Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and soul, in the
little patch of ground, half-orchard and half-garden, that abutted on
the farmyard at Mowsle Barton. After the stress and noise of long
years of city life, the repose and peace of the hill-begirt homestead
struck on his senses with an almost dramatic intensity. Time and space
seemed to lose their meaning and their abruptness; the minutes slid
away into hours, and the meadows and fallows sloped away into middle
distance, softly and imperceptibly. Wild weeds of the hedgerow
straggled into the flower-garden, and wallflowers and garden bushes
made counter-raids into farmyard and lane. Sleepy-looking hens and
solemn preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or
roadway; nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere; even the
gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges. And over the
whole scene brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a quality of
magic in it. In the afternoon you felt that it had always been
afternoon, and must always remain afternoon; in the twilight you knew
that it could never have been anything else but twilight. Crefton
Lockyer sat at his ease in the rustic seat beneath an old medlar tree,
and decided that here was the life-anchorage that his mind had so
fondly pictured and that latterly his tired and jarred senses had so
often pined for. He would make a permanent lodging-place among these
simple friendly people, gradually increasing the modest comforts with
which he would like to surround himself, but falling in as much as
possible with their manner of living.
As he slowly matured this resolution in his mind an elderly woman came
hobbling with uncertain gait through the orchard. He recognized her as
a member of the farm household, the mother or possibly the
mother-in-law of Mrs. Spurfield, his present landlady, and hastily
formulated some pleasant remark to make to her. She forestalled him.
"There's a bit of writing chalked up on the door over yonder. What is
it?"
She spoke in a dull impersonal manner, as though the question had been
on her lips for years and had best be got rid of. Her eyes, however,
looked impatiently over Crefton's head at the door of a small barn
which formed the outpost of a straggling line of farm buildings.
"Martha Pillamon is an old witch" was the announcement that met
Crefton's inquiring scrutiny, and he hesitated a moment before giving
the statement wider publicity. For all he knew to the contrary, it
might be Martha herself to whom he was speaking. It was possible that
Mrs. Spurfield's maiden name had been Pillamon. And the gaunt, withered
old dame at his side might certainly fulfil local conditions as to the
outward aspect of a witch.
"It's something about some one called Martha Pillamon," he explained
cautiously.
"What does it say?"
"It's very disrespectful," said Crefton; "it says she's a witch. Such
things ought not to be written up."
"It's true, every word of it," said his listener with considerable
satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own, "the old
toad."
And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled out in her
cracked voice, "Martha Pillamon is an old witch!"
"Did you hear what she said?" mumbled a weak, angry voice somewhere
behind Crefton's shoulder. Turning hastily, he beheld another old
crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled, and evidently in a high state of
displeasure. Obviously this was Martha Pillamon in person. The
orchard seemed to be a favourite promenade for the aged women of the
neighbourhood.
"'Tis lies, 'tis sinful lies," the weak voice went on. "'Tis Betsy
Croot is the old witch. She an' her daughter, the dirty rat. I'll put
a spell on 'em, the old nuisances."
As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on the
barn door.
"What's written up there?" she demanded, wheeling round on Crefton.
"Vote for Soarker," he responded, with the craven boldness of the
practised peacemaker.
The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded red shawl lost
themselves gradually among the tree-trunks. Crefton rose presently and
made his way towards the farm-house. Somehow a good deal of the peace
seemed to have slipped out of the atmosphere.
The cheery bustle of tea-time in the old farm kitchen, which Crefton
had found so agreeable on previous afternoons, seemed to have soured
to-day into a certain uneasy melancholy. There was a dull, dragging
silence around the board, and the tea itself, when Crefton came to
taste it, was a flat, lukewarm concoction that would have driven the
spirit of revelry out of a carnival.
"It's no use complaining of the tea," said Mrs. Spurfield hastily, as
her guest stared with an air of polite inquiry at his cup. "The kettle
won't boil, that's the truth of it."
Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce fire was banked
up under a big black kettle, which sent a thin wreath of steam from its
spout, but seemed otherwise to ignore the action of the roaring blaze
beneath it.
"It's been there more than an hour, an' boil it won't," said Mrs.
Spurfield, adding, by way of complete explanation, "we're bewitched."
"It's Martha Pillamon as has done it," chimed in the old mother; "I'll
be even with the old toad. I'll put a spell on her."
"It must boil in time," protested Crefton, ignoring the suggestions of
foul influences. "Perhaps the coal is damp."
"It won't boil in time for supper, nor for breakfast to-morrow morning,
not if you was to keep the fire a-going all night for it," said Mrs.
Spurfield. And it didn't. The household subsisted on fried and baked
dishes, and a neighbour obligingly brewed tea and sent it across in a
moderately warm condition.
"I suppose you'll be leaving us, now that things has turned up
uncomfortable," Mrs. Spurfield observed at breakfast; "there are folks
as deserts one as soon as trouble comes."
Crefton hurriedly disclaimed any immediate change of plans; he
observed, however, to himself that the earlier heartiness of manner had
in a large measure deserted the household. Suspicious looks, sulky
silences, or sharp speeches had become the order of the day. As for
the old mother, she sat about the kitchen or the garden all day,
murmuring threats and spells against Martha Pillamon. There was
something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail
old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to
the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one
faculty which had survived in undiminished vigour and intensity where
all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the
uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be
distilled from their spite and their cursings. No amount of sceptical
explanation could remove the undoubted fact that neither kettle nor
saucepan would come to boiling-point over the hottest fire. Crefton
clung as long as possible to the theory of some defect in the coals,
but a wood fire gave the same result, and when a small spirit-lamp
kettle, which he ordered out by carrier, showed the same obstinate
refusal to allow its contents to boil he felt that he had come suddenly
into contact with some unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden
forces. Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could
catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet
here, so little removed from the arteries of the latest civilization,
was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like
witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.
Passing out through the farm garden on his way to the lanes beyond,
where he hoped to recapture the comfortable sense of peacefulness that
was so lacking around house and hearth--especially hearth--Crefton came
across the old mother, sitting mumbling to herself in the seat beneath
the medlar tree. "Let un sink as swims, let un sink as swims," she
was, repeating over and over again, as a child repeats a half-learned
lesson. And now and then she would break off into a shrill laugh, with
a note of malice in it that was not pleasant to hear. Crefton was glad
when he found himself out of earshot, in the quiet and seclusion of the
deep overgrown lanes that seemed to lead away to nowhere; one, narrower
and deeper than the rest, attracted his footsteps, and he was almost
annoyed when he found that it really did act as a miniature roadway to
a human dwelling. A forlorn-looking cottage with a scrap of ill-tended
cabbage garden and a few aged apple trees stood at an angle where a
swift flowing stream widened out for a space into a decent sized pond
before hurrying away again through the willows that had checked its
course. Crefton leaned against a tree-trunk and looked across the
swirling eddies of the pond at the humble little homestead opposite
him; the only sign of life came from a small procession of
dingy-looking ducks that marched in single file down to the water's
edge. There is always something rather taking in the way a duck
changes itself in an instant from a slow, clumsy waddler of the earth
to a graceful, buoyant swimmer of the waters, and Crefton waited with a
certain arrested attention to watch the leader of the file launch
itself on to the surface of the pond. He was aware at the same time of
a curious warning instinct that something strange and unpleasant was
about to happen. The duck flung itself confidently forward into the
water, and rolled immediately under the surface. Its head appeared for
a moment and went under again, leaving a train of bubbles in its wake,
while wings and legs churned the water in a helpless swirl of flapping
and kicking. The bird was obviously drowning. Crefton thought at
first that it had caught itself in some weeds, or was being attacked
from below by a pike or water-rat. But no blood floated to the
surface, and the wildly bobbing body made the circuit of the pond
current without hindrance from any entanglement. A second duck had by
this time launched itself into the pond, and a second struggling body
rolled and twisted under the surface. There was something peculiarly
piteous in the sight of the gasping beaks that showed now and again
above the water, as though in terrified protest at this treachery of a
trusted and familiar element. Crefton gazed with something like horror
as a third duck poised itself on the bank and splashed in, to share the
fate of the other two. He felt almost relieved when the remainder of
the flock, taking tardy alarm from the commotion of the slowly drowning
bodies, drew themselves up with tense outstretched necks, and sidled
away from the scene of danger, quacking a deep note of disquietude as
they went. At the same moment Crefton became aware that he was not the
only human witness of the scene; a bent and withered old woman, whom he
recognized at once as Martha Pillamon, of sinister reputation, had
limped down the cottage path to the water's edge, and was gazing
fixedly at the gruesome whirligig of dying birds that went in horrible
procession round the pool. Presently her voice rang out in a shrill
note of quavering rage:
"'Tis Betsy Croot adone it, the old rat. I'll put a spell on her, see
if I don't."
Crefton slipped quietly away, uncertain whether or no the old woman had
noticed his presence. Even before she had proclaimed the guiltiness of
Betsy Croot, the latter's muttered incantation "Let un sink as swims"
had flashed uncomfortably across his mind. But it was the final threat
of a retaliatory spell which crowded his mind with misgiving to the
exclusion of all other thoughts or fancies. His reasoning powers could
no longer afford to dismiss these old-wives' threats as empty
bickerings. The household at Mowsle Barton lay under the displeasure
of a vindictive old woman who seemed able to materialize her personal
spites in a very practical fashion, and there was no saying what form
her revenge for three drowned ducks might not take. As a member of the
household Crefton might find himself involved in some general and
highly disagreeable visitation of Martha Pillamon's wrath. Of course
he knew that he was giving way to absurd fancies, but the behaviour of
the spirit-lamp kettle and the subsequent scene at the pond had
considerably unnerved him. And the vagueness of his alarm added to its
terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations
its possibilities become practically limitless.
Crefton rose at his usual early hour the next morning, after one of the
least restful nights he had spent at the farm. His sharpened senses
quickly detected that subtle atmosphere of
things-being-not-altogether-well that hangs over a stricken household.
The cows had been milked, but they stood huddled about in the yard,
waiting impatiently to be driven out afield, and the poultry kept up an
importunate querulous reminder of deferred feeding-time; the yard pump,
which usually made discordant music at frequent intervals during the
early morning, was to-day ominously silent. In the house itself there
was a coming and going of scuttering footsteps, a rushing and dying
away of hurried voices, and long, uneasy stillnesses. Crefton finished
his dressing and made his way to the head of a narrow staircase. He
could hear a dull, complaining voice, a voice into which an awed hush
had crept, and recognized the speaker as Mrs. Spurfield.
"He'll go away, for sure," the voice was saying; "there are those as
runs away from one as soon as real misfortune shows itself."
Crefton felt that he probably was one of "those," and that there were
moments when it was advisable to be true to type.
He crept back to his room, collected and packed his few belongings,
placed the money due for his lodgings on a table, and made his way out
by a back door into the yard. A mob of poultry surged expectantly
towards him; shaking off their interested attentions he hurried along
under cover of cowstall, piggery, and hayricks till he reached the lane
at the back of the farm. A few minutes' walk, which only the burden of
his portmanteaux restrained from developing into an undisguised run,
brought him to a main road, where the early carrier soon overtook him
and sped him onward to the neighbouring town. At a bend of the road he
caught a last glimpse of the farm; the old gabled roofs and thatched
barns, the straggling orchard, and the medlar tree, with its wooden
seat, stood out with an almost spectral clearness in the early morning
light, and over it all brooded that air of magic possession which
Crefton had once mistaken for peace.
The bustle and roar of Paddington Station smote on his ears with a
welcome protective greeting.
"Very bad for our nerves, all this rush and hurry," said a
fellow-traveller; "give me the peace and quiet of the country."
Crefton mentally surrendered his share of the desired commodity. A
crowded, brilliantly over-lighted music-hall, where an exuberant
rendering of "1812" was being given by a strenuous orchestra, came
nearest to his ideal of a nerve sedative.