is really a friend worth having, I do seriously advise you to keep an
eye on him just now. Writing letters upside-down is all very well,
and I shouldn’t be alarmed about that. Lots of people think they’ve
explained things in previous letters they never wrote. I don’t think
it matters who Snowdrop is, or what sort of children or animals he
chooses to be fond of. That’s all being eccentric in the good old
English fashion, like poetical tinkers and mad squires. You’re both of
you eccentric in that sort of way, and it’s one of the things I like
about you. But just because I naturally knock about more among the new
people, I see something of the new eccentricities. And believe me,
they’re not half so nice as the old ones. I’m a student of scientific
aviation, which is a new thing itself, and I like it. But there’s a
sort of spiritual aviation that I don’t like at all.”
“Sorry,” observed Crane. “Really no notion of what you’re talking
about.”
“Of course you haven’t,” answered Pierce with engaging candour; “that’s
another thing I like about you. But I don’t like the way your clerical
friend talks about new visions and larger religions and light and
liberty from the East. I’ve heard a good many people talk like that,
and they were mountebanks or the dupes of mountebanks. And I’ll tell
you another thing. It’s a long shot even with the long bow we used to
talk about. It’s a pretty wild guess even in this rather wild business.
But I have a creepy sort of feeling that if you went down to his house
and private parlour to see Snowdrop, you’d be surprised at what you
saw.”
“What should we see?” asked the Colonel, staring.
“You’d see nothing at all,” replied the young man.
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean,” replied Pierce, “that you’d find Mr. White talking to
somebody who didn’t seem to be there.”
* * * * *
Hilary Pierce, fired by his detective fever, made a good many more
inquiries about the Rev. Wilding White, both of his two old friends and
elsewhere.
One long legal conversation with Owen Hood did indeed put him in
possession of the legal outline of certain matters, which might be said
to throw a light on some parts of the strange letter, and which might
in time even be made to throw a light on the rest. White was the vicar
of a parish lying deep in the western parts of Somersetshire, where
the principal landowner was a certain Lord Arlington. And in this case
there had been a quarrel between the squire and the parson, of a more
revolutionary sort than is common in the case of parsons. The clergyman
intensely resented that irony or anomaly which has caused so much
discontent among tenants in Ireland and throughout the world; the fact
that improvements or constructive work actually done by the tenant
only pass into the possession of the landlord. He had considerably
improved a house that he himself rented from the squire, but in some
kind of crisis of defiance or renunciation, he had quitted this more
official residence bag and baggage, and built himself a sort of wooden
lodge or bungalow on a small hill or mound that rose amid woods on the
extreme edge of the same grounds. This quarrel about the claim of the
tenant to his own work was evidently the meaning of certain phrases in
the letter--such as the timber coming from the other end of the county,
the sort of work being a man’s own affair, and the general allusion
to somebody’s flunkeys or sycophants who attempted to boycott the
discontented tenant. But it was not quite clear whether the allusions
to a new arrangement, and how it worked, referred to the bungalow or to
the other and more elusive mystery of the presence of Snowdrop.
One phrase in the letter he found to have been repeated in many places
and to many persons without becoming altogether clear in the process.
It was the sentence that ran: “I was afraid at first it would really
be an encumbrance, as you know it’s always supposed to be.” Both
Colonel Crane and Owen Hood, and also several other persons whom he
met later in his investigations, were agreed in saying that Mr. White
had used some expression indicating that he had entangled himself with
something troublesome or at least useless; something that he did not
want. None of them could remember the exact words he had used; but all
could state in general terms that it referred to some sort of negative
nuisance or barren responsibility. This could hardly refer to Snowdrop,
of whom he always wrote in terms of tenderness as if she were a baby
or a kitten. It seemed hard to believe it could refer to the house
he had built entirely to suit himself. It seemed as if there must be
some third thing in his muddled existence, which loomed vaguely in the
background through the vapour of his confused correspondence.
Colonel Crane snapped his fingers with a mild irritation in trying
to recall a trifle. “He said it was a--you know, I’ve forgotten the
word--a botheration or embarrassment. But then he’s always in a state
of botheration and embarrassment. I didn’t tell you, by the way, that I
had a letter from him too. Came the day after I heard yours. Shorter,
and perhaps a little plainer.” And he handed the letter to Hood, who
read it out slowly:
“‘I never knew the old British populace, here in Avalon itself, could
be so broken down by squires and sneaking lawyers. Nobody dared help
me move my house again; said it was illegal and they were afraid
of the police. But Snowdrop helped, and we carted it all away in
two or three journeys; took it right clean off the old fool’s land
altogether this time. I fancy the old fool will have to admit there
are things in this world he wasn’t prepared to believe in.’”
“But look here,” began Hood as if impulsively, and then stopped and
spoke more slowly and carefully. “I don’t understand this; I think it’s
extremely odd. I don’t mean odd for an ordinary person, but odd for an
odd person; odd for this odd person. I know White better than either
of you can, and I can tell you that, though he tells a tale anyhow,
the tale is always true. He’s rather precise and pedantic when you
do come to the facts; these litigious quarrelsome people often are.
He would do extraordinary things, but he wouldn’t make them out more
extraordinary than they were. I mean he’s the sort of man who might
break all the squire’s windows, but he wouldn’t say he’d broken six
when he’d broken five. I’ve always found when I’d got to the meaning of
those mad letters that it was quite true. But how can this be true? How
could Snowdrop, whatever she is, have moved a whole house, or old White
either?”
“I suppose you know what I think,” said Pierce. “I told you that
Snowdrop, whatever else she is, is invisible. I’m certain your friend
has gone Spiritualist, and Snowdrop is the name of a spirit, or a
control, or whatever they call it. The spirit would say, of course,
that it was mere child’s play to throw the house from one end of the
county to the other. But if this unfortunate gentleman believes himself
to have been thrown, house and all, in that fashion, I’m very much
afraid he’s begun really to suffer from delusions.”
The faces of the two older men looked suddenly much older, perhaps for
the first time they looked old. The young man seeing their dolorous
expression was warmed and fired to speak quickly.
“Look here,” he said hastily, “I’ll go down there myself and find out
what I can for you. I’ll go this afternoon.”
“Train journey takes ages,” said the Colonel, shaking his head. “Other
end of nowhere. Told me yourself you had an appointment at the Air
Ministry to-morrow.”
“Be there in no time,” replied Pierce cheerfully. “I’ll fly down.”
And there was something in the lightness and youth of his vanishing
gesture that seemed really like Icarus spurning the earth, the first
man to mount upon wings.
Perhaps this literally flying figure shone the more vividly in their
memories because, when they saw it again, it was in a subtle sense
changed. When the other two next saw Hilary Pierce on the steps of
the Air Ministry, they were conscious that his manner was a little
quieter, but his wild eye rather wilder than usual. They adjourned to
a neighbouring restaurant and talked of trivialities while luncheon was
served; but the Colonel, who was a keen observer, was sure that Pierce
had suffered some sort of shock, or at least some sort of check. While
they were considering what to say Pierce himself said abruptly, staring
at a mustard-pot on the table:
“What do you think about spirits?”
“Never touch ’em,” said the Colonel. “Sound port never hurt anybody.”
“I mean the other sort,” said Pierce. “Things like ghosts and all that.”
“I don’t know,” said Owen Hood. “The Greek for it is agnosticism. The
Latin for it is ignorance. But have you really been dealing with ghosts
and spirits down at poor White’s parsonage?”
“I don’t know,” said Pierce gravely.
“You don’t mean you really think you saw something!” cried Hood sharply.
“There goes the agnostic!” said Pierce with a rather weary smile. “The
minute the agnostic hears a bit of real agnosticism he shrieks out that
it’s superstition. I say I don’t know whether it was a spirit. I also
say I don’t know what the devil else it was if it wasn’t. In plain
words, I went down to that place convinced that poor White had got
some sort of delusions. Now I wonder whether it’s I that have got the
delusions.”
He paused a moment and then went on in a more collected manner:
“But I’d better tell you all about it. To begin with, I don’t admit it
as an explanation, but it’s only fair to allow for it as a fact--that
all that part of the world seems to be full of that sort of thing.
You know how the glamour of Glastonbury lies over all that land and
the lost tomb of King Arthur and time when he shall return and the
prophecies of Merlin and all the rest. To begin with, the village
they call Ponder’s End ought to be called World’s End; it gives one
the impression of being somewhere west of the sunset. And then the
parsonage is quite a long way west of the parish, in large neglected
grounds fading into pathless woods and hills; I mean the old empty
rectory that our wild friend has evacuated. It stood there a cold
empty shell of flat classical architecture, as hollow as one of those
classical temples they used to stick up in country seats. But White
must have done some sort of parish work there, for I found a great
big empty shed in the grounds--that sort of thing that’s used for a
schoolroom or drill-hall or what not. But not a sign of him or his work
can be seen there now. I’ve said it’s a long way west of the village
that you come at last to the old house. Well, it’s a long way west of
that that you come to the new house--if you come to it at all. As for
me, I came and I came not, as in some old riddle of Merlin. But you
shall hear.
“I had come down about sunset in a meadow near Ponder’s End, and I did
the rest of the journey on foot, for I wanted to see things in detail.
This was already difficult as it was growing dusk, and I began to fear
I should find nothing of importance before nightfall. I had asked a
question or two of the villagers about the vicar and his new self-made
vicarage. They were very reticent about the former, but I gathered that
the latter stood at the extreme edge of his original grounds on a hill
rising out of a thicket of wood. In the increasing darkness it was
difficult to find the place, but I came on it at last, in a place where
a fringe of forest ran along under the low brows of a line of rugged
cliffs, such as sometimes break the curves of great downlands. I seemed
to be descending a thickly wooded slope, with a sea of tree-tops below
me, and out of that sea, like an island, rose the dome of the isolated
hill; and I could faintly see the building on it, darker against the
dark-clouded sky. For a moment a faint line of light from the masked
moon showed me a little more of its shape, which seemed singularly
simple and airy in its design. Against that pallid gleam stood four
strong columns, with the bulk of building apparently lifted above them;
but it produced a queer impression, as if this Christian priest had
built for his final home a heathen temple of the winds. As I leaned
forward, peering at it, I overbalanced myself and slid rapidly down
the steep thicket into the darkest entrails of the wood. From there I
could see nothing of the pillared house or temple or whatever it was on
the hill; the thick woods had swallowed me up literally like a sea, and
I groped for what must have been nearly half an hour amid tangled roots
and low branches, in that double darkness of night and shadow, before
I found my feet slipping on the opposite slope and began to climb
the hill on the top of which the temple stood. It was very difficult
climbing, of course, through a network of briars and branching trees,
and it was some little time afterwards that I burst through the last
screen of foliage and came out upon the bare hill-top.
“Yes; upon the bare hill-top. Rank grasses grew on it, and the wind
blew them about like hair on a head; but for any trace of anything
else, that green dome was as bare as a skull. There was no sign or
shadow of the building I had seen there a little time before; it had
vanished like a fairy palace. A broad track broken through the woods
seemed to lead up to it, so far as I could make out in that obscurity;
but there was no trace of the building to which it led. And when I saw
that, I gave up. Something told me I should find out no more; perhaps
I had some shaken sense that there were things past finding out. I
retraced my steps, descending the hill as best I might; but when I was
again swallowed up in that leafy sea, something happened that, for an
instant, turned me cold as stone. An unearthly noise, like long hooting
laughter, rang out in vast volume over the forest and rose to the
stars. It was no noise to which I could put a name; it was certainly no
noise I had ever heard before; it bore some sort of resemblance to the
neighing of a horse immensely magnified; yet it might have been half
human, and there was triumph in it and derision.
“I will tell you one more thing I learnt before I left those parts. I
left them at once, partly because I really had an appointment early
this morning, as I told you; partly also, I think, because I felt you
had the right to know at once what sort of things were to be faced. I
was alarmed when I thought your friend was tormented with imaginary
bogies; I am not less alarmed if he had got mixed up with real ones.
Anyhow, before I left that village I had told one man what I had seen,
and he told me he had seen it also. But he had seen it actually moving,
in dusk turning to dark; the whole great house, with its high columns,
moving across the fields like a great ship sailing on land.”
Owen Hood sat up suddenly, with awakened eyes, and struck the table.
“Look here,” he cried, with a new ring in his voice, “we must all go
down to Ponder’s End and bring this business to a finish.”
“Do you think you will bring it to a finish?” asked Pierce gloomily;
“or can you tell what sort of a finish?”
“Yes,” replied Hood resolutely. “I think I can finish it, and I think
I know what the finish will be. The truth is, my friend, I think I
understand the whole thing now. And as I told you before, Wilding
White, so far from being deluded by imaginary bogies, is a gentleman
very exact in his statements. In this matter he has been very exact.
That has been the whole mystery about him--that he has been very much
too exact.”
“What on earth do you mean by that?” asked Pierce.
“I mean,” said the lawyer, “that I have suddenly remembered the
phrase he used. It was very exact; it was dull, literal truth. But I
can be exact, too, at times, and just now I should like to look at a
time-table.”
* * * * *
They found the village of Ponder’s End in a condition as comically
incongruous as could well be with the mystical experiences of Mr.
Hilary Pierce. When we talk of such places as sleepy, we forget that
they are very wide-awake about their own affairs, and especially on
their own festive occasions. Piccadilly Circus looks much the same
on Christmas Day or any other; but the marketplace of a country town
or village looks very different on the day of a fair or bazaar.
And Hilary Pierce, who had first come down there to find in a wood
at midnight the riddle that he thought worthy of Merlin, came down
the second time to find himself plunged suddenly into the middle of
the bustling bathos of a jumble sale. It was one of those bazaars to
provide bargains for the poor, at which all sorts of odds and ends are
sold off. But it was treated as a sort of fête, and highly-coloured
posters and handbills announced its nature on every side. The bustle
seemed to be dominated by a tall dark lady of distinguished appearance,
whom Owen Hood, rather to the surprise of his companions, hailed as an
old acquaintance and managed to draw aside for a private talk. She had
appeared to have her hands full at the bazaar; nevertheless, her talk
with Hood was rather a long one. Pierce only heard the last words of it:
“Oh, he promised he was bringing something for the sale. I assure you
he always keeps his word.”
All Hood said when he rejoined his companion was: “That’s the lady
White was going to marry. I think I know now why things went wrong, and
I hope they may go right. But there seems to be another bother. You see
that clump of clod-hopping policemen over there, inspector and all. It
seems they’re waiting for White. Say he’s broken the law in taking his
house off the land, and that he has always eluded them. I hope there
won’t be a scene when he turns up.”
If this was Mr. Hood’s hope, it was ill-founded and destined to
disappointment. A scene was but a faint description of what was in
store for that hopeful gentleman. Within ten minutes the greater part
of the company were in a world in which the sun and moon seemed to have
turned topsy-turvy and the last limit of unlikelihood had been reached.
Pierce had imagined he was very near that limit of the imagination when
he groped after the vanishing temple in the dark forest. But nothing he
had seen in that darkness and solitude was so fantastic as what he saw
next in broad daylight in a crowd.
At one extreme edge of the crowd there was a sudden movement--a wave
of recoil and wordless cries. The next moment it had swept like a wind
over the whole populace, and hundreds of faces were turned in one
direction--in the direction of the road that descended by a gradual
slope towards the woods that fringed the vicarage grounds. Out of those
woods at the foot of the hill had emerged something that might from its
size have been a large light grey omnibus. But it was not an omnibus.
It scaled the slope so swiftly, in great strides, that it became
instantly self-evident what it was. It was an elephant, whose monstrous
form was moulded in grey and silver in the sunlight, and on whose back
sat very erect a vigorous middle-aged gentleman in black clerical
attire, with blanched hair and a rather fierce aquiline profile that
glanced proudly to left and right.
The police inspector managed to make one step forward, and then stood
like a statue. The vicar, on his vast steed, sailed into the middle of
the marketplace as serenely as if he had been the master of a familiar
circus. He pointed in triumph to one of the red and blue posters on the
wall, which bore the traditional title of “White Elephant Sale.”
“You see I’ve kept my word,” he said to the lady in a loud, cheerful
voice. “I’ve brought a white elephant.”
The next moment he had waved his hand hilariously in another direction,
having caught sight of Hood and Crane in the crowd.
“Splendid of you to come!” he called out. “Only you were in the secret.
I told you I’d got a white elephant.”
“So he did,” said Hood; “only it never occurred to us that the elephant
was an elephant and not a metaphor. So that’s what he meant by Asiatic
atmosphere and snow and mountains. And that’s what the big shed was
really for.”
“Look here,” said the inspector, recovering from his astonishment and
breaking in on these felicitations. “I don’t understand all these
games, but it’s my business to ask a few questions. Sorry to say it,
sir, but you’ve ignored our notifications and evaded our attempts
to----”
“Have I?” inquired Mr. White brightly. “Have I really evaded you? Well,
well, perhaps I have. An elephant is such a standing temptation to
evasion, to evanescence, to fading away like a dewdrop. Like a snowdrop
perhaps would be more appropriate. Come on, Snowdrop.”
The last word came smartly, and he gave a smart smack to the huge
head of the pachyderm. Before the inspector could move or anyone had
realized what had happened, the whole big bulk had pitched forward with
a plunge like a cataract and went in great whirling strides, the crowd
scattering before it. The police had not come provided for elephants,
which are rare in those parts. Even if they had overtaken it on
bicycles, they would have found it difficult to climb it on bicycles.
Even if they had had revolvers, they had omitted to conceal about their
persons anything in the way of big-game rifles. The white monster
vanished rapidly up the long white road, so rapidly that when it
dwindled to a small object and disappeared, people could hardly believe
that such a prodigy had ever been present, or that their eyes had not
been momentarily bewitched. Only, as it disappeared in the distance,
Pierce heard once more the high nasal trumpeting noise which, in the
eclipse of night, had seemed to fill the forest with fear.
It was at a subsequent meeting in London that Crane and Pierce had an
opportunity of learning, more or less, the true story of the affair, in
the form of another letter from the parson to the lawyer.
“Now that we know the secret,” said Pierce cheerfully, “even his
account of it ought to be quite clear.”
“Quite clear,” replied Hood calmly. “His letter begins, ‘Dear Owen, I
am really tremendously grateful in spite of all I used to say against
leather and about horse-hair.’”
“About what?” asked Pierce.
“Horse-hair,” said Hood with severity. “He goes on, ‘The truth is they
thought they could do what they liked with me because I always boasted
that I hadn’t got one, and never wanted to have one; but when they
found I had got one, and I must really say a jolly good one, of course
it was all quite different.’”
Pierce had his elbows on the table, and his fingers thrust up into his
loose yellow hair. He had rather the appearance of holding his head on.
He was muttering to himself very softly, like a schoolboy learning a
lesson.
“He had got one, but he didn’t want one, and he hadn’t got one and he
had a jolly good one.”
“One what?” asked Crane irritably. “Seems like a missing word
competition.”
“I’ve got the prize,” observed Hood placidly. “The missing word is
‘solicitor.’ What he means is that the police took liberties with him
because they knew he would not have a lawyer. And he is perfectly
right; for when I took the matter up on his behalf, I soon found that
they had put themselves on the wrong side of the law at least as much
as he had. In short, I was able to extricate him from this police
business; hence his hearty if not lucid gratitude. But he goes on to
talk about something rather more personal; and I think it really has
been a rather interesting case, if he does not exactly shine as a
narrator of it. As I dare say you noticed, I did know something of the
lady whom our eccentric friend went courting years ago, rather in the
spirit of Sir Roger de Coverley when he went courting the widow. She is
a Miss Julia Drake, daughter of a country gentleman. I hope you won’t
misunderstand me if I say that she is a rather formidable lady. She is
really a thoroughly good sort; but that air of the black-browed Juno
she has about her does correspond to some real qualities. She is one
of those people who can manage big enterprises, and the bigger they
are the happier she is. When that sort of force functions within the
limits of a village or a small valley, the impact is sometimes rather
overpowering. You saw her managing the White Elephant Sale at Ponder’s
End. Well, if it had been literally an army of wild elephants, it
would hardly have been on too large a scale for her tastes. In that
sense, I may say that our friend’s white elephant was not so much of
a white elephant. I mean that in that sense it was not so much of an
irrelevancy and hardly even a surprise. But in another way, it was a
very great relief.”
“You’re getting nearly as obscure as he is,” remonstrated Pierce. “What
is all this mysterious introduction leading up to? What do you mean?”