He settled back comfortably to enjoy the keen mountain air.
After leaving the station, the car followed a road up a narrow valley for a time; a small beck fell tumbling from the hills on the left, where occasionally dark plantations of fir trooped down to the side of the road; but what struck him chiefly was the air of desolation and loneliness that hung over all the countryside. The landscape seemed to him wilder and less inhabited even than the Scottish Highlands. Not a house, not a croft, was to be seen. A sense of desertion, due partly to the dusk no doubt, hung brooding over everything, as though human influence was not welcomed here, perhaps not possible. Bleak and inhospitable it looked certainly, though for himself this loneliness held a thrill of wild beauty that appealed to him.
A few black-faced sheep strung occasionally across the road, and once they passed a bearded shepherd hurrying downhill with his dog. They vanished into the mist like wraiths. It seemed impossible to Norman that the country could be so desolate and uninhabited when he knew that only a few score miles away lay the large manufacturing towns of Lancashire. The car, meanwhile, was steadily climbing up the valley and presently they came to more open country and passed a few scattered farmhouses with an occasional field of oats beside them.
Norman asked the chauffeur if many people lived hereabouts, and the man was clearly delighted to be spoken to.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘it’s a right desolate spot at the best of times, and I’m glad enough,’ he added, ‘when it’s time for us to go back south again.’ It had been a wonderful season for the grouse, and there was every promise of a record year.
Norman noticed an odd thing about the farmhouses they passed, for many of them, if not all, had a large cross carved over the lintel of the doors, and even some of the gates leading from the road into the fields had a smaller cross cut into the top bar. The car’s flash-light picked them out. It reminded him of the shrines and crosses scattered over the countryside in Catholic countries abroad, but seemed a little incongruous in England. He asked the chauffeur if most of the people hereabout were Catholics, and the man’s answer, given with emphasis, touched his curiosity.
‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ was the reply. ‘In fact, sir, if you ask me, the people round here are about as heathen as you could find in any Christian country.’
Norman drew his attention to the crosses everywhere, asking him how he accounted for them if the inhabitants were heathen, and the man hesitated a moment before replying, as though, glad to talk otherwise, the subject was not wholly to his liking.
‘Well, sir,’ he said at length, watching the road carefully in front of him, ‘they don’t tell me much about what they think, counting me for a foreigner like, as I come from the south. But they’re a rum lot to my way of thinking. What I’m told,’ he added after a further pause, ‘is that they carve these crosses to protect themselves.’
‘Protect themselves!’ exclaimed Norman a little startled. ‘Protect themselves from — what?’
‘At, there, sir,’ said the man after hesitating again, ‘that’s more than I can say. I’ve heard of a haunted house before now, but never a haunted countryside. Yet that’s what they believe, I take it. It’s all haunted, sir — everywhere. It’s the devil of a job to get any of them to turn out after dark, as I know well, and even in the daytime they won’t stir far without a crucifix hung round their neck. Even the men won’t.’
The car had put on speed while he spoke and Norman had to ask him to ease up a bit; the man, he felt sure, was prey to a touch of superstitious fear as they raced along the darkening road, yet glad enough to talk, provided he was not laughed at. After his last burst of speech he had drawn a deep breath, as though glad to have got it off his chest.
‘What you tell me is most interesting,’ Norman commented invitingly. ‘I’ve come across that sort of thing abroad, but never yet in England. There’s something in it, you know,’ he added persuasively, ‘if we only knew what. I wish I knew the reason, for I’m sure it’s a mistake just to laugh it all away.’ He lit a cigarette, handing one also to his companion, and making him slow down while they lighted them. ‘You’re an observant fellow, I see,’ he went on, ‘and I’ll be bound you’ve come across some queer things. I wish I had your opportunity. It interests me very much.’
‘You’re right, sir,’ the chauffeur agreed, as they drove on again, ‘and it can’t be laughed away, not all of it. There’s something about the whole place ‘ere that ain’t right, as you might say. It “got” me a bit when I first came ‘ere some years ago, but now I’m kind of used to it.’
‘I don’t think I should ever get quite used to it,’ said Norman, ‘till I’d got to the bottom of it. Do tell me anything you’ve noticed. I’d like to know — and I’ll keep it to myself.’
Feeling sure the man had interesting things to tell and having now won his confidence, he begged him to drive more slowly; he was afraid they would reach the house before there had been time to tell more, possibly even some personal experiences. ‘There’s a funny sort of road, or track rather, you may be seeing out shooting,’ the chauffeur went on eagerly enough, yet half nervously. ‘It leads across the moor, and no man or woman will set foot on it to save their lives, not even in the daytime, let alone at night.’
Norman said eagerly that he would like to see it, asking its whereabouts, but of course the directions only puzzled him.
‘You’ll be seeing it, sir, one of these days out shooting and if you watch the natives, you’ll find I’m telling you right.’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Norman asked. ‘Haunted — eh?’
‘That’s it, sir,’ the man admitted, after a longish pause. ‘But a queer kind of ‘aunting. They do say it’s just too lovely to look at — and keep your senses.’
It was the other’s turn to hesitate, for something in him trembled.
Now, young Norman was aware of two things very clearly: first, that it wasn’t quite the thing to pump his host’s employee in this way; second, that what the man told him held an extraordinary, almost alarming interest for him. All folk-lore interested him intensely, legends and local superstitions included. Was this, perhaps a ‘fairy-ridden’ stretch of country, he asked himself? Yet he was not in Ireland, where it would have been natural, but in stolid, matter-of-fact England. The chauffeur was obviously an observant, commonplace southerner, and yet he had become impressed, even a little scared, by what he had noticed. That lay beyond question: the man was relieved to talk to someone who would not laugh at him, while at the same time he was obviously a bit frightened.
A third question rose in his mind as well: this talk of haunted country, of bogies, fairies and the rest, fantastic though it was, perhaps, stirred a queer, yet delicious feeling in him — in his heart, doubtless — that his host’s niece, Diana, had a link with it somewhere.. The origin of a deep intuition is hardly discoverable. He made no attempt to probe it. This was Diana’s country, she must know all the chauffeur hinted, and more besides. There must be something in the atmosphere that attracted her. She had been instrumental in making her uncle invite him. She wanted him to come, she wanted him to taste and share things, ‘other things’, that to her were vital.
These thoughts flashed across him with an elaboration of detail impossible to describe. That the wish was, again, father to the thoughts, doubtless operated, yet the conviction persistently remained and the intuitive flash provided, apparently, inspiration, so that he plied the chauffeur with further questions that produced valuable results. He referred even to the Little People, the Fairies, without exciting contempt or laughter — with the result that the man gave him finally a somewhat dangerous confidence. Solemnly warning his passenger that ‘Sir Hiram mustn’t hear of it’ or he’d lose his job, the man described a remarkable incident that had happened, so to speak, under his own eyes. Sir Hiram’s sister was lost on the moors some years ago and was never found...and the local talk and belief had it that she had been ‘carried off’. Yet not carried off agains
t her will: she had wanted to go.
‘Would that be Mrs. Travers?’ Norman asked.
‘That’s who it was, sir, exactly, seeing as ‘ow you know the family. And it was the strangest disappearance that ever came my way.’ He gave a slight shudder and, if not quite to his listener’s surprise, suddenly crossed himself.
Diana’s mother!
A pause followed the extraordinary story, and then, for once, Norman used words first spoken (to Horatio) to a man who had never heard them before and received them with appropriate satisfaction.
‘Yes, sir,’ he went on, ‘and now he’s got her up here for the first time since it happened years ago — in the very country where her mother was taken — and I’m told his idea is that he ‘opes it will put her right—’
‘Put her right?’
‘I should say — cure her, sir. She’s supposed to have the same — the same—’ he fumbled for a word— ‘unbalance as wot her mother had.’ A strange rush of hope and terror swept across Norman’s heart and mind, but he made a great effort and denied them both, so that his companion little guessed this raging storm. Changing the subject as best he could, controlling his voice with difficulty so as to make it sound normal, he asked casually:, ‘Do other people — I mean, have other people disappeared here?’
‘They do say so, sir,’ was the reply. ‘I’ve heard many a tale, though I couldn’t say as I proved anything. Natives, according to the talk, ‘ave disappeared, nor no trace of them ever found. Children mostly. But the people round here won’t speak of it and it’s difficult to find out, as they never go to the Police and keep it dark among themselves—’
‘Couldn’t they have fallen into potholes, or something like that?’ Norman interrupted, to which the man replied that there was only one pothole in the whole district and the danger spot most carefully fenced round. ‘It’s the place itself, sir,’ he added finally with conviction, as though he could tell of a firsthand personal experience if he dared, ‘it’s the whole country that’s so strange.’
Norman risked the direct question.
‘And what you’ve seen yourself, with your own eyes,’ he asked, ‘did it — sort of frighten you? I mean, you observe so carefully that anything you reported would be valuable.’
‘Well, sir,’ came the reply after a little hesitation, ‘I can’t say ‘frightened’ exactly, though — if you ask me — I didn’t like it. It made me feel queer all over, and I ain’t a religious man—’
‘Do tell me,’ Norman pressed, feeling the house was now not far away and time was short. ‘I shall keep it to myself — and I shall believe you. I’ve had odd experiences myself.’
The man needed no urging, however: he seemed glad to tell his tale.
‘It’s not really very much,’ he said lowering his voice. ‘It was like this, you see, sir. The garage and my rooms lie down at an old farmhouse about a quarter-mile from the Lodge, and from my bedroom window I can see across the moor quite a way. It takes in that trail I was speaking of before, and along that track exactly I sometimes saw lights moving in a sort of wavering line. A bit faint, they were, and sort of dancing about and going out and coming on again, and at first I took them for marsh lights — I’ve seen marsh lights down at our marshes at home — marsh gas we call it. That’s what I thought at first, but I know better now.’
‘You never went out to examine them closer?’
‘No, sir, I did not,’ came the emphatic reply.
‘Or asked any of the natives what they thought?’
The chauffeur gave a curious little laugh; it was a half shy, half embarrassed laugh. Yes, he had once got a native who was willing to say something, but it was only with difficulty that Norman persuaded him to repeat it.
‘Well, sir, what he told me’ — again that embarrassed little laugh— ‘the words he used were “It was the Gay People changing their hunting grounds.” That’s what he said and crossed himself as he said it. They always changed their grounds at what he called the Equinox.’
‘The Gay People... the Equinox....’
The odd phrases were not new to Norman, but he heard them now as though for the first time, they had meaning. The equinox, the solstice, he knew naturally what the words meant, but the ‘Gay People’ belonged to some inner phantasmagoria of his own he had hitherto thought of only imaginatively. It pertained, that is, to some private ‘imaginative creed’ he believed in when he had been reading Yeats, James Stephens, A.E., or when he was trying to write poetry of his own.
Now, side by side with this burly chauffeur from the sceptical South, he came up against it — bang. And he admitted frankly to himself, it gave him a half -incredible thrill of wonder, delight and passion.
‘The Gay People,’ he repeated, half to himself, half to the driver. ‘The fellow called them that?’
‘That’s wot he called them,’ repeated the matter-of-fact chauffeur. ‘And they were passing,’ he added, almost defiantly, as though he expected to be called a liar and deserved, it ‘passing in a stream of dancing lights along the Trod.’
‘The Trod,’ murmured Norman under his breath.
‘The Trod,’ repeated the man in a whisper, ‘that track I spoke of—’ and the car swerved, as though the touch on the wheel was unsteady for a second, though it instantly recovered itself as they swung into the drive.
The Lodge flew past, carrying a cross, Norman noticed, like all the other buildings; and a few minutes later the grey stone shooting-box, small and unpretentious, came in sight. Diana herself was on the step to welcome him, to his great delight.
‘What a picture,’ he thought, as he saw her in her tweeds, her retriever beside her, the hall lamp blazing on her golden hair, one hand shading her eyes. Radiant, intoxicating, delicious, unearthly — he could not find the words — and he knew in that sudden instant that he loved her far beyond all that language could express. The dark background of the grey stone building, with the dim, mysterious moors behind, was exactly right. She stood there, framed in the wonder of two worlds — his girl!
Yet her reception chilled him to the bone. Excited, bubbling over as he was, his words of pleasure ready to tumble about each other, his heart primed with fairy tales and wonder, she had nothing to say except that tea was waiting, and that she hoped he had had a good journey. Response to his own inner convulsions there was none: she was polite, genial, cordial even, but beyond that — nothing. They exchanged commonplaces and she mentioned that the grouse were plentiful, that her uncle had got some of the best ‘guns’ in England — which pleased his vanity for a moment — and that she hoped he would enjoy himself.
Her leaden reaction left him speechless. He felt convicted of boyish, idiotic fantasy.
‘I asked particularly for you to come,’ she admitted frankly, as they crossed the hall. ‘I had an idea somehow you’d like to be here.’
He thanked her, but betrayed nothing of his first delight, now chilled and rendered voiceless.
‘It’s your sort of country,’ she added, turning towards him with a swish of her skirts. ‘At least, I think it is.’
‘If you like it,’ he returned quietly, ‘I certainly shall like it too.’
She stopped a moment and looked hard at him. ‘But of course I like it,’ she said with conviction. ‘And it’s much lovelier than those Essex marshes.’
Remembering her first description of those Essex marshes, he thought of a hundred answers, but before the right one came to him he found himself in the drawing-room chatting to his hostess, Lady Digby. The rest of the house-party were still out on the moor.
‘Diana will show you the garden before the darkness comes,’ Lady Digby suggested presently. ‘It’s quite a pretty view.’
The ‘pretty view’ thrilled Norman with its wild beauty, for the moor beyond stretched right down to the sea at Saltbeck, and in the other direction the hills ran away, fold upon fold, into a dim blue distance. The Lodge and its garden seemed an oasis in a wilderness of primeval loveliness, unkempt and wild as
when God first made it. He was aware of its intense, seductive loveliness that appealed to all the strange, unearthly side of him, but at the same time he felt the powerful, enticing human seductiveness of the girl who was showing him round. And the two conflicted violently in his soul. The conflict left him puzzled, distraught, stupid, since first one, then the other, took the upper hand. What saved him from a sudden tumultuous confession of his imagined passion, probably, was the girls’ calm, almost cold, indifference. Obviously without response she felt nothing of the tumult that possessed him.
Exchanging commonplaces, they admired the ‘pretty view’ together, then turned back in due course to the house. ‘I catch their voices,’ remarked Diana. ‘Let’s go in and hear all about it and how many birds they got.’ And it was on the door of the french window that she suddenly amazed — and, truth to tell — almost frightened him.
‘Dick,’ she said, using his first name, to his utter bewilderment and delight, and grasping his hand tightly in both of her own, ‘I may need your help.’ She spoke with a fiery intensity. Her eyes went blazing suddenly. ‘It was here, you know, that mother — went. And I think — I’m certain of it — they’re after me, too. And I don’t know which is right — to go or to stay. All this’ — she swept her arm to include the house, the chattering room, the garden— ‘is such rubbish — cheap, nasty, worthless. The other is so satisfying — its eternal loveliness, and yet—’ her voice dropped to a whisper— ‘soulless, without hope or future. You may help me.’ Her eyes turned upon him with a sudden amazing fire. ‘That’s why I asked you here.’
Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood Page 575