They return at evening A book of ghost stories

_THEY RETURN AT EVENING_ _THEY RETURN AT EVENING_ _A BOOK OF GHOST STORIES_ _by H. R. WAKEFIELD_

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_Quality Court Philip Allan & Co., Ltd. London_ _First Edition_ 1928 _Printed in Great Britain by Mackays Ltd., Chatham_ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I THAT DIETH NOT 9 II OR PERSONS UNKNOWN 49 III “HE COMETH AND HE PASSETH BY” 81 IV PROFESSOR POWNALL’S OVERSIGHT 131 V THE THIRD COACH 157 VI THE RED LODGE 185 VII “AND HE SHALL SING....” 211 VIII THE SEVENTEENTH HOLE AT DUNCASTER 237 IX A PEG ON WHICH TO HANG 263 X AN ECHO 287 THAT DIETH NOT THAT DIETH NOT PART I Well, that’s over! I expected an ordeal and found almost a farce. There is something to be said for being a Local Notable. For example, deferential condolences and preferential treatment (and no awkward questions) from the Coroner when one’s wife is found dead at the bottom of the steps into the garden. With what censorious disdain old Weldon brushed aside the curiosity of Mr. Trench Senior! Now I have prosecuted Trench Junior for poaching three times; consequently Trench Senior does not love me. So I was none too pleased to see him on the Jury. I knew he would be nasty if he saw a chance, and he asked a very nasty and intelligent question. For if she had tripped on the top steps I doubt if she would have fallen so far, and if she had slipped lower down, why such shattering injury? Why indeed! You didn’t deserve such a pulverising rebuke, Mr. Trench, but I’m very glad you got it! And now that it is all over I can reflect without anxiety. Reflect that I am a murderer and, as such, if I got my deserts, a doomed and execrated pariah. No more loose generalisation was ever made than that whoever commits adultery--and, of course, any other sin or crime--in his heart, is guilty of that offence. Every man of imagination who is tempted commits sins in his heart as often as he is tempted, but not one in ten thousand commits them with his hand. Myriads of men must have played with the idea of killing their wives, but _I killed mine_. Is there no difference? Consult the Shade of Ethel! No, I realise perfectly that I possess a kink which should have resulted in a six-foot drop. That I might never kill again, and that it was only by an acute combination of circumstances that I did so once, is beside the point. A murderer should die--if he is sane and sober and selfish. And am I so sure I could never commit another? I am not so sure. I have no remorse. There might be something to be said for a murderer who bitterly repents (though I’d hang him), but as for me--why shouldn’t I murder again if someone again drove me to such an extremity of exasperation? I rehearse all this--why and to whom? Why, because, murderer though I am, I feel compelled to tell the story of this repulsive episode impartially, and so rid my mind of it and, perhaps, forget it, for, murderer though I am, otherwise I believe myself to be reasonably decent and civilised, and I want to see what sort of defence I can muster. And to whom do I address myself? Well, it has long been a theory of mine--more than that, a profound conviction--that the minds of men are far more complex, bifurcated and stratified than is generally accepted or perceived. There is more than one “I” pervading my consciousness. There is the “I,” the murderer, who is sitting here recalling, sifting and writing down. “I” number one, let us call him; but there is also “I” number two, who is compelled to observe “I” number one. It has been suggested that there is also a “number three” watching “number two,” and so on _ad infinitum_. It may be so, but for me there is a limit set to the terms in the series, and it is fixed at “number two.” I often feel compelled to explain to him the actions of “number one,” though I do not feel he is or wants to be a judge, but just an aloofly interested spectator; in no sense a “conscience,” but poised in another layer of consciousness. It is with such vague precision that this duality works in me. And I want to explain to this watcher just how I came to kill Ethel. He may or may not be particularly interested, but he is in the unfortunate position of being compelled to listen! * * * * * I was thirty-one, wanting an heir, an ingenuous lover of beauty, and Ethel was certainly beautiful, and, I thought, a destined mother of robust children. That is why I proposed to her. I am wealthy, “a prominent local figure”; Ethel had an allowance of £40 a year--that is why she accepted me. She was highly intelligent in a debased feminine way, and she never used her brains to better purpose than in her behaviour to me during our engagement. A lovely piece of acting! Quite flawless. Such a lover of the country, adoring children, so docile, unselfish and interested in everything which interested me! What a treasure I believed I was about to acquire! Before the end of our honeymoon I began desperately to doubt it. She let me know quite uncompromisingly that she intended to “social push” with vigour and success. Now I am by nature a recluse, a detester of crowds, a loather of London: I make friends slowly and doubtingly, though most firmly now and again. But I flinch from “acquaintances” and the claims upon one’s time and nerves they entail. It was, therefore, with incredulous dismay that I discovered Ethel was determined that we should spend six months in London and three months in fashionable resorts, and that I was to spend those six months playing the sedulous host and involving myself in an incessant spate of fatuous entertainment. When I had somewhat absorbed this shock I told her that it was the tradition in my family personally to look after the estate during most of the year, that I must work very hard if my book on “The Future of the Novel as an Art Form” was to be ready in time, that I wanted children, and that her programme was impossible. And then I had my first taste of that most wicked temper. Had I faced up to it and fought her, I believe I could have gained a precarious victory, but it was so horrible, so disgusting and intolerable that I gave way. It was a fatal blunder, for she then knew she possessed a most potent weapon against me. I did not capitulate unconditionally, but I felt exasperatedly certain that I should have to renew the battle before I should be able to enforce my side of the bargain. Well, I agreed to do what she wanted for one year; to take a house in London for the Season and a Villa on the Riviera for the winter. I should have considered this quite reasonable if she had not been granted every opportunity before our marriage to understand what sort of person I am; and if she had not so cunningly and wickedly concealed from me what manner of woman she was. And though it is very plausible to say that my love for her should have made me delighted to please her, that is really vast rubbish, for the deep, dominating characteristics of a man’s temperament can never be changed, while one can love and cease to love and love again. Though it caused my vitality to droop and drain, I fulfilled my part of the contract. I took a monstrosity in Bruton Street, gave four huge parties, attended dozens of other huge parties, was forced to carry on disjointed chat through _Tristan_ in a box, sit through _Rigoletto_ in a stall, and poison my system in Night Clubs; so learning to despise humanity--or rather that brand of it--as no man should be taught. Had I possessed a constitution which would have allowed me to drink my critical sense to drowsing point, I might have tolerated such a _régime_, but, unfortunately, my grandfather had mortgaged the family liver. As I withered Ethel bloomed. Her polluted sense of values and her intense social vanity made her revel in this frenetic round of snobbery, this eternal return of jostling, aimless futility. I was not a success. My temperament nipped me below the arm-pits and dragged me round, the skeleton at the feast, though I never caused any awed hush to fall upon the assembly. “Arthur, I do wish you’d make an effort to seem to enjoy things,” Ethel once said. “The other night I overheard George Willard say that you were the World’s Worst Flat-tyre at a party. It makes me feel so ashamed and embarrassed.” “Do you think I care what that chinless, brainless, Bateman-drawing thinks about me?” I replied, knowing I was a fool to argue. “Well, he’s the son of a Duke,” said Ethel; “and what do you mean by a ‘Bateman-drawing’?” “Oh, he was a pupil of Rembrandt,” I replied inanely. “You pretend to know all about Art, but the other day, when Lady Frowse was trying to discuss the Academy with you, you looked absolutely ‘gaga.’” “Lady Frowse,” I replied, “was quoting verbatim from the notice in the _Times_, which, unfortunately, I had already read.” Then Ascot, jostle, clothes, and equine interludes--then Cowes, jostle, different clothes and the occasional belching of a decrepit cannon. And then Ethel went off to twitter in butts, and I, thank God, to Paradown and peace. I made good progress with my book; my intense feeling of release fortunately stimulating my creative energy. I had also plenty of time to think, though nothing very pleasant to think about. I had the most bitter and smarting self-contempt. To think that I could have been such an utter flaming fool as to have ruined my life by a fatuous idealisation of a certain fortuitous combination of pigment, cuticle--and the way the blood shone through it, hair--and the way the light caught it, bones--and the way their envelope draped round them. A perilous privilege, “a sense of beauty.” But had I ruined it? I considered the chances. Ethel was perfectly happy, rapidly stabilising her position amongst the Right People, with my cheque book as her entrenching tool and her temper to animate my fountain pen, with her beauty and her sexlessness and her unscrupulousness to get what she wanted from men and to keep her from ever repaying the debt. What a way to think about one’s wife! Humbug! There was no other way to think about her. No, there would be no co-respondent to encourage and supplicate! And I could do nothing, unless I refused to fill my fountain pen, and I could not do that, for I had only myself to blame, and I was ready to blame myself. At present I could see no hope. I lived a life of extreme asceticism, feeling feebly that by so doing I was defying and rejecting Ethel. Once I had been fool enough to regard women as mentally almost indistinguishable, and it had been merely by the physical criterion I had separated one from another in my mind. Now that I had been taught to despise the dangerous deceptiveness of eyes and breasts, colouring and curves and all those superficial stimulants which excite the featherless biped man to idealise the featherless biped woman, I realised what I should have known a year before--that I could only love someone with a mind I could respect. “What care I how fair she be, if she’s naught but fair to me?” Ethel came down at the end of October, her waist heavy with social scalps. A title had the same effect on her as the sound of a hunting horn on a pack of hounds. It gave her a delicious sense of excitement and well-being. When on one occasion she was addressed by a Minor Royalty for one thrilling moment, I believed she was about to die of