by Ruskin Bond
Her nerves got the better of her, and she screamed with terror. She was experienced enough to understand her plight. She knew that she would certainly freeze to death before morning if she went to sleep, and was more than likely to do so even if she kept herself awake. She had been on the move from two that morning, getting things ready for her husband’s early start, and after that making butter to trade for their groceries, seeing to the stock, and then going to Sunset. She had eaten nothing since eleven, she was dog-tired and ravenously hungry, and above all else she was cold—cold right inside to the innermost part of her body. She did not know if she could keep awake till morning, and, even if she did, the blizzard was very unlikely to have died down.
It was hopeless to think of trying to reach her neighbours. Along the straight prairie roads she would never find her way in that maelstrom of whirling snow. And if she could find her way, she would probably die of cold before she had gone a mile. And there was nothing in the house to warm her.
Ah! She straightened with a faint hope as she thought of the barn. If she could reach it, she could snuggle between the two cows and perhaps keep life in her that way. She half started up from her chair and then sank down again despondently. There was not the slightest hope of her being able to reach the barn without a lantern.
She knew that even with lanterns, and warmed after a good meal, men had gone out in a blizzard to attend to their stock and never been seen alive again: had just set out to walk the fifty or hundred yards which they walked four times every day of their lives, and had missed their way in that bewildering fury of powdered snow. There was nothing for her to do except walk up and down the room and try to keep awake till morning came.
The loneliness, and the darkness, and the cold, weighed upon her like tangible enemies. It was so dark that she blundered into the wall at the far end of the room, and her head bumped into something. Her nerves almost made her jump from it, but when she put out her hand she felt a familiar outline, and her stifled cry turned into an exclamation of joy.
The telephone! Why had not she thought of it before? Even in that awful storm, when her plight was known, somehow or other they would form an expedition in Sunset and bring help to her.
But as she turned the handle to ring up Central, her joy gave way once more to despair, all the more bitter for the momentary ray of hope. As if she could not have remembered! The telephone had been disconnected months ago, because they could not afford the expense, and the telephone company had not bothered to take the instrument away. When No.1 Northern was only sixty cents a bushel in Winnipeg, the telephone company would not be asked to install it anywhere else. They had more disconnected instruments than they could handle as it was.
With a sigh of utter despair she pulled her overcoat closer round her shoulders and resumed her walk. Fifteen paces to the door and fifteen paces back to the telephone. Back and forward. Back and forward, and all the time her brain flayed by the tortures of Tantalus.
She was cold, and she knew that there was a great pile of wood in the box by the stove; she was hungry, and she knew that there was bread and butter and jam and pork and veal in plenty; she was afraid of the dark, and there was a lamp on the table filled with coal oil; she was lonely, and there was a telephone. But none of these things was any good to her, and as she paced slowly up and down she found herself babbling incoherently: ‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.’
Her woollen blizzard-cap was stiff against her face where her breath had frozen, and her injured fingers were throbbing. Before her eyes swam visions of a red-hot stove and a hot supper on the table and a light in the lamp, until she could stand them no longer. Even though she knew it to be useless she simply had to do something different.
If only she were not so hungry! She stumbled to the pantry and automatically caught up the bread tin. With trembling fingers she opened it and took out a loaf. She found a knife and tried to cut a slice, but it would not make the slightest impression. The loaf was frozen as hard as a stone.
‘Ask for bread and ye give them a stone.’ The words danced before her eyes until she knew she was nearly hysterical again. She ran her hand aimlessly along the shelf until it encountered a pat of butter. That alone, out of all her supply of food, would not be frozen like a stone. She gouged out a lump from the pat with her knife and had almost put it to her lips when she remembered her hurt fingers. If the knife touched her lips it would take all the skin off them.
She stuck the lump on her mittens and bit off a piece, but, famished as she was, it was so greasy that it nearly made her sick. She moaned with despair and idly ran her hand along the shelf again. It encountered a long, round object, and for a moment she could not think what it was. Her half-frozen fingers in their clumsy mittens could not feel, and she fidgeted with it until with a shock of surprise she saw a ray of light.
She was holding the electric torch they had bought in case they had a breakdown in their car when driving at night, and it had been put on the shelf when they could no longer afford the car. Not much good to her now, but the light was a little bit of company.
She returned to the kitchen and flashed it over the room. The walls and roof of the house cracked at intervals almost like a pistol shot as the timber contracted. She did not like the colour of the little bit of her cheek showing in the opening of her blizzard-cap. It was a dirty white and she knew she had a touch of frostbite there.
She must do something! Her despairing brain caught at the hope that there might be an odd match lying somewhere. She knew it was hopeless, but any sort of action was better than aimless pacing up and down. With the aid of her torch she searched every nook and cranny of the house, but there was no match. She turned out the drawers and all the pockets of her husband’s clothes.
How she wished that she had not lectured him on his habit of leaving loose matches in his pockets, in case they set the house on fire; and how she wished he had remained firm in his contention that there was no danger in that! If only he had gone on laughing at her, and had not conquered his habit simply to please her and turned out his pockets every time he took off his clothes!
She closed the last drawer and returned to the kitchen to resume her walk. Up and down. Back and forward. Till her brain was mesmerised and her legs ached with fatigue and cold. She was so tired that she could keep going no longer.
At any cost she must sit down and rest for a little while. She found her chair and sat down. Her head began to nod and her eyes closed, but she fought against the temptation. That way led to certain death. She began to count the minutes to help herself keep awake, but once more her eyes closed. She tried desperately to think of some possible place she might have overlooked in her search for an odd match, some possible garment of her husband’s which perhaps she had missed.
Her brain swam with visions of overalls and pairs of trousers. She could not think of one she had missed, and they made her dizzy like the sheep she counted when she lay awake at night sometimes. Her head nodded again, and this time she did fall into a doze.
The electric torch slid from her nerveless fingers on to the floor, and the bang awoke her with a start. If it had not been for that torch, she would soon have been dead. Thoroughly frightened at her near escape, she picked it up and once more began her walk. But the brief period of sleep had given her subconscious mind a chance to work, and suddenly she remembered.
There was an old pair of blue denim overalls hanging on a nail on the veranda wall. They had been there for over a year. She had been meaning to cut them up for clothes to wash the milk pails with and was always forgetting. There was just one chance in a million that he left them there before he had started to turn out his pockets.
One chance in a million. There might be a match in them. Anyway she would see, and then if there was not she might just as well walk towards the barn and the warmth of the cows’ bodies. She would never reach them, but it was better to die quickly attempting something than to die slowly trying to keep awake in the kitch
en.
With her breath coming in sobs, she went to the door. There was a pile of snow where it had drifted through the key-hole. She caught hold of the door handle and began to turn it. But before she opened the door she glanced back and looked round the darkened room in which she had toiled and eaten and, in spite of the drudgery, been happy with her husband. She knew that it was a thousand to one she would never see it again.
With an effort she tore her eyes away and pushed open the door. It slammed behind her as the wind and snow swooped down like a million knives cutting at her body. She flashed her torch along the veranda wall. The beam of light wavered and then fastened on a tattered pair of blue overalls. There was still a chance!
She crept towards them and pulled off her right mitten with her teeth. Surely after all the misfortunes of the last few hours it was too much to expect him to have left any matches in the pockets. And if he had, supposing the pockets had holes in them. And if....
She had no more time to think, for her fingers were inside the first pocket. As she had feared, it was empty. She sobbed as she tried the second—and then the third. They, too, were empty.
She drew in her breath and paused. There was only one more pocket—the right hip-pocket—and she could not bring herself to try it. If it was empty too, then she was done for.
She could hardly move her bare fingers and knew that if she waited another minute or two they would be frost-bitten. There was nothing for it but to try, and then, if she drew a blank, that last walk to the barn. With the impatience of desperation she thrust her fingers in the pocket. They felt nothing, and with a gasp of despair she was about to withdraw them when they touched a little hard object in one corner.
It was scarcely worth trying, but she picked at it with the nail of her forefinger. It seemed to be round, and she caught her breath with excitement and fear. She was sure now that it was the head of a match, but her fingers were so cold, and she trembled so in her eagerness, that for a moment she could not move it.
Finally her reawakening hope gave her the wit to push the torch underneath the outside of the pocket. She clawed and picked at the object with her nail, and then at last she knew that it was a match, a whole match which had slipped down a tiny hole in the pocket.
Slowly and with infinite care she drew it upward with her fingernail while the torch in her left hand held the cloth steady. Higher and higher it came until at last she was able to close the other fingers of her right hand round it. She cried aloud with joy as she clutched it, and her head swam from the reaction. She stood thus trying to pull herself together, for she had yet to regain the kitchen and light the match. Her hand was almost useless from the cold, and if she was not careful she would drop the match as she took it out of the pocket.
Salvation was so near, and yet it was so fatally easy to make a mistake. With infinite caution she put her mouth against the overalls and slowly drew her lips away from the mitten she had been holding in her teeth. She pressed her cheek against the end of it to keep it against the overalls and then slowly edged her lips into the pocket.
In her excitement she almost bit the match in two as her teeth closed over it, but with a great effort she restrained herself and at last stood erect with the end of it in her mouth. Her right hand felt dead as she wriggled it into her mitten again, but the match was still between her teeth as she turned and made for the door.
She had won, and the knowledge made her calm and confident in her purpose. She knew what she had to deal with, and this time she would not fail. While she stumbled the three yards to the door her brain reviewed what she must do.
She must find the match-box she had dropped on the floor and then open the door of the fire-box, sprinkle a little coal oil from the bottle in the pantry on the wood just in case of accident; and when she had done that, and not before, she could take off her right mitten. She had just enough feeling left in her right hand to strike that one match, and after that she would have to rub snow on it to guard against frostbite. And after that on her face, and then after that light the heater and fasten up her other hand, and chop the frozen milk and water out of the buckets with the little bench axe by the wood box, and then....
With the match between her teeth she opened the door and once more stood in the kitchen. It no longer seemed hostile, and she no longer feared the loneliness, for now she had hope and something definite to do. Her head was clear and she knew that she would not fail as she switched on the torch, which was beginning to wane but ought to last until she had lighted the lamp.
The match-box was covered with snow dropped from her coat, but it was so powdery that she blew it off with one puff through her clenched teeth. Her hand did not shake until she had opened the door of the fire-box and sprinkled the coal oil over the wood.
But when she had wriggled out of her right mitten and knelt down on the floor by the fire-box, she had to work her fingers like a pianist before she could trust them to take the match from her teeth. Gingerly she transferred the match to her fingers, propped the torch up against the leg of the stove, and then took the match-box from the top, where she had laid it.
Now that the crucial moment had come she was nervous again. She was afraid to look around. Her brain told her there was no other preparation to make, but it took her a terrible, seemingly endless minute before she could bring herself to make the final move. Her life depended on that match, and if she failed....
But she would not fail. With an unconscious gesture of defiance against fate she held the match-box inside the fire-box with her left hand right up against the paper, forced her deadened right hand slowly and carefully inside the opening, and with drawn breath struck the match.
The paper, sodden with coal oil, burst into flame which scorched her left mitten and made her frozen right hand throb with pain, but she scarcely noticed it.
The fire roared up the chimney in a deafening crescendo, and she shut the door of the fire-box with a gasp of ecstasy.
Soon she would be warm.
THE STORY OF YAND MANOR HOUSE
E. AND H. HERON
Looking through the notes of Mr Flaxman Low, one sometimes catches through the steel-blue hardness of facts, the pink flush of romance, or more often the black corner of a horror unnameable. The following story may serve as an instance of the latter. Mr Low not only unravelled the mystery at Yand, but at the same time justified his life-work to M. Thierry, the well-known French critic and philosopher.
At the end of a long conversation, M. Thierry, arguing from his own standpoint as a materialist, had said:
‘The factor in the human economy which you call “soul” cannot be placed.’
‘I admit that,’ replied Low. ‘Yet, when a man dies, is there not one factor unaccounted for in the change that comes upon him? Yes! For though his body still exists, it rapidly falls to pieces, which proves that that has gone which held it together.’
The Frenchman laughed, and shifted his ground.
‘Well, for my part, I don’t believe in ghosts! Spirit manifestations, occult phenomena—is not this the ashbin into which a certain clique shoot everything they cannot understand, or for which they fail to account?’
‘Then what should you say to me, Monsieur, if I told you that I have passed a good portion of my life in investigating this particular ashbin, and have been lucky enough to sort a small part of its contents with tolerable success?’ replied Flaxman Low.
‘The subject is doubtless interesting—but I should like to have some personal experience in the matter,’ said Thierry dubiously.
‘I am at present investigating a most singular case,’ said Low. ‘Have you a day or two to spare?’
Thierry thought for a minute or more.
‘I am grateful,’ he replied. ‘But, forgive me, is it a convincing ghost?’
‘Come with me to Yand and see. I have been there once already, and came away for the purpose of procuring information from MSS, to which I have the privilege of access, for I confess that the phenomena
at Yand lie altogether outside any former experience of mine.’
Low sank back into his chair with his hands clasped behind his head—a favourite position of his—and the smoke of his long pipe curled up lazily into the golden face of an Isis, which stood behind him on a bracket. Thierry, glancing across, was struck by the strange likeness between the faces of the Egyptian goddess and this scientist of the nineteenth century. On both rested the calm, mysterious abstraction of some unfathomable thought. As he looked, he decided.
‘I have three days to place at your disposal.’
‘I thank you heartily,’ replied Low. ‘To be associated with so brilliant a logician as yourself in an inquiry of this nature is more than I could have hoped for! The material with which I have to deal is so elusive, the whole subject is wrapped in such obscurity and hampered by so much prejudice, that I can find few really qualified persons who care to approach these investigations seriously. I go down to Yand this evening, and hope not to leave without clearing up the mystery. You will accompany me?’
‘Most certainly. Meanwhile, pray tell me something of the affair.’
‘Briefly the story is as follows. Some weeks ago I went to Yand Manor House at the request of the owner, Sir George Blackburton, to see what I could make of the events which took place there. All they complain of is the impossibility of remaining in one room—the dining-room.’
‘What then is he like, this M. le Spook?’ asked the Frenchman, laughing.
‘No one has ever seen him, or for that matter heard him.’
‘Then how——’
‘You can’t see him, nor hear him, nor smell him,’ went on Low, ‘but you can feel him and—taste him!’
‘Mon Dieu! But this is singular! Is he then of so bad a flavour?’