The haunted house
enjoyed; but it was beyond expectation all the same.
The Old Man heard very clearly a voice from his own bunk. He was on
the other side of the cabin at the time, though, it is true, his
attention had been directed to the couch. The voice, far off, ghostly
in the darkness, reminded him of the day when he had so nearly drowned
(through no fault of his own, but rather of Islington port), and warned
him of approaching trials. Had the Old Man remembered to whom he had
lately recounted that drowning episode (the only adventure of his life)
he might have had suspicions. As it was, he had none, for he told the
story so often that he could not remember who last had heard it. All
he knew now was that a whisper from the other world—from A Spirit that
knew his past—had bidden him remember and beware. It affected him
damnably.
His face did not go as white as the Mate’s had done, for it started
with a handicap of fixed mahogany, but it was changed when he looked
round at John and asked him, as the Mate had asked him, those few days
before, whether he had heard anything; and once more John truthfully
said he had. Then the Old Man asked him point-blank whether he
minded—as after all, he had done him the favour of taking him aboard,
and he was only a young chap—whether he minded sleeping in his, the
Captain’s, bunk that night, and giving him his own bunk. And John had
accepted with all the goodwill in the world. He even said it was an
honour.
When John Maple landed from his short but memorable and very happy
cruise (for he had loved the sea, though it was his first experience
of it), he had no idea that there was a living in the talent he had
discovered—if talent it were. At first he only thought it amusing
that by suggesting to another person where a voice was likely to come
from, and then keeping one’s features still and talking within one’s
mouth, one could make the voice seem to come from out of nothingness.
Then when he tried it on with chance Bohemian friends in London he
found that not everybody could do it as well as he: and most of his
friends could not do it at all. Then came the day when Percy Spegel
(so he chose to spell his name for the moment), hearing him practising
the trick during a little supper at the _Lord Milner_ in Puffin
Lane, watched him with fixed eyes, wherein any expert demon might
have discovered avarice, tenacity, fraud, and other varied characters
consonant with his enormous tie-pin.
Percy Spegel appealed to his constant parasite, whether John Maple had
not a marvellous talent? To which the parasite agreed. Whether it was
not a pity that such talent should be wholly untrained? To which the
parasite also agreed. Whether it would not be a dreadfully expensive
thing to train that talent? To which the parasite abundantly agreed.
Whether he would not probably be a loser if he attempted to put John
Maple on the Halls? To which the parasite said, he certainly would be.
Whether one was not foolish, out of mere enthusiasm, to risk such loss?
Which the parasite said was only what one would expect of a good fellow
like Percy.
The upshot of it was that John Maple found himself prepared to sign a
contract of a sort he had never seen before, but familiar enough to
those who live and die by the Halls, wherein he was to earn nothing for
so long—a short period enough—and after that what looked like a very
large sum every week.
John Maple knew nothing of what the out-goings of this profession are,
or of its temptations. He very luckily accepted, and that was why his
first steady employment—about a year after his return to England from
his father’s death-bed—was in the singular capacity of Lieutenant
Allegri, the world-famed ventriloquist. But such is the gulf between
the two worlds that no one among the rich whom he saw at his leisure
had an idea of the escapade; and no one among the Bohemians had an
idea of his acquaintance with the rich. He had fewer nights in which
he could go out, but he did go out sufficiently. He kept his contract
free; he would not be bullied: and he was so good that he could make
his own terms and times.
The truth is, that if John Maple had been what young men of family in
this situation never are, and that is, devoted to his one talent, he
might have become rich. There are small fortunes made in these things.
He might have bought back Rackham after God knows how many years, if he
had cut himself right away from everything but slaving, and forgotten
every name but his own false one on the Halls.
It was after a very short time as Lieutenant Allegri that he bought for
his own pleasure a couple of dogs and trained them to do tricks. Then
he had added to their number and taught them more tricks. Then (since
he now knew the trade) he determined to change over, and in spite of
Spegel’s passionate appeals to heaven, he convinced that expert, who
knew human nature if he knew nothing else, that he must take his choice
between losing his own profit, which was considerable, or accepting
John Maple in the future as Don Herado de Madero and his Troupe of
Performing Dogs.
It was not as good as the ventriloquist show, but it drew better, for
the public is fond of dogs, and Spegel had put it about that it was all
done by kindness, not to say coddling: and the little brutes certainly
looked very happy as they ran about wagging their tails and doing
things which proved them wholly indifferent to pomposity. They barked
also, most winningly, to order, and grinned in the most endearing
fashion.
There, then, was John Maple’s singular situation at the moment when,
in that other life of his, he and Bo had met and made certain one of
the other. He had told her secretly of his profession; and he had given
her useful tips about Lovey-Lad, for he had become an expert upon dogs.
That Lovey-Lad had recognised in him a mysterious Master of Hounds
raised him enormously in Bo’s eyes. It is to be believed that one of
Don Herado’s troupe met Lovey-Lad in the park and had loyally exalted
the powers of his lord. For certainly John was the only male human
being to whom Lovey-Lad deferred; and Lovey-Lad was the only being on
earth whose opinion Bo respected.
* * * * *
But why had Aunt Hilda taken all this enormous trouble about the
Catchings? Why the new beam let into the ceiling, adzed, blackened and
chipped and dated 1487? Why the Ancestor? Why the panelling? Why the
antique chairs? Why the heraldic animals? Why anything? Why, why the
new family ghost? It’s true _that_ cost nothing, but the more solid
stuff cost a great deal. Why all this expenditure?
Had John Maple known more of the world, and wholly lost his innocence,
he could have answered, as you and I can answer, that there are only
two explanations of such feverish changes, when an old house is pulled
about and made vulgar. Either the Vandal has more money to spend than
she knows what to do with, or the Goth is embarrassed. Either the
barbaric hand is filled with the ruining gold, or the savage heart is
tortured by perpetual demands for payment from creditors and is salting
for a sale.
Either Aunt Hilda was spending money wantonly, or she was desperate for
money.
Well, it was the latter. Aunt Hilda was up to the neck in worry. She
didn’t know which way to turn.
When people change and rechange, and pull down and destroy and
theatricalise, you can tell which of the two motives is at work by a
simple test. If they act spasmodically, first putting this up and then
taking it down, changing an ornament from one place to another, pulling
out a wall and then regretting it and putting it back, they have too
much money. If they pursue one plan, continuously, and load it with
detail they are fighting debt.
Aunt Hilda was fighting debt.
Aunt Hilda was making a new Rackham and a new Catchings for the sake
of some purchaser heaven might send her. For Aunt Hilda must find a
purchaser or burst. And that was the truth.
William Maple, that careful business man, had left things in order
when he died. He had added appreciably to the value of the house and
the estate. He had allowed his wife to cover the brick part of the
front with a false veneer of half-timber because that at least gave it
uniformity with the older part; and he had allowed the new fake to be
toned down artificially so as to marry with the old. That also seemed
reasonable. More he had not allowed. But Hilda Maple, even before his
death, was already talking to her occasional guests about the antiquity
of the place, and what wonders would be revealed when all the old wood
could be uncovered and the later work which hid it could be taken away.
Her husband had not been dead two months when, in spite of all the
difficulties in getting work done during those last days of the war,
Aunt Hilda lashed out. Even then—my reader will remember, if she is
old enough—people with a pull could get things done. It was the moment
when one of the most luxurious of the new houses near the south coast
in Kent was being built by a politician. The difficulties of life were
not with the rich in those spring days of 1918, and though Hilda
Maple was not in the heart of that old gentry which had once governed
England, she was already close in touch with some of the new vulgarians
who were now beginning to govern England. Her friendship with Amathea
de Beaurivage alone was enough to get her the necessary labour. It was
enormously expensive, of course, but she was full of her new fortune,
and she began to tear down the structure of the house within, and to
ornament, and to build.
At the same time she did another thing, not unusual in women suddenly
possessed of capital, still less unusual in times when all values are
jumping up and down like the little ball in the circle of the roulette.
She gambled.
But Hilda Maple, like thousands of others in those days, was gambling
against the politicians, the peace-makers, the bankers, and the
international spouters of the millennium. They could see what was in
the game, for they held and stacked the cards. She—and the thousands of
others—could only see the backs of those cards.
There had come a moment—and that in a few months—when all was lost and
she had nothing to fall back on but Rackham itself, and Rackham she
must sell. Perhaps when she had spoken to her dying brother-in-law she
had honestly intended not to sell; but necessity knows no law, and she
excused herself to herself by the memory of what she had told him; that
she had a legal right to sell. But the selling of a house, like the
selling of a boat or the selling of one’s own soul, depends on external
effects. We “go on our clothes,” as a great American Leader of Modern
Thought has said. A boat sells on its paint and its brasswork. A house
sells by what furniture and faked wood and “period” front it can show.
Rackham might barely fetch its £20,000, for its own true worth; but let
it become Rackham Catchings and be varnished and vulgarised enough (not
that Hilda Maple thought it vulgarised—she thought it vastly ennobled)
and there was no knowing what it might fetch—especially from the right
kind of purchaser in these extraordinary times, when men stepped out
of the gutter on New Year’s Day and were in the House of Lords before
Christmas.
Therefore it was that Aunt Hilda had gone on building, pulling down,
ageing new wood, owing increasing sums for expert advice and goods from
the antique dealers, and in general playing the devil with Rackham.
She had got the house into the illustrated papers three times already;
first under “Our Elizabethan Heritage”; then under “The Quiet Homes of
England,” and then under “Minor Great English Houses, No. 51: Rackham.”