I
I am not a susceptible woman. I am objective rather than subjective,
and a fairly full experience of life has taught me that most of my
impressions are from within out rather than the other way about. For
instance, obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy figure
on my right, just beyond the field of vision, was later exposed as
the result of a defect in my glasses. In the same way Maggie, my old
servant, was during one entire summer haunted by church-bells and
considered it a personal summons to eternity until it was shown to be in
her inner ear.
Yet the Benton house undeniably made me uncomfortable. Perhaps it was
because it had remained unchanged for so long. The old horsehair chairs,
with their shiny mahogany frames, showed by the slightly worn places
in the carpet before them that they had not deviated an inch from their
position for many years. The carpets--carpets that reached to the very
baseboards and gave under one's feet with the yielding of heavy padding
beneath--were bright under beds and wardrobes, while in the centers of
the rooms they had faded into the softness of old tapestry.
Maggie, I remember, on our arrival moved a chair from the wall in the
library, and immediately put it back again, with a glance to see if I
had observed her.
"It's nice and clean, Miss Agnes," she said. "A--I kind of feel that a
little dirt would make it more homelike."
"I'm sure I don't see why," I replied, rather sharply, "I've lived in a
tolerably clean house most of my life."
Maggie, however, was digging a heel into the padded carpet. She had
chosen a sunny place for the experiment, and a small cloud of dust rose
like smoke.
"Germs!" she said. "Just what I expected. We'd better bring the vacuum
cleaner out from the city, Miss Agnes. Them carpets haven't been lifted
for years."
But I paid little attention to her. To Maggie any particle of matter not
otherwise classified is a germ, and the prospect of finding dust in that
immaculate house was sufficiently thrilling to tide over the strangeness
of our first few hours in it.
Once a year I rent a house in the country. When my nephew and niece were
children, I did it to take them out of the city during school vacations.
Later, when they grew up, it was to be near the country club. But now,
with the children married and new families coming along, we were more
concerned with dairies than with clubs, and I inquired more carefully
about the neighborhood cows than about the neighborhood golf-links. I
had really selected the house at Benton Station because there was a most
alluring pasture, with a brook running through it, and violets over the
banks. It seemed to me that no cow with a conscience could live in those
surroundings and give colicky milk.
Then, the house was cheap. Unbelievably cheap. I suspected sewerage
at once, but it seemed to be in the best possible order. Indeed, new
plumbing had been put in, and extra bathrooms installed. As old Miss
Emily Benton lived there alone, with only an old couple to look after
her, it looked odd to see three bathrooms, two of them new, on the
second floor. Big tubs and showers, although little old Miss Emily could
have bathed in the washbowl and have had room to spare.
I faced the agent downstairs in the parlor, after I had gone over the
house. Miss Emily Benton had not appeared and I took it she was away.
"Why all those bathrooms?" I demanded. "Does she use them in rotation?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"She wished to rent the house, Miss Blakiston. The old-fashioned
plumbing--"
"But she is giving the house away," I exclaimed. "Those bathrooms have
cost much more than she will get out of it. You and I know that the
price is absurd."
He smiled at that. "If you wish to pay more, you may, of course. She is
a fine woman, Miss Blakiston, but you can never measure a Benton with
any yard-stick but their own. The truth is that she wants the house off
her hands this summer. I don't know why. It's a good house, and she has
lived here all her life. But my instructions, I'll tell you frankly, are
to rent it, if I have to give it away."
With which absurd sentence we went out the front door, and I saw the
pasture, which decided me.
In view of the fact that I had taken the house for my grandnieces and
nephews, it was annoying to find, by the end of June, that I should have
to live in it by myself. Willie's boy was having his teeth straightened,
and must make daily visits to the dentist, and Jack went to California
and took Gertrude and the boys with him.
The first curious thing happened then. I wrote to the agent, saying that
I would not use the house, but enclosing a check for its rental, as I
had signed the lease. To my surprise, I received in reply a note from
Miss Emily herself, very carefully written on thin note-paper.
Although it was years since I had seen her, the exquisite neatness of
the letter, its careful paragraphing, its margins so accurate as to give
the impression that she had drawn a faint margin line with a lead
pencil and then erased it--all these were as indicative of Emily Benton
as--well, as the letter was not.
As well as I can explain it, the letter was impulsive, almost urgent.
Yet the little old lady I remembered was neither of these things. "My
dear Miss Blakiston," she wrote. "But I do hope you will use the house.
It was because I wanted to be certain that it would be occupied this
summer that I asked so low a rent for it.
"You may call it a whim if you like, but there are reasons why I wish
the house to have a summer tenant. It has, for one thing, never been
empty since it was built. It was my father's pride, and his father's
before him, that the doors were never locked, even at night. Of course
I can not ask a tenant to continue this old custom, but I can ask you to
reconsider your decision.
"Will you forgive me for saying that you are so exactly the person I
should like to see in the house that I feel I can not give you up? So
strongly do I feel this that I would, if I dared, enclose your check and
beg you to use the house rent free. Faithfully yours, Emily Benton."
Gracefully worded and carefully written as the letter was, I seemed to
feel behind it some stress of feeling, an excitement perhaps, totally
out of proportion to its contents. Years before I had met Miss Emily,
even then a frail little old lady, her small figure stiffly erect, her
eyes cold, her whole bearing one of reserve. The Bentons, for all their
open doors, were known in that part of the country as "proud." I can
remember, too, how when I was a young girl my mother had regarded the
rare invitations to have tea and tiny cakes in the Benton parlor as
commands, no less, and had taken the long carriage-ride from the city
with complacency. And now Miss Emily, last of the family, had begged me
to take the house.
In the end, as has been shown, I agreed. The glamor of the past had
perhaps something to do with it. But I have come to a time of life when,
failing intimate interests of my own, my neighbors' interests are mine
by adoption. To be frank, I came because I was curious. Why, aside from
a money consideration, was the Benton house to be occupied by an alien
household? It was opposed to every tradition of the family as I had
heard of it.
I knew something of the family history: the Reverend Thaddeus Benton,
rector of Saint Bartholomew, who had forsaken the frame rectory near the
church to build himself the substantial home now being offered me; Miss
Emily, his daughter, who must now, I computed, be nearly seventy; and a
son whom I recalled faintly as hardly bearing out the Benton traditions
of solidity and rectitude.
The Reverend Mr. Benton, I recalled, had taken the stand that his house
was his own, and having moved his family into it, had thereafter, save
on great occasions, received the congregation individually or en masse,
in his study at the church. A patriarchal old man, benevolent yet
austere, who once, according to a story I had heard in my girlhood, had
horsewhipped one of his vestrymen for trifling with the affections of a
young married woman in the village!
There was a gap of thirty years in my knowledge of the family. I had,
indeed, forgotten its very existence, when by the chance of a newspaper
advertisement I found myself involved vitally in its affairs, playing
providence, indeed, and both fearing and hating my role. Looking back,
there are a number of things that appear rather curious. Why, for
instance, did Maggie, my old servant, develop such a dislike for the
place? It had nothing to do with the house. She had not seen it when she
first refused to go. But her reluctance was evident from the beginning.
"I've just got a feeling about it, Miss Agnes," she said. "I can't
explain it, any more than I can explain a cold in the head. But it's
there."
At first I was inclined to blame Maggie's "feeling" on her knowledge
that the house was cheap. She knew it, as she has, I am sure, read all
my letters for years. She has a distrust of a bargain. But later I came
to believe that there was something more to Maggie's distrust--as though
perhaps a wave of uneasiness, spreading from some unknown source, had
engulfed her.
Indeed, looking back over the two months I spent in the Benton house, I
am inclined to go even further. If thoughts carry, as I am sure they do,
then emotions carry. Fear, hope, courage, despair--if the intention of
writing a letter to an absent friend can spread itself half-way across
the earth, so that as you write the friend writes also, and your letters
cross, how much more should big emotions carry? I have had sweep over
me such waves of gladness, such gusts of despair, as have shaken me.
Yet with no cause for either. They are gone in a moment. Just for an
instant, I have caught and made my own another's joy or grief.
The only inexplicable part of this narrative is that Maggie, neither a
psychic nor a sensitive type, caught the terror, as I came to call it,
before I did. Perhaps it may be explainable by the fact that her mental
processes are comparatively simple, her mind an empty slate that shows
every mark made on it.
In a way, this is a study in fear.
Maggie's resentment continued through my decision to use the house,
through the packing, through the very moving itself. It took the form
of a sort of watchful waiting, although at the time we neither of
us realized it, and of dislike of the house and its surroundings. It
extended itself to the very garden, where she gathered flowers for the
table with a ruthlessness that was almost vicious. And, as July went
on, and Miss Emily made her occasional visits, as tiny, as delicate as
herself, I had a curious conclusion forced on me. Miss Emily returned
her antagonism. I was slow to credit it. What secret and even
unacknowledged opposition could there be between my downright Maggie and
this little old aristocrat with her frail hands and the soft rustle of
silk about her?
In Miss Emily, it took the form of--how strange a word to use in
connection with her!--of furtive watchfulness. I felt that Maggie's
entrance, with nothing more momentous than the tea-tray, set her upright
in her chair, put an edge to her soft voice, and absorbed her. She was
still attentive to what I said. She agreed or dissented. But back of it
all, with her eyes on me, she was watching Maggie.
With Maggie the antagonism took no such subtle form. It showed itself in
the second best instead of the best china, and a tendency to weak tea,
when Miss Emily took hers very strong. And such was the effect of their
mutual watchfulness and suspicion, such perhaps was the influence of the
staid old house on me, after a time even that fact, of the strong tea,
began to strike me as incongruous. Miss Emily was so consistent, so
consistently frail and dainty and so--well, unspotted seems to be the
word--and so gentle, yet as time went on I began to feel that she hated
Maggie with a real hatred. And there was the strong tea!
Indeed, it was not quite normal, nor was I. For by that time--the middle
of July it was before I figured out as much as I have set down in
five minutes--by that time I was not certain about the house. It was
difficult to say just what I felt about the house. Willie, who came down
over a Sunday early in the summer, possibly voiced it when he came down
to his breakfast there.
"How did you sleep?" I asked.
"Not very well." He picked up his coffee-cup, and smiled over it rather
sheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to thinking about things--the
furniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many people have sat in
the chairs and seen themselves in the mirror and died in the bed, and so
on."
Maggie, who was bringing in the toast, gave a sort of low moan, which
she turned into a cough.
"There have been twenty-three deaths in it in the last forty years, Mr.
Willie," she volunteered. "That's according to the gardener. And more
than half died in that room of yours."
"Put down that toast before you drop it, Maggie," I said. "You're
shaking all over. And go out and shut the door."
"Very well," she said, with a meekness behind which she was both
indignant and frightened. "But there is one word I might mention before
I go, and that is--cats!"
"Cats!" said Willie, as she slammed the door.
"I think it is only one cat," I observed mildly. "It belongs to
Miss Emily, I fancy. It manages to be in a lot of places nearly
simultaneously, and Maggie swears it is a dozen."
Willie is not subtle. He is a practical young man with a growing family,
and a tendency the last year or two to flesh. But he ate his breakfast
thoughtfully.
"Don't you think it's rather isolated?" he asked finally. "Just you
three women here?" I had taken Delia, the cook, along.
"We have a telephone," I said, rather loftily. "Although--" I checked
myself. Maggie, I felt sure, was listening in the pantry, and I intended
to give her wild fancies no encouragement. To utter a thing is, to
Maggie, to give it life. By the mere use of the spoken word it ceases to
be supposition and becomes fact.
As a matter of fact, my uneasiness about the house resolved itself into
an uneasiness about the telephone. It seems less absurd now than it did
then. But I remember what Willie said about it that morning on our way
to the church.
"It rings at night, Willie," I said. "And when I go there is no one
there."
"So do all telephones," he replied briskly. "It's their greatest
weakness."
"Once or twice we have found the thing on the floor in the morning. It
couldn't blow over or knock itself down."
"Probably the cat," he said, with the patient air of a man arguing
with an unreasonable woman. "Of course," he added--we were passing
the churchyard then, dominated by what the village called the Benton
"mosolem"--"there's a chance that those dead-and-gone Bentons resent
anything as modern as a telephone. It might be interesting to see what
they would do to a victrola."
"I'm going to tell you something, Willie," I said. "I am afraid of the
telephone."
He was completely incredulous. I felt rather ridiculous, standing there
in the sunlight of that summer Sabbath and making my confession. But I
did it.
"I am afraid of it," I repeated. "I'm desperately sure you will never
understand. Because I don't. I can hardly force myself to go to it. I
hate the very back corner of the hall where it stands, I--"
I saw his expression then, and I stopped, furious with myself. Why had
I said it? But more important still, why did I feel it? I had not put it
into words before, I had not expected to say it then. But the moment I
said it I knew it was true. I had developed an idee fixe.
"I have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, rather
feebly. "It's on my nerves, I think."
"I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice.
"It doesn't sound like you. A telephone!" But just at the church door he
stopped me, a hand on my arm.
"Look here," he said, "don't you suppose it's because you're so
dependent on the telephone? You know that if anything goes wrong with
it, you're cut off, in a way. And there's another point--you get all
your news over it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I think, in finding
the words he wanted. "It's--it's vital," he said. "So you attach too
much importance to it, and it gets to be an obsession."
"Very likely," I assented. "The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow."
But--was it idiotic?
I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time,
not in the light of subsequent events. For, if this narrative has any
interest at all, it is a psychological one. I have said that it is a
study in fear, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is
a study of the mental reaction of crime, of its effects on different
minds, more or less remotely connected with it.
That my analysis of my impressions in the church that morning are not
colored by subsequent events is proved by the fact that under cover of
that date, July 16th, I made the following entry:
"Why do Maggie and Miss Benton distrust each other?"
I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as is
evidenced by the fact that I follow it with a recipe for fruit gelatin,
copied from the newspaper.
It was a calm and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wide
open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At the
end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton--the name came like
an echo from the forgotten past--sent a shower of colored light over
Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues, and threw a sort
of summer radiance over Miss Emily herself, in the seat ahead.
She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile. She was so
orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collar
was so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you can
understand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me to
pulling myself straight. I am rather casual as to seams.
After a time I began to have a curious feeling about her. Her head was
toward the rector, standing in a sort of white nimbus of sunlight, but
I felt that Miss Emily's entire attention was on our pew, immediately
behind her. I find I can not put it into words, unless it was that her
back settled into more rigid lines. I glanced along the pew. Willie's
face wore a calm and slightly somnolent expression. But Maggie, in her
far end--she is very high church and always attends--Maggie's eyes were
glued almost fiercely to Miss Emily's back. And just then Miss Emily
herself stirred, glanced up at the window, and turning slightly,
returned Maggie's glance with one almost as malevolent. I have hesitated
over that word. It seems strong now, but at the time it was the one that
came into my mind.
When it was over, it was hard to believe that it had happened. And even
now, with everything else clear, I do not pretend to explain Maggie's
attitude. She knew, in some strange way. But she did not know that she
knew--which sounds like nonsense and is as near as I can come to getting
it down in words.
Willie left that night, the 16th, and we settled down to quiet days,
and, for a time, to undisturbed nights. But on the following Wednesday,
by my journal, the telephone commenced to bother me again. Generally
speaking, it rang rather early, between eleven o'clock and midnight. But
on the following Saturday night I find I have recorded the hour as 2 a.m.
In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never rang
the second time. When I went downstairs to answer it--I did not always
go--there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing else. It
was on the twenty-fourth that I had the telephone inspected and reported
in normal condition, and it is possibly significant that for three days
afterward my record shows not a single disturbance.
But I do not regard the strange calls over the telephone as so important
as my attitude to them. The plain truth is that my fear of the calls
extended itself in a few days to cover the instrument, and more than
that, to the part of the house it stood in. Maggie never had this, nor
did she recognize it in me. Her fear was a perfectly simple although
uncomfortable one, centering around the bedrooms where, in each bed,
she nightly saw dead and gone Bentons laid out in all the decorum of the
best linen.
On more than one evening she came to the library door, with an
expression of mentally looking over her shoulder, and some such dialogue
would follow:
"D'you mind if I turn the bed down now, Miss Agnes?"
"It's very early."
"S'almost eight." When she is nervous she cuts verbal corners.
"You know perfectly well that I dislike having the beds disturbed until
nine o'clock, Maggie."
"I'm going out."
"You said that last night, but you didn't go."
Silence.
"Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of--" I
hesitated--"of fear. When you have really seen or heard something, it
will be time enough to be nervous."
"Humph!" said Maggie on one of these occasions, and edged into the room.
It was growing dusk. "It will be too late then, Miss Agnes. And another
thing. You're a brave woman. I don't know as I've seen a braver. But I
notice you keep away from the telephone after dark."
The general outcome of these conversations was that, to avoid argument,
I permitted the preparation of my room for the night at an earlier and
yet earlier hour, until at last it was done the moment I was dressed for
dinner.
It is clear to me now that two entirely different sorts of fear actuated
us. For by that time I had to acknowledge that there was fear in the
house. Even Delia, the cook, had absorbed some of Maggie's terror;
possibly traceable to some early impressions of death which connected
them-selves with a four-post bedstead.
Of the two sorts of fear, Delia's and Maggie's symptoms were subjective.
Mine, I still feel, were objective.
It was not long before the beginning of August, and during a lull in
the telephone matter, that I began to suspect that the house was being
visited at night.
There was nothing I could point to with any certainty as having been
disturbed at first. It was a matter of a book misplaced on the table, of
my sewing-basket open when I always leave it closed, of a burnt match on
the floor, whereas it is one of my orderly habits never to leave burnt
matches around. And at last the burnt match became a sort of clue, for I
suspected that it had been used to light one of the candles that sat in
holders of every sort, on the top of the library shelves.
I tried getting up at night and peering over the banisters, but without
result. And I was never sure as to articles that they had been moved.
I remained in that doubting and suspicious halfway ground that is worse
than certainty. And there was the matter of motive. I could not get away
from that. What possible purpose could an intruder have, for instance,
in opening my sewing-basket or moving the dictionary two inches on the
center table?
Yet the feeling persisted, and on the second of August I find this entry
in my journal:
Right-hand brass, eight inches; left-hand brass, seven inches;
carved-wood--Italian--five and three quarter inches each; old glass on
mantelpiece--seven inches. And below this, dated the third: Last night,
between midnight and daylight, the candle in the glass holder on the
right side of the mantel was burned down one and one-half inches.
I should, no doubt, have set a watch on my nightly visitor after making
this discovery--and one that was apparently connected with it--nothing
less than Delia's report that there were candle-droppings over the
border of the library carpet. But I have admitted that this is a study
in fear, and a part of it is my own.
I was afraid. I was afraid of the night visitor, but, more than that,
I was afraid of the fear. It had become a real thing by that time,
something that lurked in the lower back hall waiting to catch me by the
throat, to stop my breath, to paralyze me so I could not escape. I never
went beyond that point.
Yet I am not a cowardly woman. I have lived alone too long for that. I
have closed too many houses at night and gone upstairs in the dark to be
afraid of darkness. And even now I can not, looking back, admit that
I was afraid of the darkness there, although I resorted to the weak
expedient of leaving a short length of candle to burn itself out in the
hall when I went up to bed.
I have seen one of Willie's boys waken up at night screaming with a
terror he could not describe. Well, it was much like that with me,
except that I was awake and horribly ashamed of myself.
On the fourth of August I find in my journal the single word "flour."
It recalls both my own cowardice at that time, and an experiment I made.
The telephone had not bothered us for several nights, and I began to
suspect a connection of this sort: when the telephone rang, there was no
night visitor, and vice versa. I was not certain.
Delia was setting bread that night in the kitchen, and Maggie was
reading a ghost story from the evening paper. There was a fine sifting
of flour over the table, and it gave me my idea. When I went up to bed
that night, I left a powdering of flour here and there on the lower
floor, at the door into the library, a patch by the table, and--going
back rather uneasily--one near the telephone.
I was up and downstairs before Maggie the next morning. The patches
showed trampling. In the doorway they were almost obliterated, as by
the trailing of a garment over them, but by the fireplace there were two
prints quite distinct. I knew when I saw them that I had expected the
marks of Miss Emily's tiny foot, although I had not admitted it before.
But these were not Miss Emily's. They were large, flat, substantial, and
one showed a curious marking around the edge that--It was my own! The
marking was the knitted side of my bedroom slipper. I had, so far as
I could tell, gone downstairs, in the night, investigated the candles,
possibly in darkness, and gone back to bed again.
The effect of the discovery on me was--well undermining. In all the
uneasiness of the past few weeks I had at least had full confidence in
myself. And now that was gone. I began to wonder how much of the things
that had troubled me were real, and how many I had made for myself.
To tell the truth, by that time the tension was almost unbearable. My
nerves were going, and there was no reason for it. I kept telling myself
that. In the mirror I looked white and anxious, and I had a sense
of approaching trouble. I caught Maggie watching me, too, and on the
seventh I find in my journal the words: "Insanity is often only a
formless terror."
On the Sunday morning following that I found three burnt matches in
the library fireplace, and one of the candles in the brass holders was
almost gone. I sat most of the day in that room, wondering what would
happen to me if I lost my mind. I knew that Maggie was watching me, and
I made one of those absurd hypotheses to myself that we all do at times.
If any of the family came, I would know that she had sent for them, and
that I was really deranged! It had been a long day, with a steady summer
rain that had not cooled the earth, but only set it steaming. The air
was like hot vapor, and my hair clung to my moist forehead. At about
four o'clock Maggie started chasing a fly with a folded newspaper. She
followed it about the lower floor from room to room, making little harsh
noises in her throat when she missed it. The sound of the soft thud of
the paper on walls and furniture seemed suddenly more than I could bear.
"For heaven's sake!" I cried. "Stop that noise, Maggie." I felt as
though my eyes were starting from my head.
"It's a fly," she said doggedly, and aimed another blow at it. "If I
don't kill it, we'll have a million. There, it's on the mantel now. I
never--"
I felt that if she raised the paper club once more I should scream. So I
got up quickly and caught her wrist. She was so astonished that she let
the paper drop, and there we stood, staring at each other. I can still
see the way her mouth hung open.
"Don't!" I said. And my voice sounded thick even to my own ears.
"Maggie--I can't stand it!"
"My God, Miss Agnes!"
Her tone brought me up sharply. I released her arm.
"I--I'm just nervous, Maggie," I said, and sat down. I was trembling
violently.
I was sane. I knew it then as I know it now. But I was not rational.
Perhaps to most of us come now and then times when they realize that
some act, or some thought, is not balanced, as though, for a moment or
an hour, the control was gone from the brain. Or--and I think this was
the feeling I had--that some other control was in charge. Not the Agnes
Blakiston I knew, but another Agnes Blakiston, perhaps, was exerting a
temporary dominance, a hectic, craven, and hateful control.
That is the only outburst I recall. Possibly Maggie may have others
stored away. She has a tenacious memory. Certainly it was my nearest
approach to violence. But it had the effect of making me set a watch on
myself.
Possibly it was coincidence. Probably, however, Maggie had communicated
with Willie. But two days later young Martin Sprague, Freda Sprague's
son, stopped his car in the drive and came in. He is a nerve specialist,
and very good, although I can remember when he came down in his night
drawers to one of his mother's dinner-parties.
"Thought I would just run in and see you," he said. "Mother told me you
were here. By George, Miss Agnes, you look younger than ever."
"Who told you to come, Martie?" I asked.
"Told me? I don't have to be told to visit an old friend."
Well, he asked himself to lunch, and looked over the house, and decided
to ask Miss Emily if she would sell an old Japanese cabinet inlaid with
mother of pearl that I would not have had as a gift. And, in the end,
I told him my trouble, of the fear that seemed to center around the
telephone, and the sleep-walking.
He listened carefully.
"Ever get any bad news over the telephone?" he asked.
One way and another, I said I had had plenty of it. He went over me
thoroughly, and was inclined to find my experience with the flour rather
amusing than otherwise. "It's rather good, that," he said. "Setting a
trap to catch yourself. You'd better have Maggie sleep in your room for
a while. Well, it's all pretty plain, Miss Agnes. We bury some things as
deep as possible, especially if we don't want to remember that they ever
happened. But the mind's a queer thing. It holds on pretty hard, and
burying is not destroying. Then we get tired or nervous--maybe
just holding the thing down and pretending it is not there makes us
nervous--and up it pops, like the ghost of a buried body, and raises
hell. You don't mind that, do you?" he added anxiously. "It's exactly
what those things do raise."
"But," I demanded irritably, "who rings the telephone at night? I
daresay you don't contend that I go out at night and call the house, and
then come back and answer the call, do you?"
He looked at me with a maddening smile.
"Are you sure it really rings?" he asked.
And so bad was my nervous condition by that time, so undermined was my
self-confidence, that I was not certain! And this in face of the fact
that it invariably roused Maggie as well as myself.
On the eleventh of August Miss Emily came to tea. The date does not
matter, but by following the chronology of my journal I find I can keep
my narrative in proper sequence.
I had felt better that day. So far as I could determine, I had
not walked in my sleep again, and there was about Maggie an air of
cheerfulness and relief which showed that my condition was more nearly
normal than it had been for some time. The fear of the telephone and
of the back hall was leaving me, too. Perhaps Martin Sprague's
matter-of-fact explanation had helped me. But my own theory had always
been the one I recorded at the beginning of this narrative--that I
caught and--well, registered is a good word--that I registered an
overwhelming fear from some unknown source.
I spied Miss Emily as she got out of the hack that day, a cool little
figure clad in a thin black silk dress, with the sheerest possible white
collars and cuffs. Her small bonnet with its crepe veil was faced with
white, and her carefully crimped gray hair showed a wavy border beneath
it. Mr. Staley, the station hackman, helped her out of the surrey, and
handed her the knitting-bag without which she was seldom seen. It was
two weeks since she had been there, and she came slowly up the walk,
looking from side to side at the perennial borders, then in full August
bloom.
She smiled when she saw me in the doorway, and said, with the little
anxious pucker between her eyes that was so childish, "Don't you think
peonies are better cut down at this time of year?" She took a folded
handkerchief from her bag and dabbed at her face, where there was no
sign of dust to mar its old freshness. "It gives the lilies a better
chance, my dear."
I led her into the house, and she produced a gay bit of knitting, a baby
afghan, by the signs. She smiled at me over it.
"I am always one baby behind," she explained and fell to work rapidly.
She had lovely hands, and I suspected them of being her one vanity.
Maggie was serving tea with her usual grudging reluctance, and I noticed
then that when she was in the room Miss Emily said little or nothing.
I thought it probable that she did not approve of conversing before
servants, and would have let it go at that, had I not, as I held out
Miss Emily's cup, caught her looking at Maggie. I had a swift impression
of antagonism again, of alertness and something more. When Maggie went
out, Miss Emily turned to me.
"She is very capable, I fancy."
"Very. Entirely too capable."
"She looks sharp," said Miss Emily. It was a long time since I had heard
the word so used, but it was very apt. Maggie was indeed sharp. But Miss
Emily launched into a general dissertation on servants, and Maggie's
sharpness was forgotten.
It was, I think, when she was about to go that I asked her about the
telephone.
"Telephone?" she inquired. "Why, no. It has always done very well. Of
course, after a heavy snow in the winter, sometimes--"
She had a fashion of leaving her sentences unfinished. They trailed off,
without any abrupt break.
"It rings at night."
"Rings?"
"I am called frequently and when I get to the phone, there is no one
there."
Some of my irritation doubtless got into my voice, for Miss Emily
suddenly drew away and stared at me.
"But--that is very strange. I--"
She had gone pale. I saw that now. And quite suddenly she dropped her
knitting-bag. When I restored it to her, she was very calm and poised,
but her color had not come back.
"It has always been very satisfactory," she said. "I don't know that it
ever--"
She considered, and began again. "Why not just ignore it? If some one is
playing a malicious trick on you, the only thing is to ignore it."
Her hands were shaking, although her voice was quiet. I saw that when
she tried to tie the ribbons of the bag. And--I wondered at this, in so
gentle a soul--there was a hint of anger in her tones. There was an edge
to her voice.
That she could be angry was a surprise. And I found that she could also
be obstinate. For we came to an impasse over the telephone in the next
few minutes, and over something so absurd that I was non-plussed. It was
over her unqualified refusal to allow me to install a branch wire to my
bedroom.
"But," I expostulated, "when one thinks of the convenience, and--"
"I am sorry." Her voice had a note of finality. "I daresay I am
old-fashioned, but--I do not like changes. I shall have to ask you not
to interfere with the telephone."
I could hardly credit my senses. Her tone was one of reproof, plus
decision. It convicted me of an indiscretion. If I had asked to take
the roof off and replace it with silk umbrellas, it might have been
justified. But to a request to move the telephone!
"Of course, if you feel that way about it," I said, "I shall not touch
it."
I dropped the subject, a trifle ruffled, I confess, and went upstairs to
fetch a box in which Miss Emily was to carry away some flowers from the
garden.
It was when I was coming down the staircase that I saw Maggie. She had
carried the hall candlesticks, newly polished, to their places on
the table, and was standing, a hand on each one, staring into the old
Washington mirror in front of her. From where she was she must have had
a full view of Miss Emily in the library. And Maggie was bristling. It
was the only word for it.
She was still there when Miss Emily had gone, blowing on the mirror and
polishing it. And I took her to task for her unfriendly attitude to the
little old lady.
"You practically threw her muffins at her," I said. "And I must speak
again about the cups--"
"What does she come snooping around for, anyhow?" she broke in. "Aren't
we paying for her house? Didn't she get down on her bended knees and beg
us to take it?"
"Is that any reason why we should be uncivil?"
"What I want to know is this," Maggie said truculently. "What right
has she to come back, and spy on us? For that's what she's doing, Miss
Agnes. Do you know what she was at when I looked in at her? She was
running a finger along the baseboard to see if it was clean! And what's
more, I caught her at it once before, in the back hall, when she was
pretending to telephone for the station hack."
It was that day, I think, that I put fresh candles in all the holders
downstairs. I had made a resolution like this,--to renew the candles,
and to lock myself in my room and throw the key over the transom to
Maggie. If, in the mornings that followed, the candles had been used, it
would prove that Martin Sprague was wrong, that even foot-prints could
lie, and that some one was investigating the lower floor at night.
For while my reason told me that I had been the intruder, my intuition
continued to insist that my sleepwalking was a result, not a cause. In
a word, I had gone downstairs, because I knew that there had been and
might be again, a night visitor.
Yet, there was something of comedy in that night's precautions, after
all.
At ten-thirty I was undressed, and Maggie had, with rebellion in every
line of her, locked me in. I could hear her, afterwards running along
the hall to her own room and slamming the door. Then, a moment later,
the telephone rang.
It was too early, I reasoned, for the night calls. It might be anything,
a telegram at the station, Willie's boy run over by an automobile,
Gertrude's children ill. A dozen possibilities ran through my mind.
And Maggie would not let me out!
"You're not going downstairs," she called, from a safe distance.
"Maggie!" I cried, sharply. And banged at the door. The telephone was
ringing steadily. "Come here at once."
"Miss Agnes," she beseeched, "you go to bed and don't listen. There'll
be nothing there, for all your trouble," she said, in a quavering voice.
"It's nothing human that rings that bell."
Finally, however, she freed me, and I went down the stairs. I had
carried down a lamp, and my nerves were vibrating to the rhythm of the
bell's shrill summons. But, strangely enough, the fear had left me.
I find, as always, that it is difficult to put into words. I did not
relish the excursion to the lower floor. I resented the jarring sound of
the bell. But the terror was gone.
I went back to the telephone. Something that was living and moving was
there. I saw its eyes, lower than mine, reflecting the lamp like twin
lights. I was frightened, but still it was not the fear. The twin lights
leaped forward--and proved to be the eyes of Miss Emily's cat, which had
been sleeping on the stand!
I answered the telephone. To my surprise it was Miss Emily herself, a
quiet and very dignified voice which apologized for disturbing me at
that hour, and went on:
"I feel that I was very abrupt this afternoon, Miss Blakiston. My excuse
is that I have always feared change. I have lived in a rut too long, I'm
afraid. But of course, if you feel you would like to move the telephone,
or put in an upstairs instrument, you may do as you like."
She seemed, having got me there, unwilling to ring off. I got a curious
effect of reluctance over the telephone, and there was one phrase that
she repeated several times.
"I do not want to influence you. I want you to do just what you think
best."
The fear was entirely gone by the time she rang off. I felt, instead, a
sort of relaxation that was most comforting. The rear hall, a cul-de-sac
of nervousness in the daytime and of horror at night, was suddenly
transformed by the light of my lamp into a warm and cheerful refuge from
the darkness of the lower floor. The purring of the cat, comfortably
settled on the telephone-stand, was as cheering as the singing of a
kettle on a stove. On the rack near me my garden hat and an old Paisley
shawl made a grotesque human effigy.
I sat back in the low wicker chair and surveyed the hallway. Why not, I
considered, do away now with the fear of it? If I could conquer it like
this at midnight, I need never succumb again to it in the light.
The cat leaped to the stand beside me and stood there, waiting. He was
an intelligent animal, and I am like a good many spinsters. I am not
more fond of cats than other people, but I understand them better. And
it seemed to me that he and I were going through some familiar program,
of which a part had been neglected. The cat neither sat nor lay, but
stood there, waiting.
So at last I fetched the shawl from the rack and made him a bed on
the stand. It was what he had been waiting for. I saw that at once. He
walked onto it, turned around once, lay down, and closed his eyes.
I took up my vigil. I had been the victim of a fear I was determined to
conquer. The house was quiet. Maggie had retired shriveled to bed. The
cat slept on the shawl.
And then--I felt the fear returning. It welled up through my
tranquillity like a flood, and swept me with it. I wanted to shriek. I
was afraid to shriek. I longed to escape. I dared not move. There had
been no sound, no motion. Things were as they had been.
It may have been one minute or five that I sat there. I do not know.
I only know that I sat with fixed eyes, not even blinking, for fear of
even for a second shutting out the sane and visible world about me. A
sense of deadness commenced in my hands and worked up my arms. My chest
seemed flattened.
Then the telephone bell rang.
The cat leaped to his feet. Somehow I reached forward and took down the
receiver.
"Who is it?" I cried, in a voice that was thin, I knew, and unnatural.
The telephone is not a perfect medium. It loses much that we wish
to register but, also, it registers much that we may wish to lose.
Therefore when I say that I distinctly heard a gasp, followed by heavy
difficult breathing, over the telephone, I must beg for credence. It is
true. Some one at the other end of the line was struggling for breath.
Then there was complete silence. I realized, after a moment, that the
circuit had been stealthily cut, and that my conviction was verified
by Central's demand, a moment later, of what number I wanted. I was, at
first, unable to answer her. When I did speak, my voice was shaken.
"What number, please?" she repeated, in a bored tone. There is
nothing in all the world so bored as the voice of a small town
telephone-operator.
"You called," I said.
"Beg y'pardon. Must have been a mistake," she replied glibly, and cut me
off.