The Doll and One Other
Date: 1945-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Magic; Supernatural Fiction
Description: A small collection of two titles from 1946, late in Blackwood’s career. Eerie and atmospheric, told with the master’s touch. ~ ~ ~ ~ “Blackwood plunges with boldness, yet with consistent invention, into the realm of the fantastic.” (—The Outlook) ~ ~ ~ ~ “The Doll”: A little girl is given a doll, which is actually a malignant supernatural entity with macabre designs upon the child’s father. ~ ~ ~ ~ “The Trod”: An unusual love-triangle involving a man, a woman, and a call from the Fairy world. Eternal life comes at a high price — the loss of one’s soul and of mortal love.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

THE  DOLL

AND ONE OTHER
( BEING THE TROD )

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

MobileRead Edition
2022

A small collection of two titles from 1946, late in Blackwood’s career. Eerie and atmospheric, told with the master’s touch.

“Blackwood plunges with boldness, yet with consistent invention, into the realm of the fantastic.” (—The Outlook)

- The Doll
A little girl is given a doll, which is actually a malignant supernatural entity with macabre designs upon the child’s father.

- The Trod
An unusual love-triangle involving a man, a woman, and a call from the Fairy world. Eternal life comes at a high price — the loss of one’s soul and of mortal love.

One of the foremost British writers of supernatural tales in the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) wrote stories in which the slow accumulation of telling details produced a foreboding atmosphere of almost unendurable tension. Though he wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, “His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s.”

Blackwood’s literary renown began in 1908 with the publication of a highly successful collection of stories, John Silence — Physician Extraordinary, featuring a “psychic doctor.” His two best known stories are probably “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”.

The Doll and One Other, by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), was first published in 1946. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

THE DOLL

Some nights are merely dark, others are dark in a suggestive way as though something ominous, mysterious, is going to happen. In certain remote outlying suburbs, at any rate, this seems true, where great spaces between the lamps go dead at night, where little happens, where a ring at the door is a summons almost, and people cry “Let’s go to town!” In the villa gardens the mangy cedars sigh in the wind, but the hedges stiffen, there is a muffling of spontaneous activity.

On this particular November night a moist breeze barely stirred the silver pine in the narrow drive leading to the “Laurels” where Colonel Masters lived, Colonel Hymber Masters, late of an Indian regiment, with many distinguished letters after his name. The housemaid in the limited staff being out, it was the cook who answered the bell when it rang with a sudden, sharp clang soon after ten o’clock — and gave an audible gasp half of surprise, half of fear. The bell’s sudden clangour was an unpleasant and unwelcome sound. Monica, the Colonel’s adored yet rather neglected child, was asleep upstairs, but the cook was not frightened lest Monica be disturbed, nor because it seemed a bit late for the bell to ring so violently; she was frightened because when she opened the door to let the fine rain drive in she saw a black man standing on the steps. There, in the wind and the rain, stood a tall, slim nigger holding a parcel.

Dark-skinned, at any rate, he was, she reflected afterwards, whether negro, hindu or arab; the word “nigger” describing any man not really white. Wearing a stained yellow mackintosh and dirty slouch hat, and “looking like a devil, so help me God,” he shoved the little parcel at her out of the gloom, the light from the hall flaring red into his gleaming eyes. “For Colonel Masters,” he whispered rapidly, “and very special into his own personal touch and no one else.” And he melted away into the night with his “strange foreign accent, his eyes of fire, and his nasty hissing voice.”

He was gone, swallowed up in the wind and rain.

“But I saw his eyes,” swore the cook the next morning to the housemaid, “his fiery eyes, and his nasty look, and his black hands and long thin fingers, and his nails all shiny pink, and he looked to me — if you know wot I mean — he looked like — death….”

Thus the cook, so far as she was intelligently articulate next day, but standing now against the closed door with the small brown paper parcel in her hands, impressed by the orders that it was to be given into his personal touch, she was relieved by the fact that Colonel Masters never returned till after midnight and that she need not act at once. The reflection brought a certain comfort that restored her equanimity a little though she still stood there, holding the parcel gingerly in her grimy hands, reluctant, hesitating, uneasy. A parcel, even brought by a mysterious dark stranger, was not in itself frightening, yet frightened she certainly felt. Instinct and superstition worked perhaps; the wind, the rain, the fact of being alone in the house, the unexpected black man, these also contributed to her discomfort. A vague sense of horror touched her, her Irish blood stirred ancient dreams, so that she began to shake a little, as though the parcel contained something alive, explosive, poisonous, unholy, almost as though it moved, and, her fingers loosening their hold, the parcel — dropped. It fell on the tiled floor with a queer, sharp clack, but it lay motionless. She eyed it closely, cautiously, but, thank God, it did not move, an inert, brown paper parcel. Brought by an errand boy in daylight, it might have been groceries, tobacco, even a mended shirt. She peeped and tinkered: that sharp clack puzzled her. Then, after a few minutes, remembering her duty, she picked it up gingerly even while she shivered. It was to be handed into the Colonel’s “personal touch.” She compromised, deciding to place it on his desk and to tell him about it in the morning; only Colonel Masters, with those mysterious years in the East behind him, his temper and his tyrannical orders, was not easy of direct approach at the best of times, in the morning least of all.

The cook left it at that — that is, she left it on the desk in his study, but left out all explanations about its arrival. She had decided to be vague about such unimportant details, for Mrs. O’Reilly was afraid of Colonel Masters, and only his professed love of Monica made her believe that he was quite human. He paid her well, oh yes, and sometimes he smiled, and he was a handsome man, if a bit too dark for her fancy, yet he also paid her an occasional compliment about her curry, and that soothed her for the moment. They suited one another, at any rate, and she stayed, robbing him comfortably, if cautiously.

“It ain’t no good,” she assured the housemaid next day, “Wot with that ‘personal touch into his hands, and no one else,’ and that black man’s eyes and that crack when it came away in my hands and fell on the floor. It ain’t no good, not to us nor anybody. No man as black as he was means lucky stars to anybody. A parcel indeed — with those devil’s eyes—”

“What did you do with it?” enquired the housemaid.

The cook looked her up and down. “Put it in the fire o’ course,” she replied. “On the stove if you want to know exact.”

It was the housemaid’s turn to look the cook up and down.

“I don’t think,” she remarked.

The cook reflected, probably because she found no immediate answer.

“Well,” she puffed out presently, “d’you know wot I think? You don’t. So I’ll tell you. It was something the master’s afraid of, that’s wot it was. He’s afraid of something — ever since I been here I’ve known that. And that’s wot it was. He done somebody wrong in India long ago and that lanky nigger brought wot’s coming to him, and that’s why I says I put it on the stove — see?” She dropped her voice. “It was a bloody idol,” she whispered, “that’s wot it was, that parcel, and he — why, he’s a bloody secret worshipper.” And she crossed herself. “That’s why I said I put on the stove — see?”

The housemaid stared and gasped.

“And you mark my words, young Jane!” added the cook, turning to her dough.

And there the matter rested for a period, for the cook, being Irish, had more laughter in her than tears, and beyond admitting to the scared housemaid that she had not really burnt the parcel but had left it on the study table, she almost forgot the incident. It was not her job, in any case, to answer the front door. She had “delivered” the parcel. Her conscience was quite clear.

Thus, nobody “marked her words” apparently, for nothing untoward happened, as the way is in remote Suburbia, and Monica in her lonely play was happy, and Colonel Masters as tyrannical and grim as ever. The moist wintry wind blew through the silver pine, the rain beat against the bow window, and no one called. For a week this lasted, a longish time in uneventful Suburbia.

But suddenly one morning Colonel Masters rang his study bell and, the housemaid being upstairs, it was the cook who answered. He held a brown paper parcel in his hands, half opened, the string dangling.

“I found this on my desk. I haven’t been in my room for a week. Who brought it? And when did it come?” His face, yellow as usual, held a fiery tinge.

Mrs. O’Reilly replied, postdating the arrival vaguely.

“I asked who brought it?” he insisted sharply.

“A stranger,” she fumbled. “No one,” she added nervously, “from hereabouts. No one I ever seen before. It was a man.”

“What did he look like?” The question came like a bullet.

Mrs. O’Reilly was rather taken by surprise. “D-darkish,” she stumbled. “Very darkish,” she added, “if I saw him right. Only he came and went so quick I didn’t get his face proper like, and…”

“Any message?” the Colonel cut her short She hesitated. “There was no answer,” she began remembering former occasions.

“Any message, I asked you?” he thundered.

“No message, sir, none at all. And he was gone before I could get his name and address, sir, but I think it was a sort of black man, or it may have been the darkness of the night — I couldn’t reely say, sir…”

In another minute she would have burst into tears or dropped to the floor in a faint, such was her terror of her employer especially when she was lying blind. The Colonel, however, saved her both disasters by abruptly holding out the half opened parcel towards her. He neither cross-examined nor cursed her as she had expected. He spoke with the curtness that betrayed anger and anxiety, almost it occurred to her, distress.

“Take it away and burn it,” he ordered in his army voice, passing it into her outstretched hands. “Burn it,” he repeated it, “or chuck the damned thing away.” He almost flung it at her as though he did not want to touch it. “If the man comes back,” he ordered in a voice of steel, “tell him it’s been destroyed — and say it didn’t reach me,” laying tremendous emphasis on the final words. “You understand?” He almost chucked it at her.

“Yes, sir. Exactly, sir,” and she turned and stumbled out, holding the parcel gingerly in her arms rather than in her hands and fingers, as though it contained something that might bite or sting.

Yet her fear had somehow lessened, for if he, Colonel Masters, could treat the parcel so contemptuously, why should she feel afraid of it. And, once alone in her kitchen among her household gods, she opened it. Turning back the thick paper wrappings. she started, and to her rather disappointed amazement, she found herself staring at nothing but a fair, waxen faced doll that could be bought in any toy-shop for one shilling and sixpence. A commonplace little cheap doll! Its face was pallid, white, expressionless, its flaxen hair was dirty, its tiny ill-shaped hands and fingers lay motionless by its side, its mouth was closed, though somehow grinning, no teeth visible, its eyelashes ridiculously like a worn toothbrush, its entire presentment in its flimsy skirt, contemptible, harmless, even ugly.

A doll! She giggled to herself, all fear evaporated.

“Gawd,” she thought. “The master must have a conscience like the floor of a parrot’s cage! And worse than that!” She was too afraid of him to despise him, her feeling was probably more like pity. “At any rate,” she reflected, “he had the wind up pretty had. It was something else he expected — not a two-penny halfpenny doll!” Her warm heart felt almost sorry for him.

Instead of “chucking the damned thing away or burning it,” however, for it was quite a nice looking doll, she presented it to Monica, and Monica, having few new toys, instantly adored it, promising faithfully, as gravely warned by Mrs. O’Reilly, that she would never, never let her father know she had it.

Her father, Colonel Hymber Masters, was, it seems, what’s called a “disappointed” man, a man whose fate forced him to live in surroundings he detested, disappointed in his career probably, possibly in love as well, Monica a love-child doubtless, and limited by his pension to face daily conditions that he loathed.

He was a silent, bitter sort of fellow, no more than that, and not so much disliked in the neighbourhood, as misunderstood. A sombre man they reckoned him, with his dark, furrowed face and silent ways. Yet “dark” in the suburbs meant mysterious, and “silent” invited female fantasy to fill the vacuum. It’s the frank, corn-haired man who invites sympathy and generous comment. He enjoyed his Bridge, however, and was accepted as a first-class player. Thus, he went out nightly, and rarely came back before midnight. He was welcome among the gamblers evidently, while the fact that he had an adored child at home softened the picture of this “mysterious” man. Monica, though rarely seen, appealed to the women of the neighbourhood, and “whatever her origin” said the gossips, “he loves her.”

To Monica, meanwhile, in her rather play-less, toy-less life, the doll, her new treasure, was a spot of gold. The fact that it was a “secret” present from her father, added to its value. Many other presents had come to her like that; she thought nothing of it; only, he had never given her a doll before, and it spelt rapture. Never, never, would she betray her pleasure and delight; it should remain her secret and his; and that made her love it all the more. She loved her father too, his taciturn silence was something she vaguely respected and adored. “That’s just like father,” she always said, when a strange new present came, and she knew instinctively that she must never say Thank you for it, for that was part of the lovely game between them. But this doll was exceptionally marvellous.

“It’s much more real and alive than my teddy-bears,” she told the cook, after examining it critically. “What ever made him think of it? Why, it even talks to me!” and she cuddled and fondled the half-misshapen toy. “It’s my baby,” she cried taking it against her cheek.

For no teddy-bear could really be a child; cuddly bears were not offspring, whereas a doll was a potential baby. It brought sweetness, as both cook and governess realized, into a rather grim house, hope and tenderness, a maternal flavour almost, something anyhow that no young bear could possibly bring. A child, a human baby! And yet both cook and governess — for both were present at the actual delivery — recalled later that Monica opened the parcel and recognized the doll with a yell of wild delight that seemed almost a scream of pain. There was this too high note of delirious exultation as though some instinctive horror of revulsion were instantly smothered and obliterated in a whirl of overmastering joy. It was Madame Jodzka who recalled — long afterwards — this singular contradiction.

“I did think she shrieked at it a bit, now you ask me,” admitted Mrs. O’Reilly later, though at the actual moment all she said was “Oh, lovely, darling, ain’t it a pet!” While all Madame Jodzka said was a cautionary “If you squash its mouth like that, Monica, it won’t be able to breathe!”

While Monica, paying no attention to either of them, fell to cuddling the doll with ecstasy.

A cheap little flaxen-haired, waxen-faced doll.

That so strange a case should come to us at second hand is, admittedly, a pity; that so much of the information should reach us largely through a cook and housemaid and through a foreigner of questionable validity, is equally unfortunate. Where precisely the reported facts creep across the feathery frontier into the incredible and thence into the fantastic would need the spider’s thread of the big telescopes to define. With the eye to the telescope, the thread of that New Zealand spider seems thick as a rope; but with the eye examining second-hand reports the thread becomes elusive gossamer.

The Polish governess, Madame Jodzka, left the house rather abruptly. Though adored by Monica and accepted by Colonel Masters, she left not long after the arrival of the doll. She was a comely, youngish widow of birth and breeding, tactful, discreet, understanding. She adored Monica, and Monica was happy with her; she feared her employer, yet perhaps secretly admired him as the strong, silent, dominating Englishman. He gave her great freedom, she never took liberties, everything went smoothly. The pay was good and she needed it. Then, suddenly, she left. In the suddenness of her departure, as in the odd reason she gave for leaving, lie doubtless the first hints of this remarkable affair, creeping across that “feathery frontier” into the incredible and fantastic. An understandable reason she gave for leaving was that she was too frightened to stay in the house another night. She left at twenty-four hours’ notice. Her reason was absurd, even if understandable, because any woman might find herself so frightened in a certain building that it has become intolerable to her nerves. Foolish or otherwise, this is understandable. An idée fixe, an obsession, once lodged in the mind of a superstitious, therefore hysterically-favoured woman, cannot be dislodged by argument. It may be absurd, yet it is “understandable.”

The story behind the reason for Madame Jodzka’s sudden terror is another matter, and it is best given quite simply. It relates to the doll. She swears by all her gods that she saw the doll “walking by itself,” walking in a disjointed, hoppity, hideous fashion across the bed in which Monica lay sleeping.

In the gleam of the night-light, Madame Jodzka swears she saw this happen. She was half inside the opened door, peeping in, as her habit and duty decreed, to see if all was well with the child before going up to bed herself. The light, if faint, was clear. A jerky movement on the counterpane first caught her attention, for a smallish object seemed blundering awkwardly across its slippery silken surface. Something rolling, possibly, some object Monica had left outside on falling asleep rolling mechanically as the child shifted or turned over.

After staring for some seconds, she then saw that it was not merely an “object,” since it had a living outline, nor was it rolling mechanically, or sliding, as she had first imagined. It was horribly taking steps, small but quite deliberate steps as though alive. It had a tiny, dreadful face, it had an expressionless tiny face, and the face had eyes — small, brightly shining eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Madame Jodzka.

She watched for a few seconds thunderstruck, and then suddenly realised with a shock of utter horror that this small, purposive monster was the doll, Monica’s doll! And this doll was moving towards her across the tumbled surface of the counterpane. It was coming in her direction — straight at her.

Madame Jodzka gripped herself, physically and mentally, making a great effort, it seems, to deny the abnormal, the incredible. She denied the ice in her veins and down her spine. She prayed. She thought frantically of her priest in Warsaw. Making no audible sound, she screamed in her mind. But the doll, quickening its pace, came hobbling straight towards her, its glassy eyes fixed hard upon her own.

Then Madame Jodzka fainted.

That she was, in some ways, a remarkable woman, with a sense of values, is clear from the fact that she realised this story “wouldn’t wash,” for she confided it only to the cook in cautious whispers, while giving her employer some more “washable” tale about a family death that obliged her to hurry home to Warsaw. Nor was there the slightest attempt at embroidery, for on recovering consciousness she had recovered her courage, too — and done a remarkable thing: she had compelled herself to investigate. Aided and fortified by her religion, she compelled herself to make an examination. She had tiptoed further into the room, had made sure that Monica was sleeping peacefully, and that the doll lay — motionless — half way down the counterpane. She gave it a long, concentrated look. Its lidless eyes, fringed by hideously ridiculous black lashes, were fixed on space. Its expression was not so much innocent, as blankly stupid, idiotic, a mask of death that aped cheaply a pretence of life, where life could never be. Not ugly merely, it was revolting.

Madame Jodzka however, did more than study this visage with concentration, for with admirable pluck she forced herself to touch the little horror. She actually picked it up. Her faith, her deep religious conviction denied the former evidence of her senses. She had not seen movement. It was incredible, impossible. The fault lay somewhere in herself. This persuasion, at any rate, lasted long enough to enable her to touch the repulsive little toy, to pick it up, to lift it. She placed it steadily on the table near the bed between the bowl of flowers and the night-light, where it lay on its back helpless, innocent, yet horrible, and only then on shaking legs did she leave the room and up to her own bed. That her fingers remained ice-cold until eventually she fell asleep can be explained, of course, too easily and naturally to claim examination.

Whether imagined or actual, it must have been, nonetheless, a horrifying spectacle — a mechanical outline from a commercial factory walking like a living thing with a purpose. It holds the nightmare touch. To Madame Jodzka, protected since youth within cast-iron tenets, it came as a shock. And a shock dislocates. The sight smashed everything she knew as possible and real. The flow of her blood was interrupted, it froze, there came icy terror into her heart, her normal mechanism failed for a moment, she fainted. And fainting seemed a natural result. Yet it was the shock of the incredible masquerade that gave her the courage to act. She loved Monica, apart from any consideration of paid duty. The sight of this tiny monstrosity strutting across the counterpane not far from the child’s sleeping face and folded hands — it was this that enabled her to pick it up with naked fingers and set it out of reach….

For hours, before falling asleep, she reviewed the incredible thing, alternately denying the facts, then accepting them, yet taking into sleep finally the assured conviction that her senses had not deceived her. There seems little, indeed, that in a court of law could have been advanced against her character for reliability, for sincerity, for the logic of her detailed account.

“I’m sorry,” said Colonel Masters quietly, referring to her bereavement. He looked searchingly at her. “And Monica will miss you,” he added with one of his rare smiles. “She needs you.” Then just as she turned away, he suddenly extended his hand. “If perhaps later you can come back — do let me know. Your influence is — so helpful — and good.”

She mumbled some phrase with a promise in it, yet she left with a queer, deep impression that it was not merely, not chiefly perhaps, Monica who needed her. She wished he had not used quite those words. A sense of shame lay in her, almost as though she were running away from duty, or at least from a chance to help that God had put in her way. “Your influence is — so good.”

Already in the train and on the boat conscience attacked her, biting, scratching, gnawing. She had deserted a child she loved, a child who needed her, because she was scared out of her wits. No, that was a one-sided statement. She had left a house because the Devil had come into it. No, that was only partially true. When a hysterical temperament, engrained since early childhood in fixed dogmas, begins to sift facts and analyse reactions, logic and common sense themselves become confused. Thought led one way, emotion another, and no honest conclusion dawned on her mind.

She hurried on to Warsaw, to a stepfather, a retired General whose gay life had no place for her and who would not welcome her return. It was a derogatory prospect for this youngish widow who had taken a job in order to escape from his vulgar activities to return now empty-handed. Yet it was easier, perhaps, to face a step-father’s selfish anger than to go and tell Colonel Masters her real reason for leaving his service. Her conscience, too, troubled her on another score as thoughts and memories travelled backwards and half-forgotten details emerged.

Those spots of blood, for instance, mentioned by Mrs. O’Reilly, the superstitious Irish cook. She had made it a rule to ignore Mrs. O’Reilly’s silly fairy tales, yet now she recalled suddenly those ridiculous discussions about the laundry list and the foolish remarks that the cook and housemaid had let fall.

“But there ain’t no paint in a doll, I tell you. It’s all sawdust and wax and muck,” from the housemaid. “I know red paint when I sees it, and that ain’t paint, it’s blood.” And from Mrs. O’Reilly later: “Mother o’ God! Another red blob! She’s biting her fingernails — and that’s not my job…!”

The red stains on sheets and pillow cases were puzzling certainly, but Madame Jodzka, hearing these remarks by chance as it were, had paid no particular attention to them at the moment. The laundry lists were hardly her affair. These ridiculous servants anyhow…! And yet, now in the train, those spots, be they paint or blood, crept back to trouble her.

Another thing, oddly enough, also troubled her — the ill-defined feeling that she was deserting a man who needed help, help that she could give. It was too vague to put into words. Was it based on his remark that her influence was “good” perhaps? She could not say. It was an intuition, and few intuitions bear analysis. Supporting it, however, was a conviction she had felt since first she entered the service of Colonel Masters, the conviction, namely, that he had a past that frightened him. There was something he had done, something he regretted and was probably ashamed of, something at any rate, for which he feared retribution. A retribution, moreover, he expected; a punishment that would come like a thief in the night and seize him by the throat.

It was against this dreaded vengeance that her influence was “good,” a protective influence possibly that her religion supplied, something on the side of the angels, in any case, that her personality provided.

Her mind worked thus, it seems; and whether a concealed admiration for this sombre and mysterious man, an admiration and protective instinct never admitted even to her inmost self, existed below the surface, hidden yet urgent, remains the secret of her own heart.

It was naturally and according to human nature, at any rate, that after a few weeks of her stepfather’s outrageous behaviour in the house, his cruelty too, she decided to return. She prayed to her gods incessantly, also she found oppressive her sense of neglected duty and failure of self-respect. She returned to the soulless suburban villa. It was understandable; the welcome from Monica was also understandable, the relief and pleasure of Colonel Masters still more so. It was expressed, this latter, in a courteous message only, tactfully worded, as though she had merely left for a brief necessity, for it was some days before she actually saw him to speak to. From cook and housemaid the welcome was voluble and — disquieting. There were no more inexplicable “spots of red,” but there were other unaccountable happenings even more distressing.

“She’s missed you something terrible,” said Mrs. O’Reilly, “though she’s found something else to keep her quiet — if you like to put it that way.” And she made the sign of the cross.

“The doll?” asked Madame Jodzka with a start of shocked horror, forcing herself to come straight to the point and forcing herself also to speak lightly, casually.

“That’s it, Madame. The bleeding doll.”

The governess had heard the strange adjective many times already, but did not know whether to take it figuratively or not. She chose the latter.

“Blood?” she asked in a lowered voice.

The cook’s body gave an odd jerk. “Well,” she explained, “I meant more the way it goes on. Like a thing of flesh and blood, if you get me. And the way she treats it and plays with it,” and her voice, while loud, had a hush of fear in it somewhere. She held her arms before her in a protective, shielding way, as though to ward off aggression.

“Scratches ain’t proof of nothing,” interjected the housemaid scornfully.

“You mean,” asked Madame Jodzka gravely, “there’s a question of — of injury — to someone?” She suppressed an involuntary gasp, but paid little attention to the maid’s interruption.

Mrs. O’Reilly seemed to mismanage her breath for a moment.

“It ain’t Miss Monica it’s after,” she announced in a defiant whisper as soon as she recovered herself, “it’s someone else. That’s what I mean. And no man as black as he was ever brought no good into a house, not since I was born.”

“Someone else—?” repeated Madam Jodzka almost to herself, seizing the vital words.

“You and yer black man!” interjected the housemaid. “Get along with yer! Thank God I ain’t a Christian or anything like that! But I did ‘ear them sort of jerky shuffling footsteps one night, I admit, and the doll did look bigger — swollen like — when I peeked in and looked—”

“Stop it!” cried Mrs. O’Reilly, “for you ain’t saying what’s true or what you reely know.”

She turned to the governess.

“There’s more talk what means nothing about this doll,” she said by way of apology, “than all the fairy tales I was brought up with as a child in Mayo, and I — I wouldn’t be believing anything of it.”

Turning her back contemptuously on the chattering housemaid, she came close to Madame Jodzka.

“There’s no harm coming to Miss Monica, Madame,” she whispered vehemently, “you can be quite sure about her. Any trouble there may be is for someone else.” And again she crossed herself.

Madame Jodzka, in the privacy of her room, reflected between her prayers. She felt a deep, a dreadful uneasiness.

A doll! A cheap, tawdry little toy made in factories by the hundred, by the thousand, a manufactured article of commerce for children to play with … But…

“The way she treats it and plays with it…” rang on in her disturbed mind.

A doll! But for the maternal suggestion, a doll was a pathetic, even horrible plaything, yet to watch a child busy with it involved deep reflections, since here the future mother prophesied. The child fondles and caresses her doll with passionate love, cares for it, seeks its welfare, yet stuffs it down into the perambulator, its head and neck twisted, its limbs broken and contorted, leaving it atrociously upside down so that blood and breathing cannot possibly function, while she runs to the window to see if the rain has stopped or the sun has come out. A blind and hideous automatism dictated by the Race, provided nothing of more immediate interest interferes, yet a herd-instinct that overcomes all obstacles, its vitality insuperable. The maternity instinct defies, even denies death. The doll, whether left upside down on the floor with broken teeth and ruined eyes, or lovingly arranged to be overlaid in the night, squashed, tortured, mutilated, survives all cruelties and disasters, and asserts finally its immortal qualities. It is unkillable. It is beyond death.

A child with her doll, reflected Madame Jodzka, is an epitome of nature’s remorseless and unconquerable passion, of her dominant purpose — the survival of the race….

Such thoughts, influenced perhaps by her bitter subconscious grievance against nature for depriving her of a child of her own, were unable to hold that level for long; they soon dropped back to the concrete case that perplexed and frightened her — Monica and her flaxen haired, sightless, idiotic doll. In the middle of her prayers, falling asleep incontinently, she did not even dream of it, and she woke refreshed and vigorous, facing the fact that sooner or later, sooner probably, she would have to speak to her employer.

She watched and listened. She watched Monica; she watched the doll. All seemed as normal as in a thousand other homes. Her mind reviewed the position, and where mind and superstition clashed, the former held its own easily. During her evening off she enjoyed the local cinema, leaving the heated building with the conviction that coloured fantasy benumbed the faculties, and that ordinary life was in itself prosaic. Yet before she had covered the half-mile to the house, her deep, accountable uneasiness returned with over-mastering power.

Mrs. O’Reilly had seen Monica to bed for her, and it was Mrs. O’Reilly who let her in. Her face was like the dead.

“It’s been talking,” whispered the cook, even before she closed the door. She was white about the gills.

“Talking! Who’s been talking? What do you mean?”

Mrs. O’Reilly closed the door softly. “Both,” she stated with dramatic emphasis, then sat down and wiped her face. She looked distraught with fear.

Madame took command, if only a command based on dreadful insecurity.

“Both?” she repeated, in a voice deliberately loud so as to counteract the other’s whisper. “What are you talking about?”

“They’ve both been talking — together,” stated the cook.

The governess kept silent for a moment, fighting to deny a shrinking heart.

“You’ve heard them talking together, you mean?” she asked presently in a shaking voice that tried to be ordinary.

Mrs. O’Reilly nodded, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Her nerves were, obviously, in rags. “I thought you’d never come back,” she whimpered. “I could hardly stay in the house.”

Madame looked intently into her frightened eyes.

“You heard…?” she asked quietly.

“I listened at the door. There were two voices. Different voices.” Madame Jodzka did not insist or cross-examine, as though acute fear helped her to a greater wisdom.

“You mean, Mrs. O’Reilly,” she said in flat, quiet tones, “that you heard Miss Monica talking to her doll as she always does, and herself inventing the doll’s answers in a changed voice? Isn’t that what you mean you heard?”

But Mrs. O’Reilly was not to be shaken. By way of answer she crossed herself and shook her head.

She spoke in a low whisper. “Come up now and listen with me, Madame, and judge for yourself.”

Thus, soon after midnight, and Monica long since asleep, these two, the cook and governess in a suburban villa, took up their places in the dark corridor outside a child’s bedroom door. It was a quiet windless night; Colonel Masters, whom they both feared, doubtless long since gone to his room in another corner of the ungainly villa. It must have been a long dreary wait before sounds in the child’s bedroom first became audible — the low quiet sound of voices talking audibly — two voices. A hushed, secretive, unpleasant sound in the room where Monica slept peacefully with her beloved doll beside her. Yet two voices assuredly, it was.

Both women sat erect, both crossed themselves involuntarily, exchanging glances. Both were bewildered, terrified. Both sat aghast.

What lay in Mrs. O’Reilly’s superstitious mind, only the gods of “ould Oireland” can tell, but what the Polish woman’s contained was clear as a bell: it was not two voices talking, it was only one. Her ear was pressed against the crack in the door. She listened intently; shaking to the bone, she listened. Voices in sleep-talking, she remembered, changed oddly.

“The child’s talking to herself in sleep,” she whispered firmly, “and that’s all it is, Mrs. O’Reilly. She’s just talking in her sleep,” she repeated with emphasis to the woman crowding against her shoulder as though in need of support. “Can’t you hear it,” she added loudly, half angrily, “isn’t it the same voice always? Listen carefully and you’ll see I’m right.”

She listened herself more closely than before.

“Listen! Hark…!” she repeated in a breathless whisper, concentrating her mind upon the curious sound, “isn’t that the same voice — answering itself?”

Yet, as she listened, another sound disturbed her concentration, and this time it seemed a sound behind her — a faint, rustling, shuffling sound rather like footsteps hurrying away on tiptoe. She turned her head sharply and found that she had been whispering to no one. There was no one beside her. She was alone in the darkened corridor. Mrs. O’Reilly was gone. From the well of the house below a voice came up in a smothered cry beneath the darkened stairs: “Mother o’ God and all the Saints…” and more besides.

A gasp of surprise and alarm escaped her doubtless at finding herself deserted and alone but in the same instant, exactly as in the story books, came another sound that caught her breath still more aghast — the rattle of a key in the front door below. Colonel Masters, after all, had not yet come in and gone to bed as expected: he was coming in now. Would Mrs. O’Reilly have time to slip across the hall before he caught her? More — and worse — would he come up and peep into Monica’s bedroom on his way up to bed, as he rarely did? Madame Jodzka listened, her nerves in rags. She heard him fling down his coat. He was a man quick in such actions. The stick or umbrella was banged down noisily, hastily. The same instant his step sounded on the stairs. He was coming up. Another minute and he would start into the passage where she crouched against Monica’s door.

He was mounting rapidly, two stairs at a time.

She, too, was quick in action and decision. She thought in a flash. To be caught crouching outside the door was ludicrous but to be caught inside the door would be natural and explicable. She acted at once.

With a palpitating heart, she opened the bedroom door and stepped inside. A second later she heard Colonel Masters’ tread as he stumped along the corridor up to bed. He passed the door. He went on. She heard this with intense relief.

Now, inside the room, the door closed behind her, she saw the picture clearly.

Monica, sound asleep, was playing with her beloved doll, but in her sleep. She was indubitably in deep slumber. Her fingers, however, were roughing the doll this way and that, as though some dream perplexed her. The child was mumbling in her sleep, though no words were distinguishable. Muffled sighs and groans issued from her lips. Yet another sound there certainly was, though it could not have issued from the child’s mouth. Whence, then, did it come?

Madame Jodzka paused, holding her breath, her heart panting. She watched and listened intently. She heard squeaks and grunts, but a moment’s examination convinced her whence these noises came. They did not come from Monica’s lips. They issued indubitably from the doll she clutched and twisted in her dream. The joints, as Monica twisted them, emitted these odd sounds, as though the sawdust in knees and elbows wheezed and squeaked against the unnatural rubbing. Monica obviously was wholly unconscious of these noises. As the doll’s neck screwed round, the material — wax, thread, sawdust — produced this curious grating sound that was almost like syllables of a word or words.

Madame Jodzka stared and listened. She felt icy cold. Seeking for a natural explanation she found none. Prayer and terror raced in her helter-skelter. Her skin began to sweat.

Then suddenly Monica, her expression peaceful and composed, turned over in her sleep, and the dreadful doll, released from the dream-clutch, fell to one side on the bed and lay apparently lifeless and inert. In which moment, to Madame Jodzka’s unbelieving yet horrified ears, it continued to squeak and utter. It went on mouthing by itself. Worse than that, the next instant it stood abruptly upright, rising on its twisted legs. It started moving. It began to move, walking crookedly, across the counterpane. Its glassy, sightless eyes seemed to look straight at her. It presented an inhuman and appalling picture, a picture of the utterly incredible. With a queer, hoppity motion of its broken legs and joints, it came fumbling and tumbling across the rough unevenness of the slippery counterpane towards her. Its appearance was deliberate and aggressive. The sounds, as of syllables, came with it — strange, meaningless syllables that yet managed to convey anger. It stumbled towards her like a living thing.

Once again, this effect of a mere child’s toy, aping the life of some awful monstrosity with purpose and passion in its hideous tiny outline, brought collapse to the plucky Polish governess. The rush of blood without control drained her heart, and a moment of unconsciousness supervened so that everything, as it were, turned black.

This time, however, the moment of dark unconsciousness passed instantly: it came and went, almost like a moment of forgetfulness in passion. Passionate it certainly was, for the reaction came upon her like a storm. With recovered consciousness a sudden rage rushed into her woman heart — perhaps a coward’s rage, an exaggerated fury against her own weakness? It rushed, in any case, to help her. She staggered, caught her breath, clutched violently at the cupboard next her, and — recovered her self-control. A fury of resentment blazed through her, fury against this utterly incredible exhibition of a wax doll walking and squawking as though it were something intelligently alive that could utter syllables. Syllables, she felt convinced, in a language she did not know.

If the monstrous can paralyse, it also can affront. The sight and sound of this cheap factory toy behaving with a will and heart of its own stung her into an act of violence that became imperative. For it was more than she could stand. Irresistibly, she rushed forward. She hurled herself against it, her only available weapon the high-heeled shoe her foot kicked loose on the instant, determined to smash down the frightful apparition into fragments and annihilate it. Hysterical, no doubt, she was at the moment, and yet logical: the godless horror must be blotted out of visible existence. This one thing obsessed her — to destroy beyond all possibility of survival. It must be smashed into fragments, into dust.

They stood close, face to face, the glassy eyes staring into her own, her hand held high for the destruction she craved — but the hand did not fall. A stinging pain, sharp as a serpent’s bite, darted suddenly through her fingers, wrist and arm, her grip was broken, the shoe spun sideways across the room, and in the flickering light of the candle, it seemed to her, the whole room quivered. Paralysed and helpless, she stood utterly aghast. What gods or saints could come to aid her? None. Her own will alone could help her. Some effort, at any rate, she made, trembling, on the edge of collapse: “My God!” she heard her half-whispering, strangled voice cry out. “It is not true! You are a lie! My God denies you! I call upon my God…!”

Whereupon, to her added horror, the dreadful little doll, waving a broken arm, squawked back at her, as though in definite answer, the strange disjointed syllables she could not understand, syllables as though in another tongue. The same instant it collapsed abruptly on the counterpane like a toy balloon that had been pricked. It shrank down in a mutilated mess before her eyes, while Monica — added touch of horror — stirred uneasily in her sleep, turning over and stretching out her hands as though feeling blindly for something that she missed. And this sight of the innocently sleeping child fumbling instinctively towards an incomprehensibly evil and dangerous something that attracted her proved again too strong for the Polish woman to control.

The blackness intervened a second time.

It was undoubtedly a blur in memory that followed, emotion and superstition proving too much for common-sense to deal with. She just remembers violent, unreasoned action on her part before she came back to clearer consciousness in her own room, praying volubly on her knees against her own bed. The interval of transit down the corridor and upstairs remained blank. Yet her shoe was with her, clutched tightly in her hand. And she remembered also having clutched an inert, waxen doll with frantic fingers, clutched and crushed and crumpled its awful little frame till the sawdust came spurting from its broken joints and its tiny body was mutilated beyond recognition, if not annihilated … then stuffing it down ruthlessly on a table far out of Monica’s reach, Monica lying peacefully in deepest sleep. She remembered that. She also saw the clear picture of the small monster lying upside down, grossly untidy, an obscene attitude in the disorder of its flimsy dress and exposed limbs, lying motionless, its eyes crookedly aglint, motionless, yet alive still, alive moreover with intense and malignant purpose. No duration or intensity of prayer could obliterate the picture.

She knew now that a plain, face to face talk with her employer was essential; her conscience, her peace of mind, her sanity, her sense of duty all demanded this. Deliberately, and she was sure, rightly, she had never once risked a word with the child herself. Danger lay that way, the danger of emphasizing something in the child’s mind that was best left ignored. But with Colonel Masters, who paid her for her services, believed in her integrity, trusted her, with him there must be an immediate explanation.

An interview was absurdly difficult; in the first place because he loathed and avoided such occasions; secondly because he was so exceedingly impervious to approach, being so rarely even visible at all. At night he came home late, in the mornings no one dared go near him. He expected the little household, once its routine established, to run itself. The only inmate who dared beard him was Mrs. O’Reilly, who periodically, once every six months, walked straight into his study, gave notice, received an addition to her wages, and then left him alone for another six months.

Madame Jodzka, knowing his habits, waylaid him in the hall next morning while Monica was lying down before lunch, as usual. He was on his way out and she had been watching from the upper landing. She had hardly set eyes on him since her return from Warsaw. His lean, upright figure, his dark, emotionless face, she thought magnificent. He was the perfect expression of the soldier. Her heart fluttered as she raced downstairs. Her carefully prepared sentences, however, evaporated when he stopped and looked at her, a jumble of wild words pouring from her in confused English instead. He cut her rigmarole short, though he listened politely enough at first.

“I’m so glad you were able to come back to us, as I told you. Monica missed you very much—”

“She has something now she plays with—”

“The very thing,” he interrupted. “No doubt the kind of toy she needs…. Your excellent judgement…. Please tell me if there’s anything else you think….” and he half turned as though to move away.

“But I didn’t get it. It’s a horrible — horrible—”

Colonel Masters uttered one of his rare laughs. “Of course, all children’s toys are horrible, but if she’s pleased with it…. I haven’t seen it, I’m no judge…. If you can buy something better—” and he shrugged his shoulders.

“I didn’t buy it,” she cried desperately. “It was brought. It makes sounds by itself — syllables. I’ve seen it move — move itself. It’s a doll.”

He turned from the front door which he had just reached as though he had been shot; the skin held a sudden pallor beneath the flush and something contradicted the blazing eyes, something seemed to shrink.

“A doll,” he repeated in a very quiet voice. “You said — a doll?”

But his eyes and face disconcerted her, so that she merely gave a fumbling account of a parcel that had been brought. His question about a parcel he had ordered strictly to be destroyed added to her confusion.

“Wasn’t it?” he asked in a rasping whisper, as though a disobeyed order seemed incredible.

“It was thrown away, I believe,” she prevaricated, unable to meet his eyes, anxious to protect the cook as well. “I think Monica — perhaps found it.” She despised her lack of courage, but his intensity scattered her wits; she was conscious, moreover, of a strange desire not to give him pain, as though his safety and happiness, not Monica’s, were at stake. “It — talks! — as well as moves,” she cried desperately, forcing herself at last to look at him.

Colonel Masters seemed to stiffen; his breath caught oddly.

“You say Monica has it? Plays with it? You’ve seen movement and heard sounds like syllables?” He asked the questions in a low voice, almost as though talking to himself. “You’ve — listened?” he whispered.

Unable to find convincing words, she bowed her head, while some terror in him came across to her like a blast of icy wind. The man was afraid in his heart. Instead, however, of some explosive reply by way of blame or criticism, he spoke quietly, even calmly: “You did right to come and tell me this — quite right,” adding then in so low a tone that she barely caught the ominous words, “for I have been expecting something of the sort … sooner or later … it was bound to come….” the voice dying away into the handkerchief he put to his face.

And abruptly then, as though aware of an appeal for sympathy, an emotional reaction swept her fear away. Stepping closer, she looked her employer straight in the eyes.

“See the child for yourself,” she said with sudden firmness. “Come and listen with me. Come into the bedroom.”

She saw him stagger. For a moment he said nothing.

“Who,” he then asked, the low voice unsteady, “who brought that parcel?”

“A man, I believe.”

There was a pause that seemed like minutes before his next question.

“White,” he asked, “or — black?”

“Dark,” she told him, “very dark.”

He was shaking like a leaf, the skin of his face blanched; he leaned against the door, wilted, limp; unless she somehow took command there threatened a collapse she did not wish to witness. “You shall come with me tonight,” she said firmly, “and we shall listen together. Wait till I return now. I go for brandy,” and a minute later as she came back breathless and watched him gulp down half a tumbler full, she knew that she had done right in telling him. His obedience proved it, though it seemed strange that cowardice should borrow from its like to produce courage.

“Tonight,” she repeated, “tonight after your bridge. We meet in the corridor outside the bedroom. I shall be there. At half-past twelve.”

He pulled himself into an upright position, staring at her fixedly, making a movement of his head, half bow, half nod.

“Twelve-thirty,” he muttered, “in the passage outside the bedroom door,” and using his stick heavily rather, he opened the door and passed out into the drive. She watched him go, aware that her fear had changed to pity, aware also that she watched the stumbling gait of a man too conscience-stricken to know a moments peace, too frightened even to think of God.

Madame Jodzka kept the appointment; she had eaten no supper, but had stayed in her room — praying. She had first put Monica to bed.

“My doll,” the child pleaded, good as gold, after being tucked up. “I must have my doll or else I’ll never get to sleep,” and Madame Jodzka had brought it with reluctant fingers, placing it on the night-table beside the bed.

“She’ll sleep quite comfortably here, Monica, darling. Why not leave her outside the sheets?” It had been carefully mended, she noticed, patched together with pins and stitches.

The child grabbed at it. “I want her in bed beside me, close against me,” she said with a happy smile. “We tell each other stories. If she’s too far away I can’t hear what she says.” And she seized it with a cuddling pleasure that made the woman’s heart turn cold.

“Of course, darling — if it helps you to fall asleep quickly, you shall have it,” and Monica did not see the trembling fingers, nor notice the horror in the face and voice. Indeed, hardly was the doll against her cheek on the pillow, her fingers half stroking the flaxen hair and pink wax cheeks, than her eyes closed, a sigh of deep content breathed out, and Monica was asleep.

Madame Jodzka, fearful of looking behind her, tiptoed to the door, and left the room. In the passage she wiped a cold sweat from her forehead. “God bless her and protect her,” her heart murmured, “and may God forgive me if I’ve sinned.”

She kept the appointment; she knew Colonel Masters would keep it, too.

It had been a long wait from eight o’clock till after midnight. With great determination she had kept away from the bedroom door, fearful lest she might hear a sound that would necessitate action on her part: she went to her room and stayed there. But praying exhausted itself, for it both excited and betrayed her. If her God could help, a brief request alone was needed. To go on praying for help hour by hour was not only an insult to her deity, but it also wore her out physically. She stopped, therefore, and read some pages of a Polish saint which she did not understand. Later she fell into a state of horrified nervous drowse. In due course, she slept….

A noise awoke her — steps going softly past her door. A glance at her watch showed eleven o’clock. The steps, though stealthy, were familiar. Mrs. O’Reilly was waddling up to bed. The sounds died away. Madame Jodzka, a trifle ashamed, though she hardly knew why, returned to her Polish saint, yet determined to keep her ears open. Then slept again….

What woke her a second time she could not tell. She was startled. She listened. The night was unpleasantly still, the house quiet as the grave. No casual traffic passed. No wind stirred the gloomy evergreens in the drive. The world outside was silent. And then, as she saw by her watch that it was some minutes after midnight, a sharp click became audible that acted like a pistol shot to her keyed-up nerves. It was the front door closing softly. Steps followed across the hall below, then up the stairs, unsteadily a little. Colonel Masters had come in. He was coming up slowly, unwillingly she felt, to keep the appointment. Madame Jodzka started from her chair, looked in the glass, mumbled a quick confused prayer, and opened her door into the dark passage.

She stiffened, physically and mentally. “Now, he’ll hear and perhaps see — for himself,” she thought. “And God help him!”

She marched along the passage and reached the door of Monica’s bedroom, listening with such intentness that she seemed to hear only the confused running murmur of her own blood. Having reached the appointed spot, she stood stock still and waited while his steps approached. A moment later his bulk blocked the passage, shown up as a dark shadow by the light in the hall below. This bulk came nearer, came right up to her. She believed she said “Good evening,” and that he mumbled something about “I said I’d come … damned nonsense….” or words to that effect, whereupon the couple stood side by side in the darkened silence of the corridor, remote from the rest of the house, and waited without further words. They stood shoulder to shoulder outside the door of Monica’s bedroom. Her heart was knocking against her side.

She heard his breathing, there came a whiff of spirits, of stale tobacco, smoke, his outline seemed to shift against the wall unsteadily, he moved his feet; and a sudden, extraordinary wave of emotion swept over her, half of protective maternal yearning, half almost of sexual desire, so that for a passing instant she burned to take him in her arms and kiss him savagely, and at the same time shield him from some appalling danger his blunt ignorance laid him open to. With revulsion, pity, and a sense of sin and passion, she acknowledged this odd sudden weakness in herself, but the face of the Warsaw priest flashed across her befuddled mind the next instant. There was evil in the air. This meant the Devil. She felt herself trembling dreadfully, shaking in her shoes, losing her balance, her whole body leaning over, but leaning in his direction. A moment more and she must have fallen towards him, dropped into his arms.

A sound broke the silence, and she drew up just in time. It came from beyond the door, from inside the bedroom.

“Hark!” she whispered, her hand upon his arm, and while he made no movement, spoke no word, she saw his head and shoulders bend down toward the panel of the closed door. There was a noise, upon the other side, there were noises, Monica’s voice distinctly recognizable, another slighter, shriller sound accompanying it, breaking in upon it, answering it. Two voices.

“Listen,” she repeated in a whisper scarcely audible, and felt is warm hand grip her own so fiercely that it hurt her.

No words were distinguishable at first, just these odd broken sounds of two separate voices in that dark corridor of the silent house — the voice of a child, and the other a strange faint, hardly a human sound, while yet a voice.

“Que le bon Dieu—” she began, then faltered, breath failing her, for she saw Colonel Masters stoop down suddenly and do the last thing that would have occurred to her as likely: he put his eye to the keyhole and kept it there steadily for the best part of a minute, his hand still gripping her own firmly. He knelt on one knee to keep his balance.

The sounds had ceased, no movement now stirred inside the room. The night-light, she knew, would show him clearly the pillows of the bed, Monica’s head, the doll in her arms. Colonel Masters must see clearly anything there was to see, and he yet gave no sign that he saw anything. She experienced a queer sensation for a few seconds — almost as though she had perhaps imagined everything and proved herself a consummate, idiotic, hysterical fool. For a few seconds this ghastly thought flashed over her, the odd silence emphasizing it. Had she been after all, just a crazy lunatic? Had her senses all deceived her? Why should he see nothing, make no sign? Why had the voice, the voices, ceased? Not a murmur of any sort was audible in the room.

Then Colonel Masters, suddenly releasing his grip of her hand, shuffled on to both feet and stood up straight, while in the same instant she herself stiffened, trying to prepare for the angry scorn, the contemptuous abuse he was about to pour upon her. Protecting herself against this attack, expecting it, she was the more amazed at what she did hear:

“I saw it,” came in a strangled whisper. “I saw it walk!”

She stood paralysed.

“It’s watching me,” he added, scarcely audible. “Me!”

The revulsion of feeling at first left her speechless; it was the sheer terror in his strangled whisper that restored a measure of self possession to her. Yet it was he who found words first, awful whispered words, words spoken to himself, it seemed, more than to her.

“It’s what I’ve always feared — I knew it must come someday — yet not like this. Not this way.”

Then immediately the voice in the room became audible, and it was a sweet and gentle voice, sincere and natural, with feeling in it — Monica’s childish voice, pleading:

“Don’t go, don’t leave me! Come back into bed — please.”

An incomprehensible sound followed, as though by way of answer. There were syllables in that faint, creaky tone Madame Jodzka recognized, but syllables she could not comprehend. They seemed to enter her like points of ice. She froze. And facing her stood the motionless, inanimate figure, though the darkness hid its expression. The solid bulk of him, his outline, then leaned over towards her, his lips so close to her own face that, as he spoke, she felt the breath upon her cheek.

“Buth laga….” she heard him repeat the syllables to himself again and again. “Revenge … in Hindustani…!” He drew a long, anguished breath. The sounds sank into her like drops of poison, the syllables she had heard several times already but had not understood. At last she understood their meaning. Revenge!

“I must go in, go in,” he was mumbling to himself. “I must go in and face it.” Her intuition was justified: the danger was not for Monica but for himself. Her sudden protective maternal instinct found its explanation too. The lethal power concentrated in that hideous puppet was aimed at him. He began to edge impetuously past her.

“No!” she cried, “I’ll go! Let me go in!” pushing him aside with all her strength. But his hand was already on the knob and the next instant the door was open and he was inside the room. On the threshold they stood still a second side by side, though she was slightly behind, struggling to shove past him and stand protectively in front.

She stared across his shoulder, her eyes so wide open that the intense strain to note everything at once threatened to defeat its own end. Sight, nonetheless, worked normally; she saw all there was to see, and that was — nothing; nothing unusual, that is, nothing abnormal, nothing terrifying, so that this second time the threat of anticlimax rose to her mind. Had she worked herself up to this peak of horror merely to behold Monica lying sound asleep in a safe and quiet room? The flickering night-light revealed no more than a child in natural slumber without a toy of any sort against her pillow. There stood the glass of water beside the flowers in their saucer, the picture-book on the sill of the window within reach, the window opened a little at the bottom, and there also lay the calm face of Monica with eyes tight shut upon the pillow. Her breathing was deep and regular, no sign of disquiet anywhere, no hint of disturbance that might have accompanied that pleading sentence of two minutes ago, except that the bedclothes were perhaps somewhat tumbled. The counterpane humped itself in folds toward the foot of the bed, she noticed, as though Monica, finding it too warm, had tossed it away in sleep. No more than that.

In that first moment Colonel Masters and the governess took in this whole pretty picture complete. The room was so still that the child’s breathing was distinctly audible. Their eyes roved all over. Nothing was anywhere in movement. Yet the same instant Madame Jodzka became aware that there was movement. Something stirred. The report came, perhaps, through her skin, for no sense announced it. It was undeniable; in that still, silent room there was movement somewhere, and with that unreported movement there was danger.

Certain, rightly or wrongly, that she herself was safe, also that the quietly sleeping child was safe, she was equally certain that Colonel Masters was the one in danger. She knew that in her very bones.

“Wait here by the door,” she said almost peremptorily, as she felt him pushing past her further into the quiet room. “You saw it watching you. It’s somewhere — Take care!”

She clutched at him, but be was already beyond her.

“Damned nonsense,” he muttered and strode forward.

Never before in her whole life had she admired a man more than in this instant when she saw him moving towards what she knew to be physical and spiritual danger — never before, and never again, was such a hideous and dreadful sight to be repeatable in a woman’s life. Pity and horror drowned her in a sea of passionate, futile longing. A man going to meet his fate, it flashed over her, was something none, without power to help, should witness. No human power can stay the courses of the stars.

Her eyes rested, as it were by chance, on the crumpled ridges and hollows of the discarded counterpane. These lay by the foot of the bed in shadow, confused a little in their contours and their masses. Had Monica not moved, they must have lain thus till morning. But Monica did move. At this particular moment she turned over in her sleep. She stretched her little legs before settling down in the new position, and this stretching squeezed and twisted the contours of the heavy counterpane at the foot of the bed. The tiny landscape altered thus a fraction, its immediate detail shifted. And an outline — a very small outline — emerged. Hitherto, it had lain concealed among the shadows. It emerged now with disconcerting rapidity, as though a spring released it. Out of its nest of darkness it seemed almost to leap forward. Fast it came, supernaturally fast, its velocity actually shocking, for a shock came with it. It was exceedingly small, it was exceedingly dreadful, its head erect and venomous and the movement of its legs and arms, as of its bitter, glittering eyes, aping humanity. Malignant evil, personified and aggressive, shaped itself in this otherwise ridiculous outline.

It was the doll.

Racing with incredible security across the slippery surface of the crumpled silk counterpane, it dived and climbed and shot forward with an appearance of complete control and deliberate purpose. That it had a definite aim was overwhelmingly obvious. Its fixed, glassy eyes were concentrated upon a point beyond and behind the terrified governess, the point precisely where Colonel Masters, her employer, stood against her shoulder.

A frantic, half-protective movement on her part, seemed lost in the air….

She turned instinctively, putting an arm about his shoulders, which he instantly flung off.

“Let the bloody thing come,” he cried. “I’ll deal with it…!” He thrust her violently aside.

The doll came at him. The hinges of its diminutive broken arms and its jointed legs emitted a thin, creaking sound as it came darting — the syllables Madame Jodzka had already heard more than once. Syllables she had heard without understanding— “buth laga” — but syllables now packed with awful meaning: Revenge.

The sounds hissed and squeaked, yet clear as a bell as the beast advanced at this miraculous speed.

Before Colonel Masters could move an inch backwards or forwards in self protection, before he could command himself to any sort of action, or contrive the smallest measure of self defence, it was off the bed and at him. It settled. Savagely, its little jaws of tiny make-believe were bitten deep into Colonel Masters’ throat, fastened tightly.

In a flash this happened, in a flash it was over. In Madame Jodzka’s memory it remained like the impression of a lightning flash, simultaneously etched in black and white. It had happened in the present as though it had no past. It came and was gone again. Her faculties, as after a vivid lightning flash, were momentarily paralysed, without past or present. She had witnessed these awful things, but had not realized them. It was this lack of realization that struck her motionless and dumb.

Colonel Masters, on the other hand, stood beside her quietly as though nothing unusual had happened, wholly master of himself, calm, collected. At the moment of attack no sound had left his lips, there had been no gesture even of defence. Whatever had come, he had

“Hadn’t you better put that counterpane straight a bit…. Perhaps?”

Common sense, as always, enables the gas of hysteria to escape. Madame Jodzka gasped, but she obeyed. Automatically she moved across to do his bidding, yet aware, even as she thus moved, that he flicked something from his neck, as though a wasp, a mosquito, or some poisonous insect, had tried to sting him. She remembered no more than that, for he, in his calmness, had contributed nothing else.

Fumbling with the folds of slippery counterpane she tried to straighten out, she was startled to find that Monica was sitting up in bed, awake.

“Oh, Doska — you here!” the child exclaimed innocently, straight out of sleep and using the affectionate nickname. “And Daddy, too! Oh, my goodness…!”

“Sm-smoothing your bed, darling,” she stammered, hardly aware of what she said. “You ought to be asleep. I just looked in to see….” She mumbled a few other automatic words.

“And Daddy with you!” repeated the child excitedly, sleep still about her, wondering what it all meant. “Ooh! Ooh!” holding out her arms.

This brief exchange of spoken words, though it takes a minute to describe, occurred simultaneously with the action — perhaps ten seconds all told, for while the governess fumbled with the counterpane, Colonel Masters was in the act of brushing something from his neck. Nothing else was audible, nothing but his quick gasp and sudden intake of breath: but something else — she swears it on her Warsaw priest — was visible. Madame Jodzka maintains by all her gods she saw this other thing.

In moments of paralysing stress it is not the senses that act less speedily nor with less precision; their action, on the contrary, is intensified and speeded up: what takes longer is the registration of their reports. The numbed brain causes the apparent delay; realization is slowed down.

Madame Jodzka thus only realized a fraction of a second later what her eyes had indubitably witnessed; a dark-skinned arm slanting in through the open window by the bed and snatching at a small object that lay on the floor after dropping from Colonel Masters’ throat, then withdrawing again at lightning speed into the darkness of the night outside.

No one but herself, apparently, had seen this — it was almost supernaturally swift.

“And now you’ll be asleep again in two minutes, lucky Monica,” Colonel Masters was whispering over the bed. “I just peeped in to see that you were all right…” His voice was thin, dreadfully soundless.

Madame Jodzka, against the door, frozen, terrified, looked on and listened.

“Are you quite well, Daddy? Sure? I had a dream, but it’s gone now.”

“Splendid. Never better in my life. But better still if I saw you sound asleep. Come now, I’ll blow out this silly night-light, for that’s what woke you up, I’ll be bound.”

He blew it out, he and the child blew it out together, the latter with sleepy laughter that then hushed. And Colonel Masters tiptoed to join Madame Jodzka at the door. “A lot of damned fuss about nothing,” she heard him muttering in that voice, and then, as they closed the door and stood a moment in the darkened passage, he did suddenly an unexpected thing. He took the Polish woman in his arms, held her fiercely to him for a second, kissed her vehemently, and flung her away.

“Bless you and thank you,” he said in a low, angry voice. “You did your best. You made a great fight. But I got what I deserved. I’ve been waiting years for it.” And he was off down the stairs to his own quarters. Half way down he stopped and looked up to where she stood against the rails. “Tell the doctor,” he whispered hoarsely, “that I took a sleeping draught — an overdose.” And he was gone.

And this was, roughly, what she did tell the doctor next morning when a hurried telephone summons brought him to the bed whereon a dead man lay with a swollen, blackened tongue. She told the same tale at the inquest too and an emptied bottle of a powerful sleeping draught supported her….

And Monica, too young to realize grief beyond its trumpery meaning of a selfishly felt loss, never once — oddly enough — referred to the absence of her lovely doll that had comforted so many hours, proved such an intimate companion day and night in a life that held no other playmates. It seemed forgotten, expunged utterly from her memory, as though it had never existed at all. She stared blankly, stupidly, when a doll was mentioned: she preferred her worn-out teddy-bears. The slate of memory, in this particular case, was wiped clean.

“They’re so warm and comfy,” she described her bears, “and they cuddle without tickling. Besides,” she added innocently, “they don’t squeak and try to slip away….”

Thus in the suburbs, where great spaces between the lamps go dead at night, where the moist wind comes whispering through the mournful branches of the silver pines, where nothing happens and people cry “Let’s go to town!” there are occasional stirrings among the dead dry bones that hide behind villa walls….

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE TROD

Young Norman was being whirled in one of the newest streamlined expresses towards the north. He leaned back in his first-class Smoker and lit a cigarette. On the rack in front of him was his gun-case with the pair of guns he never willingly allowed out of his sight, his magazine with over a thousand cartridges beside it, and the rest of his luggage, he knew, was safely in the van. He was looking forward to a really good week’s shooting at Greystones, one of the best moors in England.

He realised that he was uncommonly lucky to have been invited at all. Yet a question mark lay in him. Why precisely, he wondered, had he been asked? For one thing, he knew his host, Sir Hiram Digby, very slightly. He had met him once or twice at various shoots in Norfolk, and while he had acquitted himself well when standing near him, he could not honestly think this was the reason for the invitation. There had been too many good shots present, and far better shots, for him to have been specially picked out. There was another reason, he was certain. His thoughts, as he puffed his cigarette reflectively, turned easily enough in another direction — towards Diana Travers, Sir Hiram Digby’s niece.

The wish, he remembered, is often father to the thought, yet he clung to it obstinately, and with lingering enjoyment. It was Diana Travers who had suggested his name; it well might be, it probably was, and the more he thought it over, the more positive he felt. It explained the invitation, at any rate.

A curious thrill of excitement and delight ran through him as memory went backwards and played about her. A curious being, he saw her, quite unlike the usual run of girls, but curious, in the way that he himself perhaps was curious, for he was just old enough to have discovered that he was curious, standing apart somehow from the young men of his age and station.

Well born, rich, sporting and all the rest, he yet did not quite belong to his time in certain ways. He could drink, revel, go wild, enjoy himself with his companions, but up to a point only — when he withdrew unsatisfied. There were “other things” that claimed him with some terrible inner power; and the two could not mix. These other things he could not quite explain even to himself, but to his boon companions — never. Were they things of the spirit? He could not say. Wild, pagan things belonging to an older day. He knew not. They were of unspeakable loveliness and power, drawing him away from ordinary modern life — that he knew. He could not define them to himself, much less speak of them to others.

And then he met Diana Travers and knew, though he did not dare put his discovery into actual words, that she felt something similar.

He came across her first at a dance in town, he remembered, remembering also how bored he had been until the casual introduction, and after it, how happy, enchanted, satisfied. It was assuredly not that he had fallen suddenly in love, nor that she was wildly beautiful — a tall, fair girl with a radiant, yet not lovely face, soft voice, graceful movements — for there were thousands, Norman knew, who excelled her in all these qualities. No, it was not the usual love attack, the mating fever, the herd-instinct that she might be his girl, but the old conviction, rather, that there lay concealed in her the same nameless, mysterious longings that lay also in himself — the terrible and lovely power that drew him from his human kind towards unknown “other things”.

As they stood together on the balcony, where they had escaped from the heat and clamour of the ballroom, he acknowledged to himself, yet without utterance, this overpowering, strange conviction that their fates were in some way linked together. He could not explain it at the time, he could not explain it now — while he thought it over in the railway carriage, and his conscious mind rejected it as imagination. Yet it remained. Their talk, indeed, had been ordinary enough, nor was he conscious of the slightest desire to flirt or make love; it was just that, as the saying is, they “clicked” and that each felt delightfully easy in the other’s company, happy and at home. It was almost, he reflected, as though they shared some rather wonderful deep secret that had no need of words, a secret that lay, indeed, beyond the reach of words altogether.

They had met several times since, and on each occasion he had been aware of the same feeling; and once when he ran across her by chance in the park they walked together for over an hour and she had talked more freely. Talked suddenly about herself, moreover, openly and naturally, as though she knew he would understand. In the open air, it struck him, she was more spontaneous than in the artificial surroundings of walls and furniture. It was not so much that she said anything significant, but rather the voice and manner and gestures that she used.

She had been admitting how she disliked London and all its works, loathing especially the Season with its glittering routine of so-called gaiety, adding that she always longed to get back to Marston, Sir Hiram’s place in Essex. “There are the marshes,” she said, with quiet enthusiasm, “and the sea, and I go with my uncle duck-flighting in the twilight, or in the dawn when the sun comes up like a red ball out of the sea, and the mists over the marshes drift away … and things, you know, may happen….”

He had been watching her movements with admiration as she spoke, thinking the name of huntress was well chosen, and now there was a note of strange passion in her voice that he heard for the first time. Her whole being, moreover, conveyed the sense that he would understand some emotional yearning in her that her actual words omitted.

He stopped and stared at her.

“That’s to be alive,” she added with a laugh that made her eyes shine. “The wind and the rain blowing in your face and the ducks streaming by. You feel yourself part of nature. Gates open, as it were. It was how we were meant to live, I’m sure.”

Such phrases from any other girl must have made him feel shy and embarrassed, from her they were merely natural and true. He had not taken her up, however, beyond confessing that he agreed with her, and the conversation had passed on to other things. Yet the reason he had not become enthusiastic or taken up the little clue she offered, was because his inmost heart knew what she meant.

Her confession, not striking in itself, concealed, while it revealed, a whole region of significant, mysterious “other things” best left alone in words. “You and I think alike,” was what she had really said. “You and I share this strange, unearthly longing, only for God’s sake, don’t let us talk about it…!”

“A queer girl, anyhow,” he now smiled to himself, as the train rushed northwards, and then asked himself what exactly he knew about her? Very little, practically nothing, beyond that, both parents being dead, she lived with her elderly bachelor uncle and was doing the London Season. “A thoroughbred anyhow,” he told himself, “lovely as a nymph into the bargain…” and his thoughts went dreaming rather foolishly. Then suddenly, as he lit another cigarette, a much more definite thought emerged. It gave him something of a start, for it sprang up abruptly out of his mood of reverie in the way that a true judgement sometimes leaps to recognition in the state between sleeping and waking.

“She knows. Knows about these other lovely and mysterious things that have always haunted me. She has — yes, experienced them. She can explain them to me. She wants to share them with me….”

Norman sat up with a jerk, as though something had scared him. He had been dreaming, these ideas were the phantasmagoria of a dream. Yet his heart, he noticed, was beating rather rapidly, as though a deep inner excitement had touched him in his condition of half-dream.

He looked up at his gun-cases and cartridges in the rack, then shaded his eyes and gazed out of the window. The train was doing at least sixty. The character of the country it rushed through was changing. The hedges of the midlands had gone, and stone walls were beginning to take their place. The country was getting wilder, lonelier, less inhabited. He drew unconsciously a deep breath of satisfaction. He must actually have slept for a considerable time, he realised, for his watch told him that in a few minutes he would reach the junction where he had to change. Bracendale, the local station for Greystones, he remembered, was on a little branch line that wandered away among the hills. And some fifteen minutes later he found himself, luggage and all, in the creaky, grunting train that would land him at Bracendale towards five o’clock. The dusk had fallen when, with great effort apparently, the struggling engine deposited him with his precious guns and cartridges on the deserted platform amid swirling mists a damp wind prepared for his reception. To his considerable relief a car was there to carry him the remaining ten miles to the Lodge, and he was soon comfortably installed among its luxurious rugs for the drive across the hills.

He settled back comfortably to enjoy the keen mountain air.

After leaving the station, the car followed a road up a narrow valley for a time; a small beck fell tumbling from the hills on the left, where occasionally dark plantations of fir trooped down to the side of the road; but what struck him chiefly was the air of desolation and loneliness that hung over all the countryside. The landscape seemed to him wilder and less inhabited even than the Scottish Highlands. Not a house, not a croft, was to be seen. A sense of desertion, due partly to the dusk no doubt, hung brooding over everything, as though human influence was not welcomed here, perhaps not possible. Bleak and inhospitable it looked certainly, though for himself this loneliness held a thrill of wild beauty that appealed to him.

A few black-faced sheep strung occasionally across the road, and once they passed a bearded shepherd hurrying downhill with his dog. They vanished into the mist like wraiths. It seemed impossible to Norman that the country could be so desolate and uninhabited when he knew that only a few score miles away lay the large manufacturing towns of Lancashire. The car, meanwhile, was steadily climbing up the valley and presently they came to more open country and passed a few scattered farmhouses with an occasional field of oats beside them.

Norman asked the chauffeur if many people lived hereabouts, and the man was clearly delighted to be spoken to.

“No, sir,” he said, “it’s a right desolate spot at the best of times, and I’m glad enough,” he added, “when it’s time for us to go back south again.” It had been a wonderful season for the grouse, and there was every promise of a record year.

Norman noticed an odd thing about the farmhouses they passed, for many of them, if not all, had a large cross carved over the lintel of the doors, and even some of the gates leading from the road into the fields had a smaller cross cut into the top bar. The car’s flash-light picked them out. It reminded him of the shrines and crosses scattered over the countryside in Catholic countries abroad, but seemed a little incongruous in England. He asked the chauffeur if most of the people hereabout were Catholics, and the man’s answer, given with emphasis, touched his curiosity.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” was the reply. “In fact, sir, if you ask me, the people round here are about as heathen as you could find in any Christian country.”

Norman drew his attention to the crosses everywhere, asking him how he accounted for them if the inhabitants were heathen, and the man hesitated a moment before replying, as though, glad to talk otherwise, the subject was not wholly to his liking.

“Well, sir,” he said at length, watching the road carefully in front of him, “they don’t tell me much about what they think, counting me for a foreigner like, as I come from the south. But they’re a rum lot to my way of thinking. What I’m told,” he added after a further pause, “is that they carve these crosses to protect themselves.”

“Protect themselves!” exclaimed Norman, a little startled. “Protect themselves from — what?”

“Ah, there, sir,” said the man after hesitating again, “that’s more than I can say. I’ve heard of a haunted house before now, but never a haunted countryside. Yet that’s what they believe, I take it. It’s all haunted, sir — everywhere. It’s the devil of a job to get any of them to turn out after dark, as I know well, and even in the daytime they won’t stir far without a crucifix hung round their neck. Even the men won’t.”

The car had put on speed while he spoke and Norman had to ask him to ease up a bit; the man, he felt sure, was prey to a touch of superstitious fear as they raced along the darkening road, yet glad enough to talk, provided he was not laughed at. After his last burst of speech he had drawn a deep breath, as though glad to have got it off his chest.

“What you tell me is most interesting,” Norman commented invitingly. “I’ve come across that sort of thing abroad, but never yet in England. There’s something in it, you know,” he added persuasively, “if we only knew what. I wish I knew the reason, for I’m sure it’s a mistake just to laugh it all away.” He lit a cigarette, handing one also to his companion, and making him slow down while they lighted them. “You’re an observant fellow, I see,” he went on, “and I’ll be bound you’ve come across some queer things. I wish I had your opportunity. It interests me very much.”

“You’re right, sir,” the chauffeur agreed, as they drove on again, “and it can’t be laughed away, not all of it. There’s something about the whole place ’ere that ain’t right, as you might say. It ‘got’ me a bit when I first came ’ere some years ago, but now I’m kind of used to it.”

“I don’t think I should ever get quite used to it,” said Norman, “till I’d got to the bottom of it. Do tell me anything you’ve noticed. I’d like to know — and I’ll keep it to myself.”

Feeling sure the man had interesting things to tell and having now won his confidence, he begged him to drive more slowly; he was afraid they would reach the house before there had been time to tell more, possibly even some personal experiences. “There’s a funny sort of road, or track rather, you may be seeing out shooting,” the chauffeur went on eagerly enough, yet half nervously. “It leads across the moor, and no man or woman will set foot on it to save their lives, not even in the daytime, let alone at night.”

Norman said eagerly that he would like to see it, asking its whereabouts, but of course the directions only puzzled him.

“You’ll be seeing it, sir, one of these days out shooting and if you watch the natives, you’ll find I’m telling you right.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Norman asked. “Haunted — eh?”

“That’s it, sir,” the man admitted, after a longish pause. “But a queer kind of ’aunting. They do say it’s just too lovely to look at — and keep your senses.”

It was the other’s turn to hesitate, for something in him trembled.

Now, young Norman was aware of two things very clearly: first, that it wasn’t quite the thing to pump his host’s employee in this way; second, that what the man told him held an extraordinary, almost alarming interest for him. All folklore interested him intensely, legends and local superstitions included. Was this, perhaps a “fairy-ridden” stretch of country, he asked himself? Yet he was not in Ireland, where it would have been natural, but in stolid, matter-of-fact England. The chauffeur was obviously an observant, commonplace southerner, and yet he had become impressed, even a little scared, by what he had noticed. That lay beyond question: the man was relieved to talk to someone who would not laugh at him, while at the same time he was obviously a bit frightened.

A third question rose in his mind as well: this talk of haunted country, of bogies, fairies and the rest, fantastic though it was, perhaps, stirred a queer, yet delicious feeling in him — in his heart, doubtless — that his host’s niece, Diana, had a link with it somewhere.. The origin of a deep intuition is hardly discoverable. He made no attempt to probe it. This was Diana’s country, she must know all the chauffeur hinted, and more besides. There must be something in the atmosphere that attracted her. She had been instrumental in making her uncle invite him. She wanted him to come, she wanted him to taste and share things, “other things”, that to her were vital.

These thoughts flashed across him with an elaboration of detail impossible to describe. That the wish was, again, father to the thoughts, doubtless operated, yet the conviction persistently remained and the intuitive flash provided, apparently, inspiration, so that he plied the chauffeur with further questions that produced valuable results. He referred even to the Little People, the Fairies, without exciting contempt or laughter — with the result that the man gave him finally a somewhat dangerous confidence. Solemnly warning his passenger that “Sir Hiram mustn’t hear of it” or he’d lose his job, the man described a remarkable incident that had happened, so to speak, under his own eyes. Sir Hiram’s sister was lost on the moors some years ago and was never found …and the local talk and belief had it that she had been “carried off”. Yet not carried off against her will: she had wanted to go.

“Would that be Mrs. Travers?” Norman asked.

“That’s who it was, sir, exactly, seeing as ’ow you know the family. And it was the strangest disappearance that ever came my way.” He gave a slight shudder and, if not quite to his listener’s surprise, suddenly crossed himself.

Diana’s mother!

A pause followed the extraordinary story, and then, for once, Norman used words first spoken (to Horatio) to a man who had never heard them before and received them with appropriate satisfaction.

“Yes, sir,” he went on, “and now he’s got her up here for the first time since it happened years ago — in the very country where her mother was taken — and I’m told his idea is that he ’opes it will put her right—”

“Put her right?”

“I should say — cure her, sir. She’s supposed to have the same — the same—” he fumbled for a word— “unbalance as wot her mother had.” A strange rush of hope and terror swept across Norman’s heart and mind, but he made a great effort and denied them both, so that his companion little guessed this raging storm. Changing the subject as best he could, controlling his voice with difficulty so as to make it sound normal, he asked casually:, “Do other people — I mean, have other people disappeared here?”

“They do say so, sir,” was the reply. “I’ve heard many a tale, though I couldn’t say as I proved anything. Natives, according to the talk, ’ave disappeared, nor no trace of them ever found. Children mostly. But the people round here won’t speak of it and it’s difficult to find out, as they never go to the Police and keep it dark among themselves—”

“Couldn’t they have fallen into potholes, or something like that?” Norman interrupted, to which the man replied that there was only one pothole in the whole district and the danger spot most carefully fenced round. “It’s the place itself, sir,” he added finally with conviction, as though he could tell of a firsthand personal experience if he dared, “it’s the whole country that’s so strange.”

Norman risked the direct question.

“And what you’ve seen yourself, with your own eyes,” he asked, “did it — sort of frighten you? I mean, you observe so carefully that anything you reported would be valuable.”

“Well, sir,” came the reply after a little hesitation, “I can’t say ‘frightened’ exactly, though — if you ask me — I didn’t like it. It made me feel queer all over, and I ain’t a religious man—”

“Do tell me,” Norman pressed, feeling the house was now not far away and time was short. “I shall keep it to myself — and I shall believe you. I’ve had odd experiences myself.”

The man needed no urging, however: he seemed glad to tell his tale.

“It’s not really very much,” he said lowering his voice. “It was like this, you see, sir. The garage and my rooms lie down at an old farmhouse about a quarter-mile from the Lodge, and from my bedroom window I can see across the moor quite a way. It takes in that trail I was speaking of before, and along that track exactly I sometimes saw lights moving in a sort of wavering line. A bit faint, they were, and sort of dancing about and going out and coming on again, and at first I took them for marsh lights — I’ve seen marsh lights down at our marshes at home — marsh gas we call it. That’s what I thought at first, but I know better now.”

“You never went out to examine them closer?”

“No, sir, I did not,” came the emphatic reply.

“Or asked any of the natives what they thought?”

The chauffeur gave a curious little laugh; it was a half shy, half embarrassed laugh. Yes, he had once got a native who was willing to say something, but it was only with difficulty that Norman persuaded him to repeat it.

“Well, sir, what he told me” — again that embarrassed little laugh— “the words he used were ‘It was the Gay People changing their hunting grounds.’ That’s what he said and crossed himself as he said it. They always changed their grounds at what he called the Equinox.”

“The Gay People … the Equinox….”

The odd phrases were not new to Norman, but he heard them now as though for the first time, they had meaning. The equinox, the solstice, he knew naturally what the words meant, but the “Gay People” belonged to some inner phantasmagoria of his own he had hitherto thought of only imaginatively. It pertained, that is, to some private “imaginative creed” he believed in when he had been reading Yeats, James Stephens, A.E., or when he was trying to write poetry of his own.

Now, side by side with this burly chauffeur from the sceptical South, he came up against it — bang. And he admitted frankly to himself, it gave him a half -incredible thrill of wonder, delight and passion.

“The Gay People,” he repeated, half to himself, half to the driver. “The fellow called them that?”

“That’s wot he called them,” repeated the matter-of-fact chauffeur. “And they were passing,” he added, almost defiantly, as though he expected to be called a liar and deserved, it “passing in a stream of dancing lights along the Trod.”

“The Trod,” murmured Norman under his breath.

“The Trod,” repeated the man in a whisper, “that track I spoke of—” and the car swerved, as though the touch on the wheel was unsteady for a second, though it instantly recovered itself as they swung into the drive.

The Lodge flew past, carrying a cross, Norman noticed, like all the other buildings; and a few minutes later the grey stone shooting-box, small and unpretentious, came in sight. Diana herself was on the step to welcome him, to his great delight.

“What a picture,” he thought, as he saw her in her tweeds, her retriever beside her, the hall lamp blazing on her golden hair, one hand shading her eyes. Radiant, intoxicating, delicious, unearthly — he could not find the words — and he knew in that sudden instant that he loved her far beyond all that language could express. The dark background of the grey stone building, with the dim, mysterious moors behind, was exactly right. She stood there, framed in the wonder of two worlds — his girl!

Yet her reception chilled him to the bone. Excited, bubbling over as he was, his words of pleasure ready to tumble about each other, his heart primed with fairy tales and wonder, she had nothing to say except that tea was waiting, and that she hoped he had had a good journey. Response to his own inner convulsions there was none: she was polite, genial, cordial even, but beyond that — nothing. They exchanged commonplaces and she mentioned that the grouse were plentiful, that her uncle had got some of the best “guns” in England — which pleased his vanity for a moment — and that she hoped he would enjoy himself.

Her leaden reaction left him speechless. He felt convicted of boyish, idiotic fantasy.

“I asked particularly for you to come,” she admitted frankly, as they crossed the hall. “I had an idea somehow you’d like to be here.”

He thanked her, but betrayed nothing of his first delight, now chilled and rendered voiceless.

“It’s your sort of country,” she added, turning towards him with a swish of her skirts. “At least, I think it is.”

“If you like it,” he returned quietly, “I certainly shall like it too.”

She stopped a moment and looked hard at him. “But of course I like it,” she said with conviction. “And it’s much lovelier than those Essex marshes.”

Remembering her first description of those Essex marshes, he thought of a hundred answers, but before the right one came to him he found himself in the drawing-room chatting to his hostess, Lady Digby. The rest of the house-party were still out on the moor.

“Diana will show you the garden before the darkness comes,” Lady Digby suggested presently. “It’s quite a pretty view.”

The “pretty view” thrilled Norman with its wild beauty, for the moor beyond stretched right down to the sea at Saltbeck, and in the other direction the hills ran away, fold upon fold, into a dim blue distance. The Lodge and its garden seemed an oasis in a wilderness of primeval loveliness, unkempt and wild as when God first made it. He was aware of its intense, seductive loveliness that appealed to all the strange, unearthly side of him, but at the same time he felt the powerful, enticing human seductiveness of the girl who was showing him round. And the two conflicted violently in his soul. The conflict left him puzzled, distraught, stupid, since first one, then the other, took the upper hand. What saved him from a sudden tumultuous confession of his imagined passion, probably, was the girls’ calm, almost cold, indifference. Obviously without response she felt nothing of the tumult that possessed him.

Exchanging commonplaces, they admired the “pretty view” together, then turned back in due course to the house. “I catch their voices,” remarked Diana. “Let’s go in and hear all about it and how many birds they got.” And it was on the door of the french window that she suddenly amazed — and, truth to tell — almost frightened him.

“Dick,” she said, using his first name, to his utter bewilderment and delight, and grasping his hand tightly in both of her own, “I may need your help.” She spoke with a fiery intensity. Her eyes went blazing suddenly. “It was here, you know, that mother — went. And I think — I’m certain of it — they’re after me, too. And I don’t know which is right — to go or to stay. All this” — she swept her arm to include the house, the chattering room, the garden— “is such rubbish — cheap, nasty, worthless. The other is so satisfying — its eternal loveliness, and yet—” her voice dropped to a whisper— “soulless, without hope or future. You may help me.” Her eyes turned upon him with a sudden amazing fire. “That’s why I asked you here.”

She kissed him on the eyes — an impersonal, passionless kiss, and the next minute they were in the room, crowded, with the “guns” from a large shooting brake which had just arrived.

How Norman staggered in among the noisy throng and played his part as a fellow guest, he never understood. He managed it somehow, while in his heart sang the wild music of the Irish Fairy’s enticing whisper: “I kiss you and the world begins to fade.” A queer feeling came to him that he was going lost to life as he knew it, that Diana with her sweet passionless kiss had sealed his fate, that the known world must fade and die because she knew the way to another, lovelier region where nothing could ever pass or die because it was literally everlasting — the state of evolution belonging to fairyland, the land of the deathless Gay People….

Sir Hiram welcomed him cordially, then introduced him to the others, upon which followed the usual description by the guns of the day’s sport. They drank their whiskies and sodas, in due course they went up to dress for dinner, but after dinner there was no carousing, for their host bundled them all off to an early bed. The next day they were going to shoot the best beat on the moor and clear eyes and steady hands were important. The two drives for which Greystones was celebrated were to be taken — Telegraph Hill and Silvermine — both well known wherever shooting men congregated so that anticipation and excitement were understandable. An early bed was a small price to pay and Norman, keen and eager as any of them, was glad enough to get to his room when the others trooped upstairs. To be included as a crack shot among all these famous guns was, naturally, a great event to him. He longed to justify himself.

Yet his heart was heavy and dissatisfied, a strange uneasiness gnawed at him despite all his efforts to think only of the morrow’s thrill. For Diana had not come down to dinner, nor had he set eyes on her the whole evening. His polite enquiry about her was met by his host’s cheery laugh: “Oh, she’s all right, Norman, thank ’ee; she keeps to herself a bit when a shoot’s on. Shooting, you see, ain’t her line exactly, but she may come out with us tomorrow.” He brushed her tastes aside. “Try and persuade her, if you can. The air’ll do her good.”

Once in his room, his thoughts and emotions tried in vain to sort themselves out satisfactorily: there was a strange confusion in his mind, an uneasy sense of excitement that was half delight, half fearful anticipation, yet anticipation of he knew not exactly what. That sudden use of his familiar first name, the extraordinary kiss, establishing an unprepared intimacy, deep if passionless, had left him the entire evening in a state of hungry expectancy with nerves on edge. If only she had made an appearance at dinner, if only he could have had a further word with her! He wondered how he would ever get to sleep with this inner turmoil in his brain, and if he slept badly he would shoot badly.

It was this reflection about shooting badly that convinced him abruptly that his sudden “love” was not of the ordinary accepted kind; had he been humanly “in love”, no consideration of that sort could have entered his head for a moment. His queer uneasiness, half mixed with delight as it was, increased. The tie was surely of another sort.

Turning out the electric light, he looked from his window across the moor, wondering if he might see the strange lights the chauffeur had told him about. He saw only the dim carpet of the rolling moorland fading into darkness where a moon hid behind fleecy, drifting clouds. A soft, sweet, fragrant air went past him; there was a murmur of falling water. It was intoxicating; he drew in a deep delicious breath. For a second he imagined a golden-haired Diana, with flying hair and flaming eyes, pursuing her lost mother midway between the silvery clouds and shadowy moor … then turned back into his room and flooded it with light … in which instant he saw something concrete lying on his pillow — a scrap of paper — no, an envelope. He tore it open.

“Always wear this when you go out. I wear one too. They cannot come up with you unless you wish, if you wear it. Mother….”

The word “mother”, full of imaginative suggestion, was crossed out; the signature was “Diana”. With a faint musical tinkle, a little silver crucifix slipped from the pencilled note and fell to the floor.

As Norman stood beside the bed with the note in his hand, and before he stooped to recover the crucifix, there fell upon him with an amazing certainty the eerie conviction that all this had happened before. As a rule this odd sensation is too fleeting to be retained for analysis; yet he held it now for several seconds without effort. Startled, he saw quite clearly that it was not passing in ordinary time, but somewhere outside ordinary time as he knew it. It had happened “before” because it was happening “always”. He had caught it in the act.

For a flashing instant he understood; the crucifix symbolised security among known conditions, and if he held to it he would be protected, mentally and spiritually, against a terrific draw into unknown conditions. It meant no more than that — a support to the mind.

That antagonistic “draw” of terrific power, involved the nameless, secret yearnings of his fundamental nature. Diana, aware of this inner conflict, shared the terror and the joy. Her mother, whence she derived the opportunity, had yielded — and had disappeared from life as humans know it. Diana herself was now tempted and afraid. She asked his help. Both he and she together, in some condition outside ordinary time, had met this conflict many times already. He had experienced all this before — the incident of the crucifix, its appeal for help, the delight, the joy, the fear involved. And even as he realised all this, the strange, eerie sensation vanished and was gone, as though it never had been. It became unseizable, lost beyond recapture. It left him with a sensation of loss, of cold, of isolation, a realisation of homelessness, yet of intense attraction towards a world unrealised.

He stooped, picked up the small silver crucifix, re-read the pencilled note letter by letter, kissed the paper that her hand had touched, then sat down on the bed and smiled with a sudden gush of human relief and happiness. The eerie sensation had gone its way beyond recovery. That Diana had thought about him was all that mattered. This little superstition about wearing the crucifix was sweet and touching, and of course he would wear the thing against his heart. And see that she came out tomorrow with him too! His relief was sincere. Now he could sleep. And tomorrow he might not shoot too badly. But before he climbed into bed, he looked in his diary to find out when the equinox was due, and found to his astonishment that it was on the 23rd of September, and that tonight was the 21st! The discovery gave him something of a turn, but he soon fell asleep with the letter against his cheek and the little silver crucifix hung round his neck.

He woke next morning when he was called to find the sun streaming into his room, promising perfect shooting weather. In broad daylight the normal reactions followed as they usually do; the incidents of the day before now seemed slightly ridiculous — his talk with Diana, the crucifix, the chauffeur’s fairy-tales above all. He had stumbled upon a nest of hysterical delusions, born of a mysterious disappearance many years ago. It was natural he thought, as he shaved himself, that his host disliked all reference to the subject and its aftermath. For all that, as he went down to breakfast, he felt secretly comforted that he had hung the little silver crucifix round his neck. No one, at any rate, he reflected, could see it.

He had done full justice to the well stocked sideboard and was just finishing his coffee when Diana came into the empty room, and his mind, now charged with the prosaic prospects of the coming shoot, acknowledged a shock. Fact and imagination clashed. The girl was white and drawn. Before he could rise to greet her, she came straight across to the chair beside him.

“Dick,” she began at once, “have you got it on?”

He produced the crucifix after a moment’s fumbling.

“Of course I have,” he said. “You asked me to wear it.” Remembering the hesitation in his bedroom, he felt rather foolish. He felt foolish anyhow, wearing a superstitious crucifix on a day’s shooting.

Her next words dispelled the feeling of incongruity.

“I was out early,” she said in a tense, low voice, “and I heard mother’s voice calling me on the moor. It was unmistakable. Close in my ear, then far away. I was with the dog and the dog heard it too and ran for shelter. His hair was up.”

“What did you hear?” Norman asked gently, taking her hand.

“My pet name— ‘Dis’,” she told him, “the name only mother used.”

“What words did you hear?” he asked, trembling in spite of himself.

“Quite distinctly — in that distant muffled voice — I heard her call: ‘Come to me, Dis, oh, come to me quickly!’”

For a moment Norman made no answer. He felt her hand trembling in his. Then he turned and looked straight into her eyes.

“Did you want to go?” he asked.

There was a pause before she replied. “Dick,” she said, “when I heard that voice, nothing else in the world seemed to matter—!” at which moment her uncle’s figure, bursting in through the door, shouted that the cars were ready and waiting, and the conversation came to an abrupt end.

This abrupt interruption at the moment of deepest interest left Norman, as may be imagined, excusably and dreadfully disturbed. A word from his host on this particular shooting party was, of course, a command. He dared not keep these great “guns” waiting. Diana, too, shot out as though a bullet had hit her. But her last words went on ringing in his ears, in his heart as well: “Nothing else in the world seemed to matter.” He understood in his deepest being what she meant. There was a “call” away from human things, a call into some unimaginable state of bliss no words described, and she had heard it, heard it in her mother’s voice — the strongest tie humanity knows. Her mother, having left the world, sent back a message.

Norman, trembling unaccountably, hurried to fetch his gun and join the car, and Diana, obeying the orders of her uncle, was shoved into the Ford with her retriever. She had just time to whisper to him “Keep off the Trod — don’t put a foot on it,” and the two cars whisked off and separated them.

The “shoot” took place, nevertheless, ordinarily, so far as Norman was concerned, for the hunter’s passion was too strong in him to be smothered. If his mind was mystical, his body was primitive. He was by nature a hunter before the Lord. The imaginative, mystical view of life, as with peasants and woodsmen, lay deep below, the first birds put an end to all reflection. He was soon too busy to bother about anything else but firing as fast as he could and changing his guns swiftly and smoothly. Breaking through this practical excitement, none the less, flashed swift, haunting thoughts and fancies — Diana’s face and voice and eyes, her mother’s supernatural call, his own secret yearnings, and, above all, her warning about the Trod. Both sides of his mixed nature operated furiously. Apparently, he shot well, but how he managed it, heaven only knew.

The drive in due course was over and the pick-up completed. Sir Hiram came over and asked if he would mind taking the outside butt at the next drive.

“You see”, he explained courteously, “I always ask the youngest of the party to take the outside, as it’s a devil of a walk for the old ’uns. Probably,” he added, “you’ll get more shooting than anyone, as the birds slip away over yonder butt down a little gully. So you’ll find it worth the extra swot!”

Norman and his loader set off on their long tramp, while the rest of the guns made their way down to the road where the cars would carry them as far as the track allowed. After nearly a mile’s detour Norman was puzzled by his loader striking across the heather instead of following the obvious path. He himself, naturally, kept to the smooth track. He had not gone ten yards along the track before the loader’s startled voice shouted at him: “For the love of God, sir, come off! You’re walking on the Trod!”

“It’s a good path,” cried Norman. “What’s wrong with it?” The man eyed him a moment. “It’s the Trod, sir,” he said gravely, as though that were enough. “We don’t walk on it — not at this time o’ year especially.” He crossed himself. “Come off it, sir, into the heather.”

The two men stood facing one another for a minute.

“If you don’t believe me, sir, just watch them sheep,” said the man in a voice full of excitement and emotion. “You’ll see they won’t put foot on it. Nor any other animal either.”

Norman watched a band of black-faced sheep move hesitatingly down the moorland slope. He was impatient to get on, half angry. For the moment he had forgotten all about Diana’s warning. Fuming and annoyed, he watched. To his amazement, the little band of black-faced sheep, on reaching the obvious path, jumped clear over it. They jumped the Trod. Not one of them would touch it. It was an astonishing sight. Each animal leapt across, as though the Trod might burn or injure them. They went their way across the rough heather and disappeared from sight.

Norman, remembering the warning uncomfortably, paused and lit a cigarette.

“That’s odd,” he said. “It’s the easiest way.”

“Maybe,” replied the loader. “But the easiest way may not be the best — or safest.”

“The safest?”

“I’ve got children of me own,” said the loader.

It was a significant statement. It made Norman reflect a moment.

“Safest,” he repeated, remembering all he had heard, yet longing eagerly to hear more. “You mean, children especially are in danger? Young folks — eh? — is that it?” A moment later, he added, “I can quite believe it, you know, it’s a queer bit of country — to my way of thinking.”

The understanding sympathy won the man’s confidence, as it was meant to do.

“And it’s equinox time, isn’t it?” Norman ventured further.

The man responded quickly enough, finding a “gun” who wouldn’t laugh at him. As with the chauffeur, he was evidently relieved to give some kind of utterance to fears and superstitions he was at heart ashamed of and yet believed in.

“I don’t mind for myself, sir,” he broke out, obviously glad to talk, “for I’m leaving these parts as soon as the grouse shooting’s over, but I’ve two little’uns up here just now, and I want to keep ’em. Too many young’uns get lost on the moor for my liking. I’m sending ’em tomorrow down to my aunt at Crossways—”

“Good for you,” put in Norman. “It’s the equinox just now, isn’t it? And that’s the dangerous time, they say.”

The loader eyed him cautiously a moment, weighing perhaps his value as a recipient of private fears, beliefs, fancies and the rest, yet deciding finally that Norman was worthy of his confidences.

“That’s what my father always said,” he agreed.

“Your father? It’s always wise to listen to what a father tells,” the other suggested. “No doubt he’d seen something — worth seeing.”

A silence fell between them. Norman felt he had been, perhaps, too eager to draw the man out; yet the loader was reflecting merely. There was something he yearned to tell.

“Worth seeing,” the man repeated, “well — that’s as may be. But not of this world, and wonderful, it certainly was. It put ice into his bones, that’s all I can swear to. And he wasn’t the sort to be fooled easy, let me tell you. It was on his dying bed he told me — and a man doesn’t lie with death in his eyes.”

That Norman was standing idly on this important shoot was sufficient proof of his tremendous interest, and the man beyond question was aware of it.

“In daylight,” Norman asked quietly, assuming the truth of what he hoped to hear.

“It was just at nightfall,” the other said, “and he was coming from a sick friend at a farm beyond the Garage. The doctor had frightened him, I take it, so it was a bit late when he started for home across the moor and, without realising that it was equinox time, he found himself on the Trod before he knew it. And, to his terror, the whole place was lit up, and he saw a column of figures moving down it towards him. They was all bright and lovely, he described ’em, gay and terrible, laughing and singing and crying, and jewels shining in their hair, and — worst of all — he swears he saw young children who had gone lost on the moor years before, and a girl he had loved these twenty years back, no older than when he saw her last, and as gay and happy and laughing as though the passing years was nothing—”

“They called to him?” asked Norman, strangely moved. “They asked him to join them?”

“The girl did,” replied the man. “The girl, he said, with no years to her back, drew him something terrible. ‘Come with us,’ he swears she sang to him, ‘come with us and be happy and young forever,’ and, if my father hadn’t clutched hold of his crucifix in time — my God — he would have gone—”

The loader stopped, embarrassed lest he had told too much. “If he’d gone, he’d have lost his soul,” put in Norman, guided by a horrible intuition of his own.

“That’s what they say, sir,” agreed the man, obviously relieved. Simultaneously, they hurried on, Sir Hiram’s practical world breaking in upon this strange interlude. A big shoot was in progress. They must not be late at their appointed place.

“And where does the Trod start?” Norman asked presently, and the man described the little cave of the Black Waters whence the beck, dark with the peat, ran thence towards the sea across the bleak moors. The scenery provided an admirable setting for the “fairy-tale” he had just listened to; yet his thoughts, as they ploughed forward through the heather, went back to the lovely, fascinating tale, to the superstitious dream of the “Gay People” changing their hunting grounds along that unholy Trod when the equinox flamed with unearthly blazing, when the human young, unsatisfied with earthly pleasures, might be invited to join another ageless evolution that, if it knew no hope, shared at least an unstained, eternal, happy present. Diana’s temptation, her mother’s incredible disappearance, his own heart-searing yearnings in the balance to boot, took strange shape as practical possibilities.

The cumulative effect of all he had heard, from chauffeur, loader, and from the girl herself, began, it may be, to operate, sense the human mind, especially the imaginative human mind, is ever open to attack along the line of least resistance.

He stumbled on, holding his gun firmly, as though a modern weapon of destruction helped to steady his feet, to say nothing of his mind, now full of seething dreams. They reached the appointed butt. And hardly had they settled themselves in it than the first birds began to come, and all conversation was impossible. This was the celebrated “Silvermine Drive”, and Norman had never in his life seen so many grouse as he now saw. His guns got too hot to hold, yet still the grouse poured over….

The Drive finished in due course, and after a hurried lunch came the equally famous Telegraph Hill Drive, where there were even more birds than before, and when this came to an end Norman found that his shoulder was sore from the recoil and that he had developed a slight gun-headache, so that he was glad enough to climb into the car that took him back to the Lodge and tea. The excitement, naturally, had been great, the nervous hope that he had shot well enough to justify his inclusion in the great shoot had also played upon his vitality. He found himself exhausted, and after tea he was relieved to slip up to his bedroom for a quiet hour or two.

Lying comfortably on his sofa with a cigarette, thinking over the fire and fury of the recent hours, his thoughts turned gradually aside to other things. The hunter, it seemed, withdrew; the dreamer, never wholly submerged, re-appeared. His mind reviewed the tales he had heard from the chauffeur and the loader, while the story of Diana’s mother, the strange words of the girl herself, took possession of his thoughts. Too weary to be critical, he remembered them. His own natural leaning enforced their possible truth, while fatigue made analysis too difficult to bother about, so that imagination cast its spell of glamour undefied…. He burned to know the truth. In the end he made up his mind to creep out the following night and watch the Trod. It would be the night of the equinox. That ought to settle things one way or the other — proof or disproof. Only he must examine it in the daylight first.

It was disturbing at dinner to find that the girl was absent, had in fact, according to Sir Hiram, gone away for a day or so to see an old school-friend in a neighbouring town. She would be back, however, for the final shoot, he added, an explanation which Norman interpreted to mean that her uncle had deliberately sent her out of danger. He felt positive he was right. Sir Hiram might scorn such “rubbishy tales”, but he was taking no chances. It was at the equinox that his sister had mysteriously disappeared. The girl was best elsewhere. Nor could all the pleasant compliments about Norman’s good shooting on the two Drives conceal his host’s genuine uneasiness. Diana was “best elsewhere”.

Norman fell asleep with the firm determination that he must explore the Trod next day in good light, making sure of his landmarks and then creep out at night when the household was quiet, and see what happened.

There was no shooting next day. His task was easy. Keepers and dogs went out to pick up any birds that had been left from the previous day. After breakfast he slipped off across the waste of heather and soon found it — a deep smooth groove running through occasional hollows where no water lay, nor any faintest track of man or beast upon its soft, black peaty surface. Obviously, it was a track through the deep heather no one — neither man nor animal — used. He again noted the landmarks carefully, and felt sure he could find it again in the darkness … and, in due course, the day passed along its normal course, the “guns” after dinner discussed the next day’s beat, and all turned in early in pleasurable anticipation of the shoot to come.

Norman went up to bed with a beating heart, for his plan to slip out of the sleeping house later and explore the moorland with its “haunted Trod”, was not exactly what a host expected of a guest. The absence of Diana, moreover, deliberately planned, added to his deep uneasiness. Her sudden disappearance to visit “an old school friend” was not convincing. Nor had she even left a line of explanation. It came to him that others besides the chauffeur and the loader took these fantastic fairy-tales seriously. His thoughts flew buzzing like bees outside a beehive…

From his window he looked out upon the night. The moon, in her second quarter, shone brightly at moments, then became hidden behind fleecy clouds. Higher up, evidently, a raging wind was driving, but below over the moorland a deathly stillness reigned. This stillness touched his nerves, and the dogs, howling in their kennels, added to a sense of superstitious uneasiness in his blood. The deep stillness seemed to hide a busy activity behind the silence. Something was stirring in the night, something out on the moor.

He turned back from the window and saw the lighted room, its cosy comfort, its well-lit luxury, its delicious bed waiting for weary limbs. He hesitated. The two sides of his nature clashed … but in the end the strange absence of Diana, her words, her abrupt sensational kiss, her odd silence … the quixotic feeling that he might help — these finally decided him.

Changing quickly into his shooting clothes, and making sure that the lights in all the bedroom windows he could see were out, he crept down in stockinged feet to the front door, carrying a pair of tennis shoes in his hand. The front door was unlocked, opening without noise, so that he slipped quietly across the gravel drive on to the grass, and thence, having now put on his shoes, on to the moor beyond.

The house faded behind him, patches of silvery moonlight shone through thin racing clouds, the taste of the night air was intoxicating. How could he ever have hesitated? The wonder and mystery of the wild countryside, haunted or otherwise, caught him by the throat. As he climbed the railings leading from the cultivated garden to the moor, there came a faint odd whispering sound behind him, so that he paused and listened for a moment. Was it wind or footsteps? It was neither — merely the flap of his open coat trailing across the fence. Bah! his nerves were jumpy. He laughed — almost laughed aloud, such was the exhilaration in him — and moved on quickly through the weird half lights. And for some reason his spirits rose, his blood went racing: here was an adventure the other side of his nature delighted in, yet his “other side” now took ominously the upper hand.

How primitive, after all, these “shooting parties” were! For men of brains and character, the best that England could produce, to spend all this time and money, hunting as the cavemen hunted 1 The fox, the deer, the bird — earlier men needed these for food, yet thousands of years later the finest males of the twentieth century — sportsmen all — spent millions on superior weapons, which gave the hunted animal no chance, to bring them down. Not to be a “sportsman” was to be an inferior Englishman…! The “sportsman” was the flower of the race. It struck him, not for the first time, as a grim, a cheap, ideal. Was there no other climax of chivalric achievement more desirable?

This flashed across his mind as a hundred times before, while yet he himself, admittedly, was a “sportsman” born. Against it, at the same time, rose some strange glamour of eternal, deathless things that took no account of killing, things that caught his soul away in ecstasy. Fairy tales, of course, were fairy tales, yet they enshrined the undying truths of life and human nature within their golden “nonsense”, catching at the skirts of radiant wonder, whispering ageless secrets of the soul, giving hints of ineffable glories that lay outside the normal scales of space and time as accepted by the reasoning mind. And this attitude now rose upon him like a wild ungovernable wind of spring, fragrant, delicious, intoxicating. Fairies, the Little People, the “Gay People”, happy dwellers in some non-human state…

Diana’s mother had disappeared, yearning with secret, surreptitious calls for her daughter to come and join her. The girl herself acknowledged the call and was afraid, while yet her practical, hard-boiled uncle took particular trouble to keep her out of the way. Even for him, typical “sportsman”, the time of the equinox was dangerous. These reflections, tumbling about his mind and heart, flooded Norman’s being, while his yearning and desire for the girl came over him like a flame.

The moor, meanwhile, easy enough to walk on in the daytime, seemed unexpectedly difficult at night, the heather longer, the ground very uneven. He was always putting his legs into little hollows that he could not see, and he was relieved when at last he could make out the loom of the garage which was one of his landmarks. He knew that he had not much further to go before he reached the Trod.

The turmoil in his mind had been such that he had paid little attention to the occasional slight sounds he heard as though somebody were at his heels, but now, on reaching the Trod, he became uneasily convinced that someone was not far behind him. So certain, indeed, was he of someone else that he let himself down silently into the deep heather and waited.

He listened intently, breathing very softly. The same instant he knew that he was right. Those sounds were not imagination. Footsteps were at his heels. The swish through the heather of a moving body was unmistakable. He caught distinct footsteps then. The footsteps came to a pause quite near to where he crouched. At which moment exactly, the clouds raced past the moon, letting down a clear space of silvery light, so that he saw the “follower” brilliantly defined.

It was Diana.

“I knew it,” he said half aloud, “I was sure of it long ago,” while his heart, faced with a yearning hope and fear, both half fulfilled, yet gave no leap of relief or pleasure. A shiver ran up and down his spine. Crouching there deep among the heather on the edge of the Trod, he knew more of terror than of happiness. It was all too clear for misunderstanding. She had been drawn irresistibly on the night of the equinox to the danger zone where her mother had so mysteriously “disappeared”.

“I’m here,” he added with a great effort in the same low whisper. “You asked my help. I’m here to meet you … dear….”

The words, even if he actually uttered them, died on his lips. The girl, he saw, stood still a moment, gazing in a dazed way, as though puzzled by something that obstructed her passage. Like a sleep walker, she stared about her, beautiful as a dream, yet only half conscious of her surroundings. Her eyes shone in the moonlight, her hands were half outstretched, yet not towards himself.

“Diana,” he heard himself crying, “can you see me? Do you see who I am? Don’t you recognise me? I’ve come to help — to save — you!”

It was plain she neither heard nor saw him standing there in front of her. She was aware of an obstructing presence, no more than that. Her glazed, shining eyes looked far beyond him — along the Trod. And a terror clutched him that, unless he quickly did the right thing, she would be lost to him forever.

He sprang to his feet and went towards her, but with the extraordinary sensation that he at once came up against some intervening wall of resistance that made normal movement difficult. It was almost like forcing his way through moving water or a drift of wind, and it was with an effort that he reached her side and stood now close against her.

“Diana!” he cried, “Dis — Dis,” using the name her mother used. “Can’t you see who I am? Don’t you know me? I’ve come to save you—” and he stretched his hands towards her.

There was no response; she made no sign.

“I’ve come to lead you back — to lead you home — for God’s sake, answer me, look into my eyes!”

She turned her head in his direction, as though to look into his face, but her eyes went past him towards the moonlit moor beyond. He noticed only, while she stared with those unseeing eyes, that her left hand fumbled weakly at a tiny crucifix that hung on a thin silver chain about her neck. He put out his hand and seized her by the arm, but the instant he touched her he found himself suddenly powerless to move. There came this strange arrest. And at the same instant, the whole Trod became startlingly lit up with a kind of unearthly radiance, and a strange greenish light shone upon the track right across the moor beyond where they stood. A deep terror for himself as well as for her rose over him simultaneously. It came to him, with a shock of ice, that his own soul as well as hers, lay in sudden danger.

His eyes turned irresistibly towards the Trod, so strangely shining in the night. Though his hand still touched the girl, his mind was caught away in phantasmal possibilities. For two passions seized and fought within him: the fierce desire to possess her in the world of men and women, or to go with her headlong, recklessly, and share some ineffable ecstasy of happiness beyond the familiar world where ordinary time and space held sway. Her own nature already held the key and knew the danger…. His whole being rocked.

The two incompatible passions gored the very heart in him. In a flash he realised his alternative — the dreary desolation of human progress with its grinding future, the joy and glory of a soulless happiness that reason denied and yet the heart welcomed as an ultimate truth. These two!

Yet of what value and meaning could she ever be to him as wife and mother if she were now drawn away — away to where her mother now eternally passed her golden, time-less life? How could he face this daily exile of her soul, this hourly isolation, this rape of her normal being his earthly nature held so dear and precious? While — should he save her, keeping her safe against the human hearth — how should he hold her to him, he himself tainted with the golden poison…?

Norman saw both sides with remorseless clarity in that swift instant while the Trod took on its shining radiance. His reasoning mind, he knew, ad sunk away; his heart, wildly beating, was uppermost. With a supreme effort he kept his touch upon Diana’s arm. His fingers clutched at the rough tweed of her sleeve. His entire being seemed rapt in some incredible ecstasy. He stood, he stared, he wondered, lost in an ineffable dream of beauty. One link only with the normal he held to like a vice — his touch upon her tough tweed sleeve, and, in his fading memory, the picture of a crucifix her weakening fingers weakly fumbled.

Figures were now moving fast and furious along the Trod; he could see them approaching from the distance. It was an inspiring, an intoxicating vision, and yet quite credible, with no foolish phantasmagoria of any childish sort. He saw everything as plainly as though he watched a parade in Whitehall, or a procession at some southern Battle of Flowers. Yet lovely, happy, radiant — and irresistibly enticing. As the figures came nearer, the light increased, so that it was obvious they emanated light of their own against the dark moorland. Nor were the individual figures particularly striking, least of all sensational. They seemed “natural”, yet natural only because they were true and justified.

In the lead, as they drew nearer, Norman saw a tall dark man riding a white horse, close behind him a fair shining woman in a green dress, her long, golden hair falling to her waist. On her head he saw a circlet of gold in which was set a red stone that shone and glowed like burning flame. Beside her was another woman, dark and beautiful, with white stones sparkling in her hair as diamonds or crystals sparkle. It was a gorgeous and a radiant sight. Their faces shone with the ecstasy of youth. In some indescribable way they all spread happiness and joy about them, their eyes blazing with a peace and beneficence he had never seen in any human eyes.

These passed, and more and more poured by, some riding, some walking, young and old and children, men with hunting spears and unstrung bows, then youthful figures with harps and lyres, and one and all making friendly gestures of invitation to come and join them, as they flowed past silently. Silently, yes, silently, without a sound of footsteps or of rustling heather, silently along the illuminated Trod, and yet, silent though their passing was, there came to him an impression of singing, laughter, even an air of dancing. Such figures, he realised, could not move without rhythm, rhythm of sound and gesture, for it was as essential to them as breathing. Happy, radiant, gay they were forever from the grinding effort and struggle of the world’s strenuous evolutionary battles — free, if soulless. The “Gay People” as the natives called them. And the sight wrenched at the deepest roots of his own mixed being. To go with them and share their soulless bliss forever … or to stay and face the grim battle of Humanity’s terrific — noble, yes — but almost hopeless, evolution?

That he was torn in two seemed an understatement. The pain seared and burned him in his very vitals. Diana, the girl, drew him as with some power of the stars themselves, and his hand still felt the tweed of her cloth beneath his fingers. His mind and heart, his nerves, his straining muscles, seemed fused in a fury of contradictions and acceptances. The glorious procession flowed streaming by, as though the stars had touched the common moorland earth, dripping their lavish gold in quiet glory — when suddenly Diana wrenched herself away and ran headlong towards them.

A golden-haired woman, he saw, had stepped out of the actual Trod, and had come to a halt directly in front of where he stood. Radiant and wonderful, she stood for a moment poised.

“Dis … Dis…” he heard in tones like music. “Come … come to me. Come and join us! The way is always open. There are no regrets…!”

The girl was half way to her mother before he could break the awful spell that held him motionless. But the rough cloth of her sleeve held clutched between his fingers, and with it the broken chain that caught her little crucifix. The silver cross swung and dangled a moment, then dropped among the heather.

It was as he stooped frantically to recover in that Fate played that strange, unusual card she keeps in reserve for moments when the world seems lost; for, as he fell, his own chain and crucifix, to which he had not once given a thought, flicked up and caught him on the lip. Thinking it was a broken edge of torn heather that stung him into pain, he dashed it aside — only to find it was the foolish metal symbol Diana had made him promise to wear, in his own safety. It was the sharp stab of pain, not the superstitious mental reaction, that roused immediate action in him.

In a second he was on his feet again, and a second later he had overtaken the striding girl and had both arms possessingly round her figure. An instant afterwards his lips were on her own, her head and shoulders torn backwards against his breast.

“Dis!” he cried wildly, “we must stay here together! You belong to me. I hold you tight — forever … here!”

What else he cried he hardly knows. He felt her weight sink back into his arms. It seems he carried her. He felt her convulsive weeping sobs against his heart. Her arms clung tightly round him.

In the distance he saw the line of moving figures die fading off into the enveloping moorland, dipping down into the curving dimness. Clouds raced back across the moon. There was no sound, the wind lay still, no tumbling beck was audible, the peewits slept.

Putting his own coat about her, he carried her home … and in due course he married her; he married Diana, he married Dis as well, a queer, lovely girl, but a girl without a soul, almost without a mind — a girl as commonplace as the radiant nonentity pictured with shining teeth on the cover of a popular magazine — a standardised creature whose essence had “gone elsewhere”.

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