they sounded rather in the tradition, and so I looked up the history
of Duncaster and was unexpectedly fortunate; for it is mentioned in
a work, which, for the most part, is deservedly forgotten. _The
Memoirs of Simon Tylor_, a peculiarly dull dog. I have them here,” he
continued, walking over to a shelf and taking down a bulky volume.
“In the year 1839 Simon took a walking tour through Norfolk and arrived
at Duncaster on September 10th. He liked the look of it, and decided to
spend a couple of days there at the inn, ‘The Sleeping Sentinel.’”
“It is there still,” said Mr. Baxter.
“All this,” went on Mr. Markes, “is described at vast and damnable
length, but his adventure, which occurred on the second evening of his
stay, is much more crisply done. I will read it to you:
“‘I spent a pleasing and invigorating morning wandering over the wild
expanse of moor and “dunes,” as they call the great sand mounds; and
afterwards dined, rested and had some talk with my good host of the
inn. Late in the afternoon I decided to make further exploration of the
neighbourhood, and, noticing a fine wood of tall trees some distance
away across the moor, I remarked to my host that I proposed to visit
it. Greatly to my surprise he strongly opposed my doing so, but when
I asked him for what reason, he returned me evasive replies--“No one
wanders there after nightfall,” he said, “It has a bad repute.”
“‘On account of robbers?’ I asked. And though he replied with a short
laugh that that was so, I did not believe it was the thought in his
mind. To satisfy him, I declared I would but walk towards it, a promise
I had better have kept.
“‘So I wandered out as the light was fading, and drew near to the wood.
Then I put it to myself that such village gossip was in most cases but
idle tradition inscribed in the long and sparsely furnished memories
of country folk. And this decision prevailing, I entered the wood,
following a rough pathway. And then I had reason to doubt my host’s
word, for instead of it being shunned by the local folk it seemed that
the wood did house quite a company. The light being low and the trees
growing close, I failed clearly to distinguish my companions, but only,
as it were, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed them many times.
“Lovers,” thought I. After I had traversed some two hundred paces I
noted some little way in front of me a low mound with a single fine
tree at its back. I was just fancying that I would go so far and then
return when a movement in the gloom caught my eye, and at the same
instant I perceived a very vile and curious stench. Something seemed
to be reclining on the mound, a beast of some sort, and slowly gaining
its feet. And then I knew the beginning of fear. This thing seemed to
rise and rise till it towered above the tree, and then it couched its
head as for a spring. I have no wish to see its like again. Seized with
a great loathing and horror, I ran back along the path, and as I ran it
seemed that many were running beside me and closing in upon me. I felt
the Thing was close beside me, but I dared not turn to look. Just as my
breath was leaving me I found myself at the edge of the wood, and then
something seemed to touch me, and I screamed and swooned.
“‘When I regained my senses I found I was prone on the ground and my
host and some others were standing round me conversing in low tones.
They helped me back to the Inn, no one saying a word. I left early the
next morning, that stench still lingering in my nostrils and the host
seeming to avoid talk with me. All this is the truth as I have set it
down.’
“And that’s what happened to Simon,” said Markes.
“A curious story,” said Mr. Baxter.
“Far more curious than uncommon. I could find you a dozen almost
identical experiences. Almost certainly the work of our friends the
Druids, whoever they were! A mound and an oak--such places are death
traps. Not all the time; the peril is periodic, why, we don’t know.
But our friend Simon was very lucky to be able to leave ‘early next
morning,’ though he didn’t escape altogether. The rest of his book
reads like a coda to this adventure. Bad dreams, depression and always
that smell in his nose. He died within a year or two. And now tell
me exactly what happened at Duncaster, for I gather it is still a
disturbed area.”
So Mr. Baxter told him the curious events connected with the new
seventeenth.
A PEG ON WHICH TO HANG----
A PEG ON WHICH TO HANG----
Before telling Mr. James Partridge’s displeasing experience at
the Beach Hotel, Littleford, it may be as well to establish that
gentleman’s credentials by briefly describing him. He is a writer
by habit and inclination, though being the fruit of rich but honest
parents, he is not in the paralysing position of being compelled to
rely on his pen, ink and paper for his means of subsistence. He has
made a nice little reputation as an essayist of the lightest sort. He
has examined the surface of things, of persons and of life in general
with a tolerant, mildly cynical assiduity. Below that surface he very
sensibly refrains from looking. It is not in his character. He takes
some homely and familiar topic--let us say, a Number 11e Omnibus--as
his text, and manages to coax from a ruminating survey of its cargo
and its route two thousand bland and gently ironic words of amusement
without pedantry, for which he receives 25 guineas from a high-brow
weekly.
Though on the whole a modest man, he believes in his heart of hearts
that he does this sort of thing better than “Y.Y.”--an opinion not
widely shared, and least of all by Mr. Robert Lynd.
Being a journalist, you will naturally suspect that he invented this
narrative and foisted it on his credulous acquaintance. If so, you will
do him a serious injustice, for he has no gift for fiction and, indeed,
this is not the type of narrative he would care to pursue if he had.
You may take it for granted then that his version of what happened
on the night of March 23rd, 1924, at the Royal Hotel, Littleford, is
plain, untouched-up fact.
If you would like to know some details of his appearance, he is
thin, wiry, but lacking muscle, a mild edition of Sherlock Holmes,
facially--a bit dusty and musty and bachelory, a bit donnish and
British and formidable--a man’s man, but not every man’s man. People
who like him like him very much--that’s all he cares about.
He found himself at the Royal Hotel, Littleford, on March 23rd, 1924,
on this account. He has three firm and excellent friends about his own
age--which is 47--like himself all keen golfers. Their handicaps range
between nine and fourteen--almost certainly the most satisfactory range
of all; for those embraced within it are not unduly cast down by the
undesired uprising of playful divots, yet they can derive exquisite
satisfaction from the production of a Stout Blow, and are sufficiently
competent to perpetrate several in the course of a round--humble folk
who realise that, if they will never be mistaken for Bobby Jones, it is
hardly possible that they will be confused with Harry Tate. Mr. George
Dunbar, K.C., masterful, hirsute, with a hypnotic power over juries,
Mr. William Cranmer, who knows more about old books than most people,
Mr. Alexander Frith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at an Ancient
Foundation and a sceptic of sceptics, made up the four who journeyed
down to Littleford on this occasion.
It had been their cherished custom for many years to leave their
faithful readers, their burglarious clientèle, their candidates for
firsts in Greats, their cultured bibliophiles to their own disconsolate
devices at seasons of the year convenient to them all, and to forgather
at certain famous golf courses; and they had chosen that admirable
links, Littleford, for their spring pilgrimage in 1924. They intended
to stay a week, and had secured their rooms prudently in advance.
They travelled down together in Mr. Partridge’s car, and on entering
the Royal Hotel were met by a flaccid specimen of the genus Small
Hotel-keeper, who was chafing his palms in a deprecating manner.
Mr. Partridge addressed him sternly. “You have four rooms engaged for
us in my name, which is Partridge.”
“I regret to say, sir, only three,” replied the flaccid specimen, “but
I have secured an excellent room at a boarding-establishment close at
hand,” and he frotted his clammy hands again.
If Mr. Partridge had a failing it was a tendency to be choleric at
times--and this was one of them. As the organiser of the party it
would be his painful duty to sample the boarding-establishment, and,
cherishing a peculiar loathing for this type of accommodation, he
wasn’t having any.
“Look here,” he said with truculence, “I have your letter stating you
had reserved _four_ rooms, and I must ask you to keep to your word.”
Something in Mr. Partridge’s demeanour daunted the specimen, and he
shuffled off down the passage to his office.
Mr. Cranmer, who is incorrigibly a man of peace, began suggesting he
was rather partial to boarding-houses and wouldn’t mind a bit, but Mr.
Partridge waved him aside and strode menacingly down the passage after
the hotel-keeper, who went through the outer office into a small room
at the back, which Mr. Partridge saw was already occupied by a female
of the Buxom Brighton Barmaid type, with whom the landlord began a
colloquy, in a whisper sufficiently audible to allow Mr. Partridge to
catch a sentence here and there.
“Well, chance it,” murmured the female.
“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
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.