Written With My Left Hand

by Nugent Barker

  At length we dropped towards the plain, and there we left the Morrisons and walked to Froon. The track we followed in the darkness trickled out from stunted grass and boulders in the foothills; thence it travelled eastwards, gathering lights and shadows on the way, until it reached the flaring Market Place at Froon, with our old, stately mansion in the corner.

  We climbed up to our richly-ornamented door by steep and narrow steps. I knocked and knocked again, impressively, and it was opened by our servant-maid, who bore the foreign name of Filippina. We saw her for a moment in the Market light before we walked into our panelled dining-room, where massive pictures hung upon the walls—the very pictures that are hanging there today. I went at once and flung the curtains back and opened the shutters and let the Market light into the room. (I do not care to burn good oil when the Market Place is busy.) Window by window I let the light into the room. I took my Prayer Book from the pocket of my overcoat and put it gently on the table, and the light from Thomas Dixon’s oil-shop fell on it, and I could see the golden cross.

  We heard a cry from Filippina’s room. I started up at that, and would have hurried out, had I not caught the sound of running footsteps in the hall. I thought: ‘That’s lodger Bidolack,’ and then: ‘He’s at his tricks again!’ The fellow had the insolence to stand and sing, outside our door, in his lilting, fruity, tenor voice:

  ‘O heaven, to think of their white souls,

  And mine so black and grim!’

  I saw in a mirror the face of my wife Isobel, all puckered up with hate. I turned and peered at it, her young face puckered up with hate.

  ‘But what is this?’ I whispered, thunderstruck, yet secretly delighted. ‘Do you hate the man?’

  ‘I hate the girl!’ she answered, never moving, staring for ever at the door.

  Then I knew. It was as I had thought. I saw that all was over. In my rage I fought her. She had no chance. With blow after blow, I killed my wife Isobel.

  There was nothing more for me to do just then but to leave her where she lay.

  I locked the door behind me.

  I took off my black, funereal gloves, and tidied my collar in the dark; at the end of the passage I saw a light under Filippina’s door.

  ‘What is this?’ I whispered. ‘Lord preserve us!’

  She lay shapeless on her bed. I turned her round, and saw the death-blood shining on her face.

  ‘This is the work of Bidolack,’ I thought, and in a flash his song came back to me:

  ‘O heaven, to think of their white souls,

  And mine so black and grim!’

  I recognised the words from Hood’s Eugene Aram. ‘A while ago,’ I thought, ‘how true they were.’

  ‘And Bidolack? Oh, well,’ I thought, smiling across the bed in Filippina’s shining bedroom, ‘by now he’s run off to the Mendip Hills, and presently the whole of Somerset will hunt him for the double crime, led by the look of things.’

  They buried my servant Filippina, and they buried my wife Isobel; and they hunted for my lodger Bidolack, and never found him. I have heard that retribution always comes to him who deserves it. I wonder.

  Whessoe

  THOSE who had seen him, those who had endeavoured to speak with him, face to face, until suddenly they had realised that it would be ridiculous to carry the conversation further—these people searched diligently among the proper sources, and called him Whessoe. It may be that there was more than the merest ghost of a reason for such a name. Yet he was so secret, so illusive, they could not be sure.

  His habitation was a great, silent, early Victorian house, and it stood on a semi-circle of drive behind two gates that swung rheumatically on their creaky hinges, off the leafiest avenue of that old watering town. There are many such houses, sunk in sleep, on the verdured, lazy borders of Chelsover. Their emptiness of all sound save the frequent mutter of rain-drops from the eaves; the filmy stare of their windows; their endless, aimless hours—these things give them the air of old, querulous people who have found no benefit in the health-giving waters of Chelsover, but have sat themselves down within sight of that hope-shattering spa, to watch others pass by them on the same misguided errand, beneath the whispering trees. Especially the two gates were two old snuffy gentlemen, who wheezed, and croaked, and told doubtful stories, whenever anyone took them for a moment by the latches, and walked, with silent footsteps, up the lichened drive, to the old house where the old man lived.

  They say that he wore knee-breeches, and that, whenever he took his walks abroad, a threadbare, plum-coloured surtout, with the tightest of waists, and a whole battalion of buttons, glowed like a dying smithy amidst the leaf-shadows. But Whessoe of Two Gates walked so rarely in the daytime, and seldom beyond the confines of his house: the night was his, and the very early morning, when the moon, shining into an open upper window, brightened the gleam in his eye, and darkened the lines on his face.

  Then would certain belated residents of Chelsover, lifting their heads, gaze fearfully at the old man lurking there.

  Those of them that knew his story. . . . Yet they never ceased to wonder, when that strange figure met their eyes. They wondered at the truth of many tales concerning him; they wondered at the relentless spirit that would not let him sleep. There were occasions when he was not to be seen at his accustomed vigil: times when these same residents peered anxiously over the lower windows, to catch the fleeting glimpses of his ghostly figure as it wandered from room to room. It was so white, so frail, it shone so queerly in the dark passages and the half-light of the hall. Sometimes, when he caught sight of himself in the dusky, all but invisible, depths and boundaries of a mirror, Whessoe, too, would start and shudder at the spectral shape that had confronted him there. His face was as white and crumpled as a ball of paper; his shrunken legs appeared as though they might drop at any moment from the loosely buckled ends of his knee-breeches; his knuckles were as big as buttons—as big as the buttons on his plum-coloured surtout. But the contemplation of this disturbing figure seldom held him for long; soon he would be through with the ghost-gazing, would be off again upon his nocturnal rambles, drifting and gliding, watching at the window, caring for no man, a shadow of fled glories passing through the house.

  And as silently as Whessoe, the years passed too; time was long in bringing change to the sombre mansion; and the dread invasion, when it did come, came neither very suddenly nor very gradually: it seemed to slip into his life like a visitor who had hailed him before opening the door: it seemed, perhaps, even more vividly, to have slipped out from a world that had nothing whatever to do with his own . . . a world with a dry mouth, and a grisly tongue in its cheek, that caused him rather frantically to think of ghosts.

  Ghosts in the old house! Ghosts within the gates! Impossible, thought the old man restlessly—yet in the same moment realised that the signs had come, and he had not heeded them. For a week, a month, the visitor had hailed, and Whessoe had not attempted to open the door. Surely they were incontestable, those once unmeaning events that suddenly he remembered one very early April morning in the shuttered drawing-room, where his eyes were opened by a sign which in its own turn was a prelude to a greater sign in store!

  An odour had reached him, a sweet, ineffable odour that seemed to wrap his frail body in kindly, pleading voices of the past; he fancied that a window must be open, and a shutter unlatched; but he knew that no flowers grew now in the unwalked wilderness of a garden, nor was there any scent in the sycamore tree whose topmost branches fell barely short of his bedroom window-sill. The incident had disturbed him, without giving cause for any particular fear in his awakening mind; but sometime later, when he had left the drawing-room, and was moving noiselessly across the black spaces of the hall, a sound had started at his elbow, a tiny catch of the breath, as though—ah, yes—a ghost had sighed . . . and he had fled in a high frenzy up the staircase, to fashion the moonbeams of his bedroom into the forms and murmurs of ghosts. The moon left his window, and went her way; but still he sat on,
round-eyed, probing shadows of the immediate past.

  A week, a month ago, the signs had come, and he had not heeded them! A vague hint of preparation—he could not define it exactly—in rooms, and hall, and passages; a brighter, cleaner atmosphere, even at midnight, that seemed to envelope him at every turn of the stair—these were the little things, scarcely felt in the hour of their happening, that jumped to his memory now, and kept him vigilant for many weeks to come. Sleeping by day, and walking by night, his long-established mode of living was highly favourable to a proper study of ghosts. He would sit in the great, lofty bedroom whose windows looked over the sycamore tree: he would sit there very silently, with the door a little open, hoping for the arrival of those invading spirits whose voices he dreaded to hear.

  It was a faded, murky room, that in which the crowning evidence of a supernatural world had come to him at last. The bed stood out like a draped coffin on a bier; heavy curtains hid the two tall windows that might have been the black mouths of tombs. One of these windows had been open, and the curtains parted, on the night when he heard the spectral cry. The sound had awakened him; and for many moments afterwards he fancied that he could hear the whistle of the wind. But the cord of the window-blind hung motionless in the still, night air; nothing stirred in that vast tomb behind two parted curtains; and suddenly he knew that the sound was coming from within the house—that in some distant room a ghostly company was dancing to a quiver of spectral music, and a riot of fitful, elfin laughter.

  Trembling in every limb, old Whessoe flung off the bed-clothes, and hurried to the door; but the lock was rusty, and the key refused to turn in his nerveless fingers. He went to the window, peeped down into the garden and up into the sky; he was scared, he was shaking, he wanted to hide the tempestuous music that danced in his ears. A sickle moon was rising above the avenue that led into Chelsover: already, through the mesh of distant leaves, she had begun to sprinkle her dust onto the sleepy head of the sycamore tree. And now a cool wind blew into the old man’s face, and the far-distant shunting of a train told him that his usual hour for rising was near. But this time he did not rise. Instead, he lay again beneath the bed-clothes, with fingers pressed into his ears, and the sheets pulled over his thin, grey hair; and at intervals throughout the night, in his waking moments, and in his troubled dreams, he heard the company of ghosts, and the flying music, and the distant room, and the whole house, dancing and dancing. . . .

  So the ghosts came, and Whessoe knew now that the manifestations were something more real than the vague voices of house and garden. He did not hear them on the following night. A week went by, and the heart of the house was wrapped in silence. His first thought was to locate the room of the riotous dancing; he fancied it must be the drawing-room; but when at last he ventured within it, no sign of the dancing was there. His heart thumped as he glided, silent as a shadow, across the moonlit floor. But again the odour assailed him, subtle and frightening, speaking to him in voices of the past. Old Whessoe caught his breath. So they were here always, now. In every crack and corner, watching him, watching him, never to go. He was able no longer to think of the house as his own.

  When they came again, he was ready for them. He was sitting in his room with the door open, ready and waiting, dressed in the plum-coloured surtout and loose knee-breeches of a bygone year; and they began their display by creaking the stairs, and uttering little outbursts of laughter, until presently all individual sounds were swallowed in the dance. The music swirled, the voices rose and fell, the house rocked as before; and Whessoe stood in his doorway, round-eyed and with his mouth pursed as for whistling, trying to summon up courage to obey the almost articulate voices that he fancied he could hear, at odd moments, calling to him to join them.

  Thenceforth, the wild, elfin music of the ghosts became an established custom in that house. Whessoe would await it in fear; but the fear was changed into a momentary wonder when the first gay notes arrived. He did not hear it every night. Often a whole week would go by, and the long, early hours of the morning brought no sign. He would sit in the great, lofty bedroom whose windows looked over the sycamore tree; he would sit there very silently, with the door a little open, hoping for the return of those invading spirits whose voices he dreaded to hear. And when they came, and the wrinkled cheeks of the house were smoothed out with the great burst of music, always the first fear would creep back into Whessoe; and it was many weeks before he ventured beyond the doorway while the ghosts danced.

  But as time brought less restraint to the ghostly visitors, so also it brought a sense of boldness to Whessoe. The anxiety of waiting for their return was lessened by these shortening intervals of silence; his first horror began to depart; and he found himself looking forward with increasing pleasure to those nights when music tossed above the whistle of the wind, and the wind tossed over the trees, calling his name:

  ‘Whes-s-s-oe! Whes-s-s-oe!’

  At first he was scared, sitting there, unable to tell the fancied voice from the real; then, from the wild elements of nature, he began to separate the wild elements of the house—the one became a stepping stone to the other—and when at last he realised that a spirit world was taking possession of the old building, superimposing itself upon everything within it, creeping into every crack and cranny, usurping the house’s soul, Whessoe was not afraid. He felt soothed, and strangely gratified at so much ghostly attention. He became quietly interested, and began to think.

  ‘What are these phantoms like?’ he thought, and strove to picture them. He wondered whether they walked in the day-time, and whether they could be seen outside the realms of darkness; from his scanty knowledge of the ways of ghosts, he decided these two questions in the negative. And sometimes, in his cunning way, he tried to catch the tunes that were filling his nights with pleasure, that bid him leave their singers unmolested because they were as lovely as the shy songs of birds. And although there were moments when his curiosity urged him to put the phantoms to the proof in the broad light of day, yet always he remained loyal to the songs’ bidding; but as the weeks passed, there came a more daring note to his nightly vigils.

  There was a cracked, spare piano which in old days had been relegated to some dim room on the drawing-room floor; and one early morning, when the singing and the dancing were over, and the house was quiet, Whessoe stole down, and seated himself in front of the instrument; and there, in the darkness, with notes that came softly at first and finally filled the whole house with song, he, as though to pay back the ghosts in their own ghostly coin, played many bars of his favourite Lucia.

  When August came, and the thick trees of Chelsover lay like a dust-sheet over the town, the spirits kept away; and the old house slept dreamlessly with its head upon its arm. Whessoe was puzzled. He who once had known and welcomed solitude, fretted when he found it again. The round mouth of the night drew near him and pressed its soundless, thick lips to his ear; the empty corners stared at him with tightly lidded eyes. But such a state did not exist for long; the ghostly period had been of too short a duration to have become a necessity for his soul. On the approach of September, his feelings suffered a certain change. Whenever the wind sang, he did not hesitate any longer to attribute the singing to the wind; and it sang to him in warning tones that told him that the ghosts’ music had been rather monstrously evil. He was not ignorant of such a popular opinion in regard to ghostly phenomena, and his grey head nodded sagely as he wandered from room to room. That strange air of preparation—that freshness in the rooms and passages—a sense of wings flying down the well of the staircase, and beating the whole cubical atmosphere of the hall—these facts that had disturbed his solitude as far back as the previous December spoke to him now of the evil nature of ghosts. To minds far less fanciful than his, the creatures might have seemed the more terrible because they had arisen from renovation and progress, and not from decay. He visualised a kind of perverted fungus, growing more readily in sweet and dry places of the earth. And when he saw it like thi
s, he shivered in the surtout, and rattled at the knees.

  He wanted very earnestly to stamp out the evil. Therefore one morning, when the moon was still shining, and the whole world of Chelsover lay asleep, Whessoe crept down to the vast, shutterless library, and began to write. . . . He wrote long and laboriously, and without a pause; he wrote until the room grew cold and a breeze sighed, and shadows stretched sleepily in the garden just before dawn. It was late, very late in the day for Whessoe, with his crumpled face losing all its lines in the soft halflight; his shrunken body merging into the dark pit of the chair; and the old man put away the pen. But on the next evening he rose before midnight, and finished his letter; and his buckled shoes went noiselessly up the lichened drive.

  The gate coughed and wheezed on its rusty hinges; the arched avenue beyond rained countless spears of moonlight and shadow. Screwing up his eyes, he saw that this road into Chelsover was not deserted. A figure stood by the far-distant pillar-box, a postman, collecting letters in the light of a lamp.

  Whessoe halloed at him, and began to run.

  ‘Hi-yi-yi!’ But his rather thin, high voice trailed off dismally into the silence. ‘Hi-yi-yi!’ he called. Perhaps it was difficult for people to see his spare figure amid the spears of moonlight and shadow.

  ‘Ahoy-y-y!’ shouted Whessoe again, but the postman did not hear. The fellow shouldered his bag, and bustled away; and the plum-coloured surtout and faded knee-breeches moved slowly in the direction of the pillar-box. There was no need to hurry now, there was no need at all. . . . But there had been no need to hurry at any time during the whole hard business of the letter-writing. Although he waited many days, Whessoe received no answer; nobody answered the letter that he had written to the Society for Psychical Research, at immense pains, on two sheets of note-paper, craving help.