They return at evening A book of ghost stories
shifty little noise. Had he heard it or just imagined it? He listened
intently. No, there was nothing. An idea for an article! He began to
undress, whistling a vague little tune, and pretending to concentrate
on pleasant, commonplace things. He pretended to do so because he
refused to confess that he had a rather poisonous sensation of being
watched and waited for. When he was examining those pegs he had had to
exercise considerable self-control so as not to turn round quickly to
see who was looking at them too, just over his shoulder. But he _had_
looked round sharply when he thought he’d heard that curious little
noise. Well, he shouldn’t have done. That way panic lay. Panic! What on
earth was there to panic about?
Instead of sinking at once into that ten-fathom-deep slumber to which
a flawless conscience and eighteen strenuous holes entitled him, he
passed into that exasperating border state where detached and leering
images come flocking into one’s head, endlessly and inanely telescoping
one another, composing indefinable patterns, humiliating puerilities,
a state where there is neither the controlled rationality of full
consciousness nor the deliciously serio-comic pantomime of the land
of dreams. “This region,” he decided, “is the nearest approach to an
understanding of that buzzing, wavering kaleidoscope called lunacy,
which the sane person ever reaches. The mind can neither control, nor
quite lose control of, these regurgitations of the memory--for that
is what they must be.” Yet some of these images did not seem to be
derived from the well-stored bins of his remembered experience. For
example, he never recalled having entered long rows of figures--wild,
whirling figures in a heavy ruled ledger. And that girl’s face which
kept getting between his eyes and the ruled lines. He did not remember
having seen anyone like her before. And there she was, sitting near him
in a little enclosed garden, and then back came those figures--into
what a raving rigmarole was he plunged! He woke up fully and sharply
for a moment, and then--his will surrendering--fell into a deep sleep.
Gradually the competing images hardened, and as the confused turmoil of
a swiftly rising sea settles into the orderly march of mighty combers,
they took unto themselves a sequence.
Rows of figures staring out from a book, and then someone standing
beside him and beckoning him. And then that long room and a table at
which two men were sitting with books and papers in front of them, who
looked at him searchingly. It was coming! He sat down on a chair to
which one of these men motioned him. Then the other one began pointing
at more rows of figures on a paper on the table. It was all over! Then
one of the men put down his pencil and looked at him, and that girl’s
face, placid, smiling, gentle, rose and filled the room. A terrible
sense of caged frustration seized him. He walked back to the door and
through it, and found himself flinging clothes into a bag, and then
he looked up, and there was that lovely childish face looking down
so easily at him. A terrible sense of loss--and there he was walking
warily and glancing back down a street beside the sea, and there he was
on his hands and knees creeping across the floor of a moon-lit room. He
reached the window, the moon was pacing rainbow clouds, but what was
that--that shadow flung so silently and so still from the trees? He
crawled back to the bed, and his head was in his hands, and they seemed
to press and force out that girl’s face, radiating love and trust. He
staggered up, and a moment later he felt life choking and twisting from
him.
Mr. Partridge for good reasons only occasionally and reluctantly
recalls his sensations at the moment when it seemed to him that at one
moment he was dangling and gasping, and at the next when he was sitting
up in bed watching with horror something which fluttered hideously on
the wall, its tortured arms flung out as though from one crucified, its
head jerking foully--something which suddenly writhed and crumpled to
the floor out of the beam of the moon.
Mr. Partridge shouted and leapt from the bed, overturning as he did
so the table by the side. As he reached his feet the door opened, a
candle flickered, and there was the manager of the Royal Hotel, in
a night-shirt, with terror in his eyes. “I know what’s the matter,
sir,” he mumbled, “it’s my fault, I knew it would happen, but my wife
thought----”
“Knew what would happen?” cried Mr. Partridge. “Tell me, is there
anything on the floor there, is there a tree with a shadow out there?
Is there? Is there?” His hands went to his throat.
“No, sir,” said the worm, “it’s all over, sir. I’m sorry, sir. I
shouldn’t have allowed it, sir. Come with me, sir.”
Mr. Partridge put on his dressing-gown, and after one quick look back
followed him down to the floor below.
“This is my room, sir,” said the worm, opening a door. “You’ll sleep
here, sir; I’m sorry, sir.”
“What is it? What have I seen?” cried Mr. Partridge, his nerves still
dancing, but settling down.
“I don’t really know, sir,” said the worm. “But something happened in
your room twenty-five years ago--long before I came. Some clerk it
was, sir. Well, sir, he hanged himself.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Partridge, shuddering, “I know that.”
“It seems, sir, he’d been taking the Bank’s money for a good while; he
wanted to marry and couldn’t afford it, and he slipped away down here,
but the police were after him, and followed him. Well, sir, something
always happens in your room on the night of it. That’s why it’s always
kept empty.”
“Well then,” asked Mr. Partridge, “why the devil did you put me into
it?”
The worm looked limply and hen-peckedly at him.
“Oh, I know,” said Mr. Partridge. “Because your wife hated to see
fifteen shillings and sixpence go begging.”
“Well, sir, I did take a room at the boarding-establishment.”
“Has this happened before?”
“Yes, sir, twelve years ago, sir, the year I took over, and I didn’t
know about it. A gentleman was in there, and he screamed and woke
the whole house. I promise you, it was against my wishes and better
judgment that we let you be there, but my wife thought it might have
passed off, and we’re not usually so full at this time.”
“Well,” said Mr. Partridge, “before I take some aspirin and attempt to
sleep, let me give you a word of advice. Make your wife sleep alone in
that room this day next year!”
The worm smiled deprecatingly.
“Your things will be brought down in the morning, sir.”
“All right, all right,” said Mr. Partridge, “but tell me, _is_ there a
peg missing in that wall?”
“Yes, sir, it was the one on which----”
“All right, all right,” said Mr. Partridge. “Call me at 8.30.”
And, taking ten grains of aspirin, he soon after sank into a dreamless
sleep.
At breakfast next morning Mr. Partridge made a brave effort to appear
his usual calm, flippant self, but the sharp eye of Willie Cranmer,
with whom he was playing a single that morning, was not deceived.
As they walked together to the club house he remarked, “You had a bad
night, Jim, tell me about it.”
Mr. Partridge did so.
When he had finished, Cranmer said, “I did not tell you at the time,
but that face at the window in the afternoon had not a very reassuring
expression, and I saw it again just before we went to bed, but I
thought it better to say nothing to you.”
“Do you know, Willie, that, now I’m feeling almost all right again, the
thing that impresses me is that until I had that experience last night
I had never even vaguely conceived what it must be like to be driven
to such vulgar lengths as embezzlement by such elementary impulses
as love and poverty? Yet that sort of thing has been going on around
me ever since I had eyes to see and read, ears to hear, and a mind
to understand, though in my vanity I have considered myself rather a
knowing fellow where humanity and its motives are concerned. I know now
that I knew nothing about anything, above a certain pitch of intensity.
I feel humiliated. What is it? How do these things happen?”
“Well,” said Cranmer, “as we agreed last night, some of the cleverest
minds in the world have been trying to answer those questions for
thousands of years. Your experience last night is as inexplicable as it
always would have been and, in my opinion, will ever be.”
They had reached the first tee. Just below them baby waves frolicked
in, chased by a small and scented breeze. Four alert, beady eyes, the
property of a pair of black-headed gulls on the beach, regarded them
sardonically. Mr. Partridge tried a practice swing, and then his hand
went to his throat. He stroked it for a moment as he gazed out to sea.
Willie Cranmer noticed the little gesture, but merely said, “Now let’s
be serious!” And he teed up. A little later, being an Injudicious
Hooker, he disappeared into a bunker on the left, simultaneously Mr.
Partridge, a master of cuts, retired into its counterpart on the right.
Two little spurts of sand leapt into the air. And then--two more!
AN ECHO
AN ECHO
It was about a quarter past four on September 4th of last year that I
knew, as I walked along a ride through Long Bottom Wood, that I was
once again to be projected into a Fourth Dimension. I must explain, as
well as I can, what I mean.
At irregular intervals I am compelled, though with extreme reluctance,
to witness supernatural phenomena. Every haunted place seems longing
to reveal its secret to me. There is a ghostly understanding between
me and the Restless Ones. The experience I am about to relate was the
fifty-sixth of its kind, and experts in this shadowy commerce tell me I
am probably the most gifted clairvoyant known to the world.
They yield me this dubious palm for the certainty, precision and
vividness of my recorded “successes.” For some time I tried to keep my
dismal talent secret, but I betrayed it unconsciously far too often.
I regard this peculiarity of mine as a nuisance, often a profoundly
disturbing nuisance. From none of my experiences have I gained
anything of good, and as far as throwing light on the nature of this
or any other world they seem utterly useless. I have called them
“supernatural,” but they may be nothing of the kind; sometimes I doubt
profoundly if they are.
As I say, I have no pride in my performances. I feel myself to be
merely a peculiar kind of camera, the lens of which is sensitive to
things to which an ordinary camera is insensitive.
The preliminary symptoms are always the same. Suddenly every sound,
from the loudest to the softest, seems frozen in dreadful suspense. It
is something more active than the mere absence of sound. Simultaneously
everything is dimmed--a consistent toning down of every shade. It is
as though I am gazing through one of those glasses used by artists
when painting outdoors in too dazzling a light, and the world becomes
sullen, brassy, livid. I feel that I am both within and without the
bounds of reality, as though, as I have suggested, I have strayed
into a fourth spacial dimension, a region dim, motionless, soundless.
Once, when these first preliminary warnings came to me, I attempted to
avoid seeing the vision I knew was coming, but it was in vain; some
irresistible force compelled me to go through to the end--and now I
never struggle.
The great love of my life is ornithology--to put it less pompously, I
adore birds, and have written many articles and a few books about them.
And this was the cause of my stay at Balland Manor, for its owner,
Ronald Lawton, is an enthusiastic amateur, and had implored me to
catalogue the birds on the estate. He and his wife were abroad on this
occasion, so I had the house to myself, and very pleasant I found it. I