It was a lonely part of the country, far north, where the summer
nights are pale and light and scant of shade. This summer night there
was no moon, and yet it was not dark. For hours the flat, deprecating
earth had lain prone under a storm of wind and rain. Its patient
surface was drenched, blanched, smitten into blindness. The tumbled
waters of the Firth splashed on the edges of the plain, their wild
commotion dwarfed by the noise of the wind-driven showers, whose
gloomy drops tapped the waters into sullen acquiescence. Half a mile
inland the road to the north was laid. Clear and straight it ran, with
never a house or homestead to break it, viscous with clay here,
shining with quartz there, uncompromising, exact, like the lists of
old, dressed for a tourney. Its sides were bare, scantily garnished
with grass. This was nearly a hedgeless country. In places the
undeviating line of it passed through a little coppice or clump of
gnarled, ill-conditioned, nameless trees. They seemed to lean forward
vindictively on either side, snapping their horny fingers at each
other, waving their cantankerous branches as the gusts took them,
broke them, and whirled the fragments of their ruin far away and out
of ken, like a flapping, unruly kite which a child has allowed to pass
beyond his control. The broad white surface of the road was not
suffered to be blotted for a single moment. Nothing could rest for the
play of the intriguing air-currents, surging backwards and forwards,
blind, stupid and swelled with pride, till they had got completely out
of hand and defied the archers of the middle sky. They staggered
hither and thither like ineffectual giants; they buffeted all
impartially; they instigated the hapless branches at their mercy to
wild lashings of each other, to useless accesses of the spirit of
self-destruction. Bending slavishly under the heavy gusts, each shabby
blade of grass by the roadside rose again and was on the _qui vive_
after the rustling tyrant had passed.
It was then, in the succeeding moments of comparative peace, when the
directors of the passionate aerial revolt had managed to call their
panting rabble off for the time, that great perpendicular sheets of
rain, like stage films slung evenly from heavenly temples, descended
and began moving continuously sideways, like a wall, across the level
track. A sheet of whole water, blotting out the tangled borders of
herbage that grew sparsely round the heaps of stones with which the
margin was set at intervals, placed there ready for breaking. When the
slab of rain had moved on again, the broad road, shining out sturdily
with its embedded quartz and milky kneaded clay, lay clear once more.
Calm, ordered and tranquil in the midst of tumult and discord, it
pursued its appointed course, edging off from its evenly bevelled
sides the noisy moorland streams, that had come jostling each other in
their haste to reach it, only to be relegated, noisily complaining, to
the swollen, unrecognizable gutter.
At a certain point on the line of way, a tall, spare,
respectable-looking man in a well-fitting grey frock coat stood
waiting. The rain ran down the back of his coat collar, and dripped
off the rim of his tall hat. His attitude suggested some weary
foredone clerk waiting at the corner of the city street for the
omnibus that was to carry him home to his slippered comfort and sober
pipe of peace. He wore no muffler, but then it was summer--St. John’s
Eve. He leaned on an ivory-headed ebony stick of which he seemed fond,
and peered, not very eagerly, along the road, which now lay in
dazzling rain-washed clarity under the struggling moon. There was a
lull in the storm. He had no luggage, no umbrella, yet his grey coat
looked neat, and his hat shiny.
Far in the distance, from the south, a black clumsy object appeared,
labouring slowly along. It was a coach, of heavy and antique pattern.
As soon as he had sighted it, the passenger’s faint interest seemed
diminished. With a bored air of fulfilment, he dropped his eyes and
looked down disapprovingly at the clayey mud at his feet, although,
indeed, the sticky substance did not appear to have marred the
exquisite polish of his shoes. His palm settled composedly on the
ivory knob of his trusty stick, as though it were the hand of an old
friend.
With all the signs of difficult going, but no noise of straining or
grinding, the coach at last drew up in front of the expectant
passenger. He looked up quietly, and recognized it as the vehicle
wherein it was appointed that he should travel in this unsuitable
weather for a stage or two, maybe. All was correct, the coachman,
grave, business-like, headless as of usage, the horses long-tailed,
black, conventional.…
The door opened noiselessly, and the step was let down. The passenger
shook his head as he delicately put his foot on to it, and observed
for the benefit, doubtless, of the person or persons inside--
“I see old Joe on the box in his official trim. Rather unnecessary,
all this ceremony, I venture to think! A few yokels and old women to
impress, if indeed, any one not positively obliged is abroad on a
night like this! For form’s sake, I suppose!”
He took his seat next the window. There were four occupants of the
coach beside himself. They all nodded formally, but not unkindly. He
returned their salutations with old-fashioned courtesy, though
unacquainted seemingly with any of them.
Sitting next to him was a woman evidently of fashion. Her heavy and
valuable furs were negligently cast on one side, to show a plastron
covered with jewels. She wore at least two enamelled and
jewel-encrusted watches pinned to her bosom as a mark for thieves to
covet. It was foolish of her. So at least thought the man in the grey
frock coat. Her yellow wig was much awry. Her eyes were weak,
strained, and fearful, and she aided their vision with a diamond-beset
pince-nez. Now and again she glanced over her left shoulder as if in
some alarm, and at such times she always grasped her gold-net reticule
feverishly. She was obviously a rich woman in the world, a first-class
train-de-luxe passenger.
The woman opposite her belonged as unmistakably to the people. She was
hard-featured, worn with a life of sordid toil and calculation, but
withal stout and motherly, a figure to inspire the fullest confidence.
She wore a black bonnet with strings, and black silk gloves heavily
darned. Round her sunken white collar, a golden gleam of watch-chain
was now and then discernible.
At the other end of the coach, squeezed up into the corner where the
vacillating light of the lamp hung from the roof least penetrated, a
neat, sharp-featured man nestled and hid. His forehead retreated, and
his bowler hat was set unnecessarily far back, lending him an air of
folly and congenital weakness which his long, cold, clever nose could
not dissipate. He was white as old enamel.
But the man whom the gentleman in the frock coat took to among his
casual fellow-travellers was the one sitting directly opposite him, a
rough, hearty creature, who alone of all the taciturn coachful seemed
disposed to enter into a casual conversation, which might go some way
to enliven the dreariness entailed by this somewhat old-fashioned mode
of travelling. Gay talk might help to drown the dashing of the waters
of the Firth lying close on the right hand of the section of road they
were even now traversing, and the ugly roar of the wind and rain
against the windows. This--by comparison--cheerful fellow was dressed
like a working man, in a shabby suit of corduroys. He wore no collar,
but a twisted red cotton handkerchief was wound tightly round his
thick squat neck. His little mean eyes, swinish, but twinkling
good-humouredly, stared enviously at the neat gentleman’s stiff collar
and the delicate grey tones of his suiting. Crossing and uncrossing
his creasy legs, in the unusual effort of an attempt at conviviality,
the man in corduroys addressed the man in the frock coat awkwardly
enough, but still civilly.
“Well, mate! They’ve chosen a rare rough night to shift us on! Orders
from headquarters, I suppose? I’ve been here nigh on a year and never
set eyes on my boss!”
“We used to call him God the Father,” said the elder man slowly.… “But
whoever it is that orders our ways here, there is no earthly sense in
questioning His arrangements, we can only fall in with them. As you
admit, you are fairly new, and perhaps you do not as yet conceive
fully of the silent impelling force that sways us. It is the same in
the world we have left, only that there we were only concerned with
the titles and standing of our ‘boss,’ as you call Him, and obeyed His
laws not a whit. I must say I consider this particular system of soul
transference that we have to submit to, very unsettling and productive
of restlessness among us--a mere survival and tiresome superstition,
to my mind. It has one merit; one sees something of the under world,
travelling about as we do, and meeting chance, perhaps kindred spirits
on the road. One realizes, too, that Hades is not quite as grey, shall
I say, as it is painted! But perhaps,” he added, with a slight touch
of class hauteur, “you do not quite follow me?”
“Oh yes, Master, I do,” eagerly replied the fellow-traveller to whom
he chose to address his monologue. “Since I’ve been dead, I have
learned the meaning of many things. I turn up my nose at nothing these
days. I always neglected my schooling, but now I tell you I try to
make up for lost time. From a rough sort of fellow that I was, with
not an idea in my head beyond my beer and my prog, I have come to take
my part in the whole of knowledge. It was all mine before, so to
speak, but I didn’t trouble to put my hand out for it. Didn’t care,
didn’t listen to Miss that taught me, or to Parson, either. He had
some good ideas too, as I’ve come to know, though Vice isn’t Vice
exactly with us here, now, in a manner of speaking. If God Almighty
made us, why did He make us, even in parts, bad? That’s what I want to
know, and I’ll know that when I’ve been dead a bit longer. Why did He
give me rotten teeth so that I couldn’t chew properly and didn’t care
for my food and liked drink better? It’s dirt and digestion makes
drinking and devilry, I say.”
The smart woman interrupted him with a kind of languid eagerness,
exclaiming--
“I must say I agree with you. Since the pestle fell on my shoulder in
that lonely villa at Monte, I have realized what the dreadful gambling
fever may lead to. It had made those two who treated me so ill, quite
inhuman. They had become wild beasts. I ought never to have accepted
their treacherous invitation to luncheon, never tempted them with my
outrageous display of jewels! And look here, I was tarred with the
same stick, I gambled too----”
She rummaged in her reticule and fished out a ticket for the rooms at
Monte Carlo.
“I always call that the ticket for my execution. Though my
executioners were rather unnecessarily brutal. They will attain unto
this place more easily than I did. Hardly any pain. The hand of the
law is gentle, compared with the methods of----”
The man in the grey frock coat raised his finger warningly. “No names,
I beg. One of our conventions…!”
“Have a drop?” said the calm motherly woman to the excited fine lady.
“Your wound is recent, isn’t it? Yours was a very severe case! A
bloody murder, I call it, if ever there was one, and clumsy at that!
And you only passive, which is always so much harder, they say! I
can’t tell, for I was what you may call an active party. They don’t
seem to mind mixing, they that look after us here! They lump us all
together--travelling, at any rate! Though when I think of what I was
actually turned off for, well--the way I look at it, what I did was a
positive benefit to Society, and some sections of Society knew it,
too, and would have liked to preserve my life.”
“But what, Madam, if I may ask, was your little difficulty?”
“It is called, I believe, Baby Farming,” she replied off-handedly,
receiving her flask back from the smart woman and stowing it away in a
capacious pocket. As she spoke, a shudder like a transitory ripple on
a rain-swept stream passed over her hearers, with the exception of the
thin man in the far corner, who preserved his serenity. Raising his
sunken chin, he observed the last speaker with some slight show of
interest.
The man in grey apologized.
“Excuse us, Madam. A remnant of old-world squeamishness,
uncontrollable by us for the moment. Though perhaps, if you will, you
might a little dissipate our preconceived notions of your profession,
by explaining clearly your point of view.”
“Delighted, I’m sure,” she answered. “Funny, though, how seriously you
all take it, even here! The feeling against my profession seems
absurdly strong below as well as above. I was hooted as I left the
court, I recollect. It annoyed me then considerably. I thought that
those that hooted had more need to be grateful to me if all was known
and paid for. I saved their pockets for them and their lovely honour
too. They knew they owed all that to me. For the rest, they did not
care. They went on, bless ’em, raising up seed for me to mow down as
soon as its head came above ground, and welcome! Sly dogs, no thanks
from them! But those shivering, shrinking women that came to me, some
of them hardly out of their teens, some of them so delicate they had
no right to have a baby at all!--Ah, if only I hadn’t let myself take
their money it would have been a work of pure philanthropy. But I had
to live, then! Now that that tax has been taken off, one has time to
think it out all round. But Lord!--Society, to cry shame on me for it!
They might as well hang any other useful public servant, like dustmen,
rat-catchers, and such-like ridders of pests. Good old Herod, that I
used to hear about at school, knew what he was doing when he cleared
off all those useless Innocents! He was the first baby farmer, I
guess.”
“You take large ground, Madam,” said the man in the frock coat, a
trifle huffily.
“And I have the right,” said she, her large determined chin emerging
from its rolls of fat in her eagerness. “You men ought to know it, and
you do well enough, when you’re honest. I was only the ’scapegoat, and
took on me the little sins of the race. It’s an easy job enough, what
I did, but there’s few have the stomach for it, even then. You
couldn’t call it dirty work either. You just stand by and leave ’em
alone--to girn and bleat and squinny and die.”
“No blood, eh?” the man in the corner said suddenly. “I like blood.”
“What a fine night it has turned!” said the man in the grey frock
coat, raising the sash and putting his head out of the window.…
“Something rather uncanny, eh, about that man?” he remarked under his
breath, half to himself, half to the man in brown corduroys.
“Take your head in,” said the latter, almost affectionately, “or
you’ll be catching cold, and you’ve a nasty scar on your neck that I
could see as you leaned forward, and which you oughtn’t to go getting
the cold into.”
“Oh, that!” said the other complacently, sitting down again, but
averting his gaze carefully from the man in the corner, for whom he
seemed to feel a repulsion as marked as was his preference for his
cheerful _vis-à-vis_. “That! That’s actually the scar of the blow
that killed me. A fearful gash! He was a powerful man that dealt it.
He got me, of course, from behind. I never even saw him. I was drafted
off here at once, his hand had been so sure.” He felt nervously in his
pockets. “I have a foulard somewhere, but I am apt to mislay it.”
“You should do like me, have a good strong handkercher and knot it
round your neck firm. I’ve got a mark of sorts on my neck too, but it
isn’t an open wound--never was,” the bluff man sniggered. “It is sheer
vanity with me, but I don’t care to have it seen. It goes well all
round, mine does--done by a rope, eh!”
He paused and nodded slyly. “For killing a toff. Nice old gentleman he
seemed, too, but I hadn’t much time to look at him. Had to get to
work----”
He was rudely interrupted by a screech from the baby farmer.
“Lord!” she cried, “do I see another conveyance coming on this lonely
road? I do ’ope so. I’m one for seeing plenty of people. I always like
a crowd, and I must tell you, this sort of humdrum jogging along was
beginning to get on my nerves.”
They all jerked themselves round, and peered through the glass panes
behind them. The taciturn man alone reserved his attention.
Sure enough, a dark object, plainly outlined in the strong moonlight
which now lit up the heavens, where heavy masses of cloud had until
now obscured its effulgence, was plainly visible. It blotted the
ribbon of white that lay in front of them.… Nearer and nearer it came.
All heads were at the windows of the coach.… Now it was seen to be a
high-hung dog-cart, of the most modern pattern, drawn by a smart
little mettled pony, and containing two slight young girls.… The one
that drove held the ribbons in hands that were covered with white
dog-skin gloves, and which looked immense in the pallid moonshine.
“What an excitement!” said the stout woman. “We shall pass them. Some
member of one of the country families about here, I suppose.”
“I hope--for all things considering, I’m not a blood-thirsty man,” the
man in corduroys muttered anxiously under his breath, “that we’re not
a-going to give them a shock! Bound to, when we meet them plumb like
this! ’Orses can’t abide the sight of us, mostly, no more than they
could those nasty motors when they first came in. And we’re worse than
motors--they seem to smell us out at once for what we are!”
“If you do really think that pony is likely to swerve,” said the man
in the grey suit, anxiously, “would it be of any use our asking old
Diggory to drive more slowly and humour them?”
“Couldn’t go no slower than we are!” replied the man in corduroys.
“Besides, it’s not the pace that kills! I’ll bet you that pony’s all
of a sweat already!”
The dog-cart approached. The faces of the two young women were
discernible. They were white--blanched with fear, or it may have been
the effect of the strong moonlight. There was no doubt that they were
disturbed, and that the girl who was driving fully realized the
necessity of controlling the horse, whose nostrils were quivering, and
on whose sides foam was already appearing in white swathes.…
“It won’t pass us!” said the man in the corner, speaking suddenly. He
rubbed his hands slowly one over the other. “There will be blood!”
“For goodness’ sake stop gloating like that!” said the stout woman.
“It turns my stomach to hear you. Wherever can you have come from, I
wonder? ’Tisn’t manners.… I say, can’t we hail them?” she inquired of
the man in grey. “All give them one big shout?”
“They wouldn’t be able to hear us,” he replied, shaking his head
sadly. “You must not forget that we are ghosts. We are not really
here.”
“Ay, and that’s what the beasts know!” cried the man in corduroys. He
jumped about. “That ’oss won’t be able to stand it. The kid’ll not be
able to hold him in.…”
“They’re on us!” screamed the smart woman. “Oh, my God! Do we have to
sit still and see it?” She covered her eyes with her hand.
“Yes, Missus, I reckon you have, and what’s more, run away after like
any shoffer that’s killed his man and left him lying in the roadside.
Old Diggory’s got his orders.”
The snorting of the pony was now audible. The coachful of ghosts
distinctly saw the lather of foam dropping from its jaws. They were
able, some of them, to realize the agonized tension of one girl’s
hands, pulling for all she was worth, and the scared sideways twist of
her forcedly inactive companion. Alone the face of the yellow
carriage-lamp glared, immovable.…
Then it flew down, and was extinguished. There was a crash, a
convulsion--and the great road to the north lay clear again.
The Coach of Death rolled on remorselessly past a black heap that
filled the ditch on one side. It lay quite still, after that almost
human leap and heave.…
The smart woman fainted, or appeared to do so. The baby farmer sat
silent.
“It’s iniquitous!” exclaimed the man in grey, turning round from the
window--his eyes wet, “to leave them behind like that without a word
of inquiry, when it’s our conveyance has done all the mischief!”