you would come to the room in the tower,” it said. “I have been long waiting for you. At last you have come. Tonight I shall feast; before long we will feast together.”

And the quick breathing came closer to me; I could feel it on my neck.

At that the terror, which I think had paralysed me for the moment, gave way to the wild instinct of self-preservation. I hit wildly with both arms, kicking out at the same moment, and heard a little animal-squeal, and something soft dropped with a thud beside me. I took a couple of steps forward, nearly tripping up over whatever it was that lay there, and by the merest good-luck found the handle of the door. In another second I ran out on the landing, and had banged the door behind me. Almost at the same moment I heard a door open somewhere below, and John Clinton, candle in hand, came running upstairs.

“What is it?” he said. “I sleep just below you, and heard a noise as if – Good heavens, there’s blood on your shoulder.”

I stood there, so he told me afterwards, swaying from side to side, white as a sheet, with the mark on my shoulder as if a hand covered with blood had been laid there.

“It’s in there,” I said, pointing. “She, you know. The portrait is in there, too, hanging up on the place we took it from.”

At that he laughed.

“My dear fellow, this is mere nightmare,” he said.

He pushed by me, and opened the door, I standing there simply inert with terror, unable to stop him, unable to move.

“Phew! What an awful smell,” he said.

Then there was silence; he had passed out of my sight behind the open door. Next moment he came out again, as white as myself, and instantly shut it.

“Yes, the portrait’s there,” he said, “and on the floor is a thing – a thing spotted with earth, like what they bury people in. Come away, quick, come away.”

How I got downstairs I hardly know. An awful shuddering and nausea of the spirit rather than of the flesh had seized me, and more than once he had to place my feet upon the steps, while every now and then he cast glances of terror and apprehension up the stairs. But in time we came to his dressing-room on the floor below, and there I told him what I have here described.

•  •  •

The sequel can be made short; indeed, some of my readers have perhaps already guessed what it was, if they remember that inexplicable affair of the churchyard at West Fawley, some eight years ago, where an attempt was made three times to bury the body of a certain woman who had committed suicide. On each occasion the coffin was found in the course of a few days again protruding from the ground. After the third attempt, in order that the thing should not be talked about, the body was buried elsewhere in unconsecrated ground. Where it was buried was just outside the iron gate of the garden belonging to the house where this woman had lived. She had committed suicide in a room at the top of the tower in that house. Her name was Julia Stone.

Subsequently the body was again secretly dug up, and the coffin was found to be full of blood.

THE ARMLESS MAN

W. G. Litt

1916

I first met Bob Masters in the hotel at a place called Fourteen Streams, not very far from Kimberley.

I had for some months been trying to find gold or diamonds by digging holes in the veldt. But since this has little or nothing to do with the story, I pass by my mining adventures and come back to the hotel. I came to it very readily that afternoon, for I was very thirsty.

A tall man standing at the bar turned his head as I entered and said “Good-day” to me. I returned the compliment, but took no particular notice of him at first.

Suddenly I heard the man say to the barman:

“I’m ready for another drink.”

That surprised me, because his glass was still three-quarters full. But I was still more startled by the action of the barman who lifted up the glass and held it whilst the man drank.

Then I saw the reason. The man had no arms.

You know the easy way in which Englishmen chum together anywhere out of England, whilst in their native country nothing save a formal introduction will make them acquainted? I made some remark to Masters which led to another from him, and in five minutes’ time we were chatting on all sorts of topics.

I learnt that Masters, bound for England, had come in to Fourteen Streams to catch the train from Kimberley, and, having a few hours to wait, had strolled up to the collection of tin huts calling itself a town.

I was going down to Kimberley too, so of course we went together, and were quite old friends by the time we reached that city.

We had a wash and something to eat, and then we walked round to the post-office. I used to have my letters addressed there, poste restante, and call in for them when I happened to be in Kimberley.

I found several letters, one of which altered the whole course of my life. This was from Messrs. Harvey, Filson, and Harvey, solicitors, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It informed me that the sudden death of my cousin had so affected my uncle’s health that he had followed his only son within the month. The senior branch of the family being thus extinct the whole of the entailed estate had devolved on me.

The first thing I did was to send off two cablegrams to say that I was coming home by the first available boat, one to the solicitors, the other to Nancy Milward.

Masters and I arranged to come home together and eventually reached Cape Town. There we had considerable trouble at the shipping office. It was just about the time of year when people who live in Africa to make money, come over to England to spend it, and in consequence the boats were very crowded. Masters demanded a cabin to himself, a luxury which was not to be had, though there was one that he and I could share. He made a tremendous fuss about doing this, and I thought it very strange, because I had assisted him in many ways which his mutilation rendered necessary. However, he had to give way in the end, and we embarked on the Castle liner.

On the voyage he told me how he had lost his arms. It seemed that he had been sent up country on some Government job or other, and had had the ill-fortune to be captured by the natives. They treated him quite well at first, but gave him to understand that he must not try to escape. I suppose that to most men such a warning would be a direct incitement to make the attempt. Masters made it and failed. They cut off his right arm as a punishment. He waited until the wound was healed and tried again. Again he failed. This time they cut off his other arm.

“Good Lord,” I cried. “What devils!”

“Weren’t they!” he said. “And yet, you know, they were quite good-tempered chaps when you didn’t cross them. I wasn’t going to be beaten by a lot of naked negroes though, and I made a third attempt.

“I succeeded all right that time, though, of course, it was much more difficult. I really don’t know at all how I managed to worry through. You see, I could only eat plants and leaves and such fruit as I came across; but I’d learnt as much as I could of the local botany in the intervals.”

“Was it worthwhile?” I asked. “I think the first failure and its result would have satisfied me.”

“Yes,” he said slowly, “it was worthwhile. You see, my wife was waiting for me at home, and I wanted to see her again very badly – you don’t know how badly.”

“I think I can imagine,” I said. “Because there is a girl waiting for me too at home.”

“I saw her before she died,” he continued.

“Died?” I said.

“Yes,” he answered. “She was dying when I reached home at last, but I was with her at the end. That was something, wasn’t it?”

I do hate people to tell me this sort of thing. Not because I do not feel sorry for them; on the contrary, I feel so sorry that I absolutely fail to find words to express my sympathy. I tried, however, to show it in other ways, by the attentions I paid him and by anticipating his every wish.

Yet there were many things that were astonishing about his actions, things that I wonder now I did not realize must have been impossible for him to do for himself, and that yet were done. But he was so surprisingly dexterous with his lips, and feet too, when he was in his cabin that I suppose I put them down to that.

I remember waking up one night and looking out of my bunk to see him standing on the floor. The cabin was only faintly lit by a moonbeam which found its way through the porthole. I could not see clearly, but I fancied that he walked to the door and opened it, and closed it behind him. He did it all very quickly, as quickly as I could have done it. As I say, I was very sleepy, but the sight of the door opening and shutting like that woke me thoroughly. Sitting up I shouted at him.

He heard me and opened the door again, easily, too, much more easily than he seemed to be able to shut it when he saw me looking at him.

“Hullo! Awake, old chap?” he said. “What is it?”

“Er – nothing,” I said. “Or rather I suppose I was only half awake; but you seemed to open that door so easily that it quite startled me.”

“One does not always like to let others see the shifts to which one has to resort,” was all the answer he gave me.

But I worried over it. The thing bothered me, because he had made no attempt to explain.

That was not the only thing I noticed.

Two or three days later we were sitting together on deck. I had offered to read to him. I noticed that he got up out of his chair. Suddenly I saw the chair move. It gave me a great shock, for the chair twisted apparently of its own volition, so that when he sat down again the sunlight was at his back and not in his eyes, as I knew it had been previously. But I reasoned with myself and managed to satisfy myself that he must have turned the chair round with his foot. It was just possible that he could have done so, for it had one of those light wickerwork seats.

We had a lovely voyage for three-quarters of the way, and the sea was as calm as any duck-pond. But that was all altered when we passed Cape Finisterre. I have done a lot of knocking about on the ocean one way and another, but I never saw the Bay of Biscay deserve its reputation better.

I’d much rather see what is going on than be cooped up below, and after lunch I told Bob I was going up on deck.

“I’ll only stay there for a bit,” I said. “You make yourself comfortable down here.”

I filled his pipe, put it in his mouth, and gave him a match; then I left him.

I made my way up and down the deck for a time, clutching hold of everything handy, and rather enjoyed it, though the waves drenched me to the skin.

Presently I saw Masters come out of the companion-way and make his way very skillfully towards me. Of course it was fearfully dangerous for him.

I staggered towards him, and, putting my lips to his ear, shouted to him to go below at once.

“Oh, I shall be all right!” he said, and laughed.

“You’ll be drowned – drowned,” I screamed. “There was a wave just now that – well, if I hadn’t been able to cling on with both hands like grim death, I should have gone overboard. Go below.”

He laughed again and shook his head.

And then what I dreaded happened. A vast mountain of green water lifted up its bulk and fell upon us in a ravening cataract. I clutched at Masters, but trying to save him and myself handicapped me badly. The strength of that mass of water was terrible. It seemed to snatch at everything with giant hands, and drag all with it. It tossed a hen-coop high, and carried it through the rails.

I felt the grip of my right hand loosen, and the next instant was carried, still clutching Masters with my left, towards that gap in the bulwark.

I managed to seize the end of the broken rail. It held us for a moment, then gave, and for a moment I hung sheer over the vessel’s side.

In that instant I felt fingers tighten on my arm, tighten till they bit into the flesh, and I was pulled back into safety.

Together we staggered back, and got below somehow. I was trembling like a leaf, and the sweat dripped from me. I almost screamed aloud.

It was not that I was frightened of death. I’ve seen too much of that in many parts of the earth to dread it greatly. It was the thought of those fingers tightening on me where no fingers were.

Masters did not speak a word, nor did I, until we found ourselves in the cabin.

I tore the wet clothes off me and turned my arm to the mirror. I knew I could not have been mistaken when I felt them.

There on the upper arm, above the line of sunburn that one gets from working with sleeves rolled up, there on the white skin showed the red marks of four slender fingers and a thumb! I sat down suddenly at sight of them, and pulling open a drawer, found a flask of neat brandy, and gulped it down, emptied it in one gulp.

Then I turned to him and pointed to the marks.

“In God’s name, how came these here?” I said. “What – what happened up there on deck?”

He looked at me very gravely.

“I saved you,” he said, “or rather I didn’t, for I could not. But she did.”

“What do you mean?” I stammered.

“Let me get these clothes off,” he said, “and some dry ones on; and I’ll tell you.”

Words fail to describe my feelings as I watched the clothes come off him and dry ones go on just as if hands were arranging them.

I sat and shuddered. I tried to close my eyes, but the weird, unnatural sight drew them as a lodestone.

“I’m sorry that you should have had this shock,” he said. “I know what it must have been like, though it was not so bad for me when they seemed to come, for they came gradually as time went on.”

“What came gradually?” I asked.

“Why, these arms! They’re what I’m telling you about. You asked me to tell you, I thought?”

“Did I?” I said. “I don’t know what I’m saying or asking. I think I’m going mad, quite mad.”

“No,” he said, “you’re as sane as I am, only when you come across something strange, unique for that matter, you are naturally terrified. Well, it was like this. I told you about my adventures with the negroes up country. That was quite true. They cut off both my arms – you can see the stumps for that matter. And I told you that I came home to find my wife dying. Her heart had always been weak, I’d known that, and it had gradually grown more feeble. There must have been, indeed there was, a strange sort of telepathy between us. She had had fearful attacks of heart failure on both occasions when the negroes had mutilated me, I learnt on comparing notes.

“But I had known too, somehow, that I must escape at all costs. It was the knowledge that made me try again after each failure. I should have gone on trying to escape as long as I had lived, or rather as long as she had lived. I knelt beside her bed and she put out her arms and laid them round my neck.

“‘So you have come back to me before I go,’ she said. ‘I knew you must, because I called you so. But you have been long in coming, almost too long. But I knew I had to see you again before I died.’

“I broke down then. I was sorely tried. No arms even to put round her!

“‘Darling, stay with me for a little, only for a little while!’ I sobbed.

“She shook her head feebly. ‘It is no use, my dear,’ she said, ‘I must go.’

“I’ll come with you,’ I said, ‘I’ll not live without you.’

“She shook her head again.

“You must be brave, Bob. I shall be watching you afterwards just as much as if I still lived on earth. If only I could give you my arms! A poor, weak woman’s arms, but better than none, dear.’

“She died some weeks later. I spent all the time at her bedside, I hardly left her. Her arms were round me when she died. Shall I ever feel them round me again? I wonder! You see, they are mine now.

“They came to me gradually. It was very strange at first to have arms and hands which one couldn’t see. I used to keep my eyes shut as much as possible, and try to fancy that I had never lost my arms.

“I got used to them in time. But I have always been careful not to let people see me do things that they would know to be impossible for an armless man. That was what took me to Africa again, because I could get lost there and do things for myself with these hands.”

“‘And they twain shall be one flesh,’” I muttered.

“Yes,” he said, “I think the explanation must be something of that sort. There’s more than that in it, though; these arms are other than flesh.”

He sat silent for a time with his head bowed on his chest. Then he spoke again:

“I got sick of being alone at last, and was coming back when I met you at Fourteen Streams. I don’t know what I shall do when I do get home. I can never rest. I have – what do they call it – Wanderlust?”

“Does she ever speak to you from that other world?” I asked him.

He shook his head sadly.

“No, never. But I know she lives somewhere beyond this world of ours. She must, because these arms live. So I try always to act as if she watches everything. I always try to do the right thing, but, anyway, these arms and hands would do good of their own accord. Just now up on the deck I was very frightened. I’d have saved myself at any cost almost, and let you go. But I could not do that. The hands clutched you. It is her will, so much stronger and purer than mine, that still persists. It is only when she does not exert it that I control these arms.”

That was how I learnt the strangest tale that ever a man was told, and knew the miracle to which I owed my life.

It may be that Bob Masters was a coward. He always said that he was. Personally I do not believe it, for he had the sweetest nature I ever met.

He had nowhere to go to in England and seemed to have no friends. So I made him come down with me to Englehart, that dear old country seat of my family in the Western shires which was now mine.

Nancy lived in that country, too.

There was no reason why we should not get married at once. We had waited long enough.

I can see again the old, ivy-grown church where Nancy and I were wed, and Bob Masters standing by my side as best man.

I remember feeling in his pocket for the ring, and as I did so, I felt a hand grasp mine for a moment.

Then there was the reception afterwards, and speech-making – the usual sort of thing.

Later Nancy and I drove off to the station.

We had not said good-bye to Bob, for he’d insisted on driving to the station with the luggage; said he was going to see the last of us there.

He was waiting for us in the yard when we reached it, and walked with us on to the platform.

We stood there chatting about one thing and another, when I noticed that Nancy was not talking much and seemed rather pale. I was just going to remark on it when we heard the whistle of the train. There is a sharp curve in the permanent way outside the station, so that a train is on you all of a sudden.

Suddenly to my horror I saw Nancy sway backwards towards the edge of the platform. I tried vainly to catch her as she reeled and fell – right in front of the oncoming train. I sprang forward to leap after her, but hands grasped me and flung me back so violently that I fell down on the platform.

It was Bob Masters who took the place that should have been mine, and leapt upon the metals.

I could not see what happened then. The stationmaster says he saw Nancy lifted from before the engine when it was right upon her. He says it was as if she was lifted by the wind. She was quite close to Masters. “Near enough for him to have lifted her, sir, if he’d had arms.” The two of them staggered for a moment, and together fell clear of the train.

Nancy was little the worse for the awful accident, bruised, of course, but poor Masters was unconscious.

We carried him into the waiting-room, laid him on the cushions there, and sent hot-foot for the doctor.

He was a good country practitioner, and, I suppose, knew the ordinary routine of his work quite well. He fussed about, hummed and hawed a lot.

“Yes, yes,” he said, as if he were trying to persuade himself. “Shock, you know. He’ll be better presently. Lucky, though, that he had no arms.”

I noticed then, for the first time, that the sleeves of the coat had been shorn away.

“Doctor,” I said, “how is he? Surely, if he isn’t hurt he would not look like that. What exactly do you mean by shock?”

“Hum – er,” he hesitated, and applied his stethoscope to Masters’ heart again.

“The heart is very weak,” he said at length. “Very weak. He’s always very anemic, I suppose?”

“No,” I answered. “He’s anything but that. He’s – Good Lord, he’s bleeding to death! Put ligatures on his arms. Put ligatures on his arms.”

“Please keep quiet, Mr. Riverston,” the doctor said. “It must have been a dreadful experience for you, and you are naturally very upset.”

I raved and cursed at him. I think I should have struck him, but the others held me. They said they would take me away if I did not keep quiet.

Bob Masters opened his eyes presently, and saw them holding me.

“Please let him go,” he said. “It’s all right, old man. It’s no use your arguing with them, they would not understand. I could never explain to them now, and they would never believe you. Besides, it’s all for the best. Yes, the train went over them and I’m armless for the second time. But – not for long!”

I knelt by his side and sobbed. It all seemed so dreadful, and yet, I don’t think that then I would have tried to stay his passing. I knew it was best for him.

He looked at me very affectionately.

“I’m so sorry that this should happen on your wedding-day,” he said. “But it would have been so much worse for you if she had not helped.”

His voice grew fainter and died away.

There was a pause for a time, and his breath came in great sighing sobs.

Then suddenly he raised himself on the cushions until he stood upright on his feet, and a smile broke over his face – a smile so sweet that I think the angels in Paradise must look like that.

His voice came strong and loud from his lips.

“Darling!” he cried. “Darling, your arms are round me once again! I come! I come!”

•   •   •   •   •

“One of the most extraordinary cases I have ever met with,” the doctor told the coroner at the inquest. “He seemed to have all the symptoms of excessive hemorrhage.”