They return at evening A book of ghost stories
“But supposing----” the flaccid one--obviously a hen-pecked
one--started feebly to object.
“_His_ look-out,” replied the female. “Anyway, you’ve took a room for
him at Mrs. Brown’s, it’s his look-out.”
“I don’t like it,” said the flaccid one, “honest I don’t,” and then he
shuffled out.
“I find,” he said shiftily, “that I _can_ manage the fourth room, but I
assure you the boarding-establishment is a clean, comfortable house.”
“No thanks,” said Mr. Partridge. “Show us the four rooms, please.”
Leading the way, the specimen unlocked in turn three rooms on the
second floor, in which the others were deposited, and then he took Mr.
Partridge up to the third and opened a door at the end of a passage.
“This will be yours, sir,” he said, his eyes on his fingers, and a
moment later Mr. Partridge was alone, and receiving a sharp, vivid yet
vague impression of malaise. He had had such impressions just once or
twice before--immediate, apparently causeless aversions for certain
persons, places, things, rooms--yes, rooms. He experienced again this
irritating, irrational distaste when that little worm closed the door
of Number 39. It wasn’t violently obtrusive, but it was certainly there.
He looked round the room. It was furnished with the conventional Royal
Hotel properties--a chest of drawers with a couple of knobs missing,
a wardrobe slightly down at one heel, one picture at a rakish angle,
depicting Mr. Marcus Stone’s reactions to Sacred and Profane Love,
a row of pegs with one missing. Mr. Partridge, being an essayist of
the lightest sort, was observant of detail, and he noted that a new
panel had been inserted beneath one of them. Then there was a loutish
wash-stand with a mirror, into which he gazed. Yes, certainly he wanted
a holiday--one could almost tell a man’s age from his eyebrows, his
were growing wispy and errant--and then he stepped back abruptly,
for it seemed to him for a moment that the image he saw reflected
had changed--as if someone had peeped over his shoulder and--absurd
of course! It must be because the room was so dark. He began fussing
with the blind, which refused to go right up. Well, curse the thing!
He started and looked back quickly over his shoulder--it was only the
Boots with his bag. “This is a damnably dark room, Boots,” he said
testily. “See if you can get the blind up a little.”
“Always seems a bit dim,” said the Boots, putting down the bag and
jerking at the blind cord. “There, sir, that’s a little better.”
Mr. Partridge changed quickly into his golf attire and went down
to lunch. Afterwards they took sides in the traditional four-ball
match which inaugurated these reunions. The play was not of a very
par standard, and the balls were slyly provocative in concealing
themselves, so that it was growing dusk as they entered the little
garden of the Hotel. As they came through the gate Willie Cranmer said
to Mr. Partridge, “Got a decent room, Jim?”
“No,” said the latter. “Dark and poky, but it will do all right. It’s
that one, I think, next to the chimney, with the small window.”
“Well,” said Willie, “there’s someone in there, I saw him look out for
a moment.”
Mr. Partridge stared up for a moment. “Probably the Boots,” he said, a
little shortly.
When he went up to dress for dinner, he found his distaste for Number
39 decidedly intensified. He went to the window and looked out. Yes,
it _was_ the one next to the chimney. He could find no trace of any
activity by the Boots.
In fact, there was too little activity on the part of everybody in this
rotten place--no hot water, for example. He’d let his ancient friend
Armitage know what he thought of R.A.C. recommended Hotels! He rang the
bell viciously, which presently resulted in a timid knock--a maid with
a japanned tin can--who came in with the expression of a heifer facing
the pole-axe, hurried across the room, rattled down the can in the
basin, and ran out again.
“Do I look as great a menace to rustic virtue as all that?” wondered
Mr. Partridge. “I should like to think so, but I don’t.” And he set
himself to a smart piece of changing.
During dinner the conversation took the natural form of a riot of
golf-shop--the usual immortality for green-finders, the usual Nirvana
for shanks, tops and flubs, but afterwards in the lounge they turned to
less momentous topics. For example, Mr. Partridge asked Willie Cranmer
if he had secured any notable prizes in the book-market lately.
“Nothing of any great value,” he replied, “but one thing which
interests me very much. It’s a privately printed--very badly
printed--account of some troublesome events in an Essex Manor, dated
1754. Its abominable title page is inscribed as follows:
THE HAUNTINGE OF MY HOUSE
BY
CHAS. SWINTON
A GENTLEMAN OF ESSEX.
“He seems to have inherited the place in 1750, but his joy at such
good fortune speedily turned to foreboding and exasperation. He goes
into great detail, and certainly Swinton Manor seems to have housed
a disturbing company. He must have had his fair share of guts and
pertinacity to have stuck it as long as he did. It’s the most curious
chronicle of its kind I ever read. Eventually he had the house pulled
down, having endured enough.”
“It’s a very curious subject, this business of hauntings,” said
Mr. Frith judicially. “For one thing it is a nice instance of the
scepticism of men, when they want to be sceptical--how often they
prefer the greatest credulity! Looked at dispassionately, the evidence
for such phenomena is far more catholic and irrefutable than is the
evidence for ninety-nine things out of a hundred which are accepted
without question. Read that encyclopædic catalogue of Richet, _Thirty
Years of Psychical Research_, if you want to know how full and detailed
that evidence is. Yet the average man mocks at the suggestion that
even one out of this multiplicity is anything but an invention or an
hallucination.”
“I think you have suggested the real reason,” said George Dunbar.
“They pretend to refuse to believe because they’d vastly prefer to
disbelieve, and comparatively very few have ever been compelled
by personal experience to face such facts. Even then, when the
intimidating vision is fading, they are satisfied to mutter something
about ‘Subjective and Objective’--leave it at that and change the
subject.”
“If there is one certain thing,” said Mr. Partridge, “it is that they
can be objective. The identical experience has been shared a thousand
times, the same apparition has been viewed by dozens of different
people at the same and different times. The evidence for that is beyond
argument.”
“I believe in such phenomena in a certain sense,” said Willie
Cranmer, “but I am not prepared to allow them a supernatural--in
the more esoteric sense of the word--existence. By some unexplained
means, certain places, certain things, become impregnated, kinetic,
sensitised. How or why one room, one chair, even one W.C., allows
itself to be so impregnated is an utterly inexplicable mystery. One
battlefield is ‘haunted’; a thousand are as placid as Port Meadow.
Usually, I grant you, there is evidence that a potent emanation of some
passion has at some time been released and operative in such disturbed
areas, though not, I believe, by any means in every case. But the most
singular thing to my mind about the supernatural is its caprice, its
fortuitousness, its rarity--and indeed its essential lack of purpose.
The eloquent and, considering its date, ingenious explanation of Lytton
covers but a small percentage of the data and, even if one accepts it
in its entirety, a vast legion of instances of hauntings and haunted
would be left still as fortuitous, as unrelated, and as inexplicable.”
“I knew a house,” said George Dunbar, “in which I would not spend a
week alone for one thousand guineas. Not merely is it impregnated, it
is dripping with horror and beastliness. It is dark and brooding and
has--it seems to me--an evil life of its own. Everyone, I know, who has
entered it has taken an immediate and increasing loathing for it. It
has a shocking record of suicides--eight in thirty years, but I agree
with Willie that I never got the impression that there was any mind
or will animating those coughs one heard, the steps behind one, the
dim, drawn faces one thought one saw at windows; and all the symposium
of dread one experienced there. I mean that one was left convinced
that there was no consciousness working in our space and time--these
things seemed to be passing in and out of another dimension--that
is vague, but just the impression I got. All these phenomena seemed
quite purposeless, and therefore should not have been, as they were,
frightening--puppets without strings--like the mechanical recording of
a gramophone.”
“I think that’s a better simile than mine,” said Cranmer. “Once the
record is made by the living it goes on long after the recorder
is dead, repeating and repeating until it wears out, and there is
evidence that the influence does wear out in certain senses. All such
comparisons between affairs on one plane and on another are fallacious,
but they help to clear the air of debate.”
“But someone has to put the record on,” objected Mr. Partridge.
“I suggest it is never taken off,” replied Cranmer.
“What a typical ghost discussion it has been,” thought Mr. Partridge,
“hopelessly inconclusive, tentative, vaguely disturbing, subjective,
guess-work.”
At a quarter to twelve they decided to go to bed. Mr. Partridge and
Willie Cranmer went out for a breath of air.
“Did you find you had identified your room all right?” the latter asked.
“Yes,” said Mr. Partridge, wondering slightly irritably why the subject
seemed to have this mild fascination for his old friend.
The night was fine, with a three-quarter moon. Willie Cranmer stared
up at the hard shadows round the chimney for a moment or two, and then
said, “Well, let’s go to bed. You’re sure you’re quite comfortable?”
“Oh, quite!” said Mr. Partridge in a clipped, slightly bothered tone,
and they went in.
The corner of the corridor in which Number 39 was situated was so
dark that Mr. Partridge had to light a match before he could find the
keyhole. As he was fumbling with the key he checked himself sharply and
listened intently. It seemed to him that a sound, difficult to define,
had come from within. He lit another match to make sure this was Number
39. Yes, it was. That little sound must have come from the next room.
He went in and turned on the light, which consisted of one blinking and
superannuated bulb.
“This is a rotten pub,” he thought. “A moribund bulb, blinds not
drawn, bed not pulled down! I’ll tell that worm what I think of his
establishment in the morning!”
He went to hang up his coat on one of those pegs when he suddenly found
himself staring uncertainly at them. His subconscious mind had uttered
a protest. Then he remembered. “That’s rather funny,” he thought. “I
could have sworn that one of those pegs was missing, and that one
of those panels had been renewed.” Yet they were all there now, and
the panels were identical. He peered at them closely; it was a quite
unimportant and yet irritating little puzzle.
The room was stuffy. He went to the window and opened it. He must be
getting old and unobservant. He’d never noticed that tree before--what
was it?--a yew, and a very fine one. How could he have failed to
see it? In how unreal, unearthly a way the moon painted the world
sometimes! This view from the window, for example--how uncertain in a
sense, unfamiliar, as if it were a reflection from a mind not his own;
certain pictures of Cézanne gave one that tingling, groping “let me get
back to reality” feeling. Reality! What was it? And what was that? That