by E. F. Benson
Presently we were sitting in the small, cosy room, with our tea ready for us, and the fire burning bright on the hearth. We talked, odd as it may appear, of anything else but that. But the silences between the abandonment of one topic and the introduction of another grew longer, and at last Jim spoke.
‘Something has happened,’ he said. ‘You saw what wasn’t there and I felt what wasn’t there. What did we see or feel? And what did she see or feel?’
He had hardly spoken when there came a rap at the door, and our landlord entered. For the moment during which the door was open I heard from the bar of the inn a shrill, gabbling voice, which I had never heard before, but which I knew Jim had heard.
‘There’s Mrs Labson come into the bar, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘and she wants to know if it was you who were standing outside her house ten minutes ago. She’s got a notion . . . ’
He paused.
‘It’s hard to make out what she’s after,’ he said. ‘Her husband has not been at home all day, and he’s not home yet, and she thinks you may have seen him on the golf-links. And then she says she’s thinking of letting her house for a month, and wonders if you would care to take it, but she runs on so – ’
The door opened again, and there she stood, filling the doorway. She had on her head a great feathered hat, and over her shoulders a red satin evening cloak now moth-eaten and ragged, while on her feet were still those carpet-slippers.
‘So odd it must seem to you for a lady to intrude like this,’ she said, ‘but you are the gentlemen, are you not, whom I saw admiring my house just now?’
Her eyes, now utterly vacant, now suddenly keen and searching, fell on the window. The curtains were not drawn and outside the last of the daylight was fading. She shuffled quickly across the floor and rattled the blind down, first peering out into the dusk.
‘I’m sure I don’t wonder at that,’ she gabbled on, ‘for my house is much admired by visitors here. I was thinking of letting it for a few weeks, though I am not sure that it would be convenient to do so just yet, and even if I did, I should have to put some of my treasures away in a little attic at the top of the house and lock that up. Some heirlooms, you understand. But that’s all by the way. I came in, a very odd intrusion, I know, to ask if either of you had seen my husband, Mr Labson – I am Mrs Labson, as I should have told you – if you’d seen him on the golf-links this afternoon. He went out about two o’clock, and he’s not been back. Most unusual, for there’s his tea ready for him always at half past four.’
She paused and seemed to listen intently, then went across to the window again and drew the blind aside.
‘I thought I heard a step in my garden just out there,’ she said, ‘and I wondered if it was Mr Labson. Such a pleasant little garden, a bit over-grown maybe; I think I saw one of you gentlemen looking down into it last night, when I was taking a breath of air. Or even if you didn’t care to take the whole of my house, perhaps you would like a couple of rooms there. I could make everything most comfortable for you, for Mr Labson always said I was a wonderful cook and manager, and not a word of complaint have I ever had from him all these years. Still, if he’s taken it into his head to go off suddenly like this, I should be pleased to have a lodger in the house, for I’m not accustomed to be alone. Being alone in a house was a thing I never could bear.’
She turned to our landlord.
‘I’ll take a room here for tonight,’ she said, ‘if Mr Labson doesn’t come back. Perhaps you would send across for a bag into which I have put what I shall want. No; that would never do; I’ll go and get it myself, if you would be so good as to come with me as far as the door. One never knows who is about at this time of night. And if Mr Labson should come here to look for me, don’t let him in whatever you do. Say I’m not here; say I’ve left home for a day or two and have given no address. You don’t want Mr Labson here, for he’s not got a penny of his own, and couldn’t pay for his board and lodging, and I won’t support him in idleness any longer. He ruined me and I’ll be even with him yet. I told him – ’
The stream of insane babble suddenly ceased; her eyes, fixing themselves on a dusky corner of the room behind where I stood, grew wide with terror, and her mouth gaped. Simultaneously I heard a gasp of startled amazement from Jim, and turned quickly to see what he and Mrs Labson were looking at.
There he stood, he whom I had seen half an hour ago appearing suddenly in the square, and as suddenly disappearing as he came to the Corner House. Next minute she had flung the door wide and bolted out. Jim and I followed and saw her rush down the passage outside, and through the open door of the bar into the square. Terror winged her feet, and that great misshapen bulk sped away and was lost in the darkness of the fallen night.
We went straight to the police-station, and the country was scoured for the mad woman who, I felt sure, was also a murderess. The river was dragged, and about midnight two fishermen found the body below the sluice-gate at the head of the estuary. Search meantime had been made in the Corner House, and her husband’s corpse was discovered, strangled with a silk handkerchief, behind the water-butt in the corner of the garden. Close by was a half-dug excavation, where no doubt she had intended to bury him.
Corstophine
Fred Bennet had proposed himself for a visit of a couple of nights, and had said in his letter that he had a curious story to tell me. The date he suggested was perfectly convenient, and he arrived just before dinner. We were alone, but when I hinted that I was more than ready to hear his curious story he said that would come later.
‘I want to clear the ground first,’ he said, ‘for it is always better to agree or disagree on a principle before you advance your illustration.’
‘Spook?’ I asked, knowing that the occult side of life is far more real to him than the happenings of normal existence.
‘I really don’t know whether you’ll think it is spooky or not,’ he said. ‘You may think it is only a coincidence. But, you see, I don’t believe in coincidences. There isn’t such a thing as blind chance, to my mind: what we call chance is only the working out of a law which we are ignorant of.’
‘Explain,’ said I.
‘Well, take the rising of the sun. If we were ignorant of the movement of the earth we should think it a coincidence that the sun will rise tomorrow very nearly at the same time as it rose today. But we don’t call it a coincidence because we know, more or less, the law that makes it do so. That’s clear, isn’t it?’
‘That will do for the present,’ I said. ‘I won’t argue yet.’
‘Right. Now since we know about the movement of the earth, we can safely prophesy that the sun will rise tomorrow. Our knowledge of what is past makes us able to see into the future, and, in fact, we shouldn’t call it prophecy at all if we were told the sun would rise tomorrow. In just the same way, if a man had known the exact movement of a certain iceberg, and the exact course of the Titanic, he would have been able to prophesy that the Titanic would founder on that iceberg at a certain moment. Our knowledge of the future, in a word, depends entirely on our knowledge of the past, and if we knew absolutely all about the past, we should know absolutely all about the future.’
‘Not quite,’ said I. ‘A fresh factor might come.’
‘But that factor would be dependent on the past too,’ he said.
‘Is the story going to be as difficult as the preliminaries?’ I asked.
He laughed.
‘Much more difficult,’ he said. ‘At least, the explanation is much more difficult, if you don’t accept these very simple facts. To my mind the idea that the past and present and future are all really one is the only possible way of accounting for it.’
He pushed back his plate and leaned his elbows on the table, looking fixedly at me. He has the most extraordinary eyes I have ever seen; they seem sometimes to look quite through what they are regarding, and then to c
ome back as from some remote focus to your face again.
‘Of course, time, the whole sum of time, cannot be more than an infinitesimal point in eternity,’ he said, ‘even if it is as much as that. When we get out of time, when we die, in fact, we shall regard time as just a point, visible all round, so to speak. Some people, even now, get glimpses of it in its entirety. We call them clairvoyants: they have visions of the future which are actually and literally fulfilled. Or, perhaps, they have, when they see such things, some revelation of the past which enables them, like the man prophesying about the sinking of the Titanic, to foretell the future. If he had found people to believe him a disaster like that might have been averted. Take it which way you like.’
Now Fred, as I already knew, had more than once in his life experienced this mysterious enlightenment, and I guessed now the nature of the curious story of which he had spoken.
‘You’ve seen something,’ I said, rising. ‘I long to hear all about it.’
The night was very hot, and instead of adjourning to another room, we went out into the garden, where there was some coolness of breeze and dew. The sun was set, but light still lingered in the sky; screeching companies of swifts wheeled overhead, and the warmth drew out in subtle distillation the fragrance from the rose-beds. My servant had already put out a little encampment of basket-chairs, and a table with cards, if we felt so disposed, on the lawn, and here we settled ourselves.
‘And above all things,’ I said, ‘tell me your story fully and at length. Otherwise I shall only be asking questions as to details, and that will interrupt you.’
With his permission I give the story very much as he told it me. As he spoke the night darkened round us, the swifts ceased their shrill foraging, and bats took their place with shriller and barely audible squeakings. Occasionally there was the flare of a lit match, and the creak of a basket-chair, but there was no other interruption.
‘One evening, about three weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I was dining with Arthur Temple. His wife and his sister-in-law were there, but about half past ten they went out to a ball. He hates dancing as much as I do, and proposed that we should have a game of chess. I adore chess, and play it quite atrociously, but when I am playing chess I can think of nothing whatever else. That night, however, things went strangely well, and with trembling excitement I saw that after some twenty moves the unwonted prospect of winning my game was opening out in front of me. I mention this to show that I was very wide-awake and concentrated on what I was doing.
‘As I meditated the move which was soon to prove fatal to my adversary, a vision such as I have had once or twice before leaped into being before my eyes. My hand was raised to take hold of my queen, when the chess-board at which I was looking and my actual surroundings entirely vanished, and I was standing on the platform of a railway station. There was a train drawn up by it, out of which I was aware I had just stepped, and I knew I had an hour to wait for the one that was to take me on to my unknown destination. Just opposite me was the board on which was painted the name of the station; this I shall not tell you at present, because you might guess what my story is going to be. But though it seemed perfectly natural that I should be there, I had never at that time, to the best of my knowledge, heard of the name of the station before. There was my luggage on the platform, and I gave it in charge of a porter who was exactly like Arthur Temple, told him that I was going for a walk, and would be back before my train was due.
‘It was a very dark afternoon – somehow I knew it was afternoon – and the air oppressively close and sultry, as if a storm was coming up. I walked through the booking-office of the station and out into a big yard. To the right were some allotment gardens, beyond which the ground rose rapidly up to a distant line of moors; to the left were rows upon rows of sheds, with tall chimneys vomiting smoke, and in front a long street with huddled houses stretching right and left. They were built of grey, discoloured stone, with slate roofs, mean and dismal dwellings, and neither in the station yard nor in the long perspective of the street in front of me was there a sign of any human being. Probably, I thought, the men and women of the place were engaged in those manufacturing buildings; but there were no children playing on the pavements. The place seemed absolutely deserted, and somehow disquieting and appalling.
‘I stood there a moment, hesitating as to whether I should start on a walk among such charmless surroundings or stop in the station and while away the hour with my book. Then I became aware that there was waiting for me something which very closely concerned me, and that, whatever it was, it lay beyond that long untenanted street. I had to go, though I had no idea where I was going or what I should find. I crossed the yard and started to walk up the street.
‘As soon as I got on the move that sense of being obliged to go completely vanished; it had given me the required push, I suppose, and I realised that I was just waiting for my train and filling in the time. The street stretched endlessly in front of me, up a steepish hill, and on each side were these low two-storey houses. Their doors and windows, in spite of the stifling heat, were all shut, and never a face showed from within, nor was there a single footstep but my own to break the silence. No sparrow fluttered in the eaves or foraged in the gutters; no cat slunk along the house-walls or blinked on the doorsteps; there was nothing visible nor audible of the evidence of life.
‘On and on I walked, and presently the street began to show signs of coming to an end. The houses on one side ceased, and I looked over long stretches of grimy fields, tenantless of any grazing beasts. At that, like a blink of distant lightning, there flashed on my mind the notion that I did not see any living things because I no longer had anything to do with the living. All about me probably were children and men and women, and cats and sparrows, but I did not belong to them. I was there in some other capacity, and whatever it was that was of significance for me in this desolate place it was not concerned with life. I can’t express it more definitely than that, because the notion itself was indefinite, and it flashed upon me but for a moment and was gone again. Then the houses on the other side of the street came to an end also, and I was walking along a black country road, with stunted hedges on each side. Meantime the dusk was coming rapidly on, a thick and murky dusk, hot and windless. The road made a sharp right-angled turn, and while it was open to the fields on one side the other was bounded by a high stone wall that rose above my head. I was beginning to wonder what this enclosure was when I came to a big iron gate in it, and I saw through the bars that it was a graveyard. Row upon row the tombstones glimmered faintly in the dusk, and at the far end of it, only just visible in the gathering darkness, were the roofs and small spire of a cemetery chapel. The gate was open, and feeling that there was something here which concerned me, I entered and began walking up an unweeded gravel path in the direction of the chapel. As I did this, I looked at my watch and saw that half of my hour of waiting was nearly spent, and that I must soon be retracing my steps. But I knew I had business here which must be performed.
‘The tombstones came to an end, and there was a broad space of open grass between me and the chapel. Then I saw that there was one grave standing alone there, and with that odd curiosity that prompts us to read the names on tombstones I left the path and went to it.
‘Though it appeared rather new, glimmering whitely in the dusk, I saw that already moss and lichen had covered the face of it, and I wondered whether it was the grave of some stranger who had died a lonely death here, and had no one, friend or relation, who looked after it. The name, whatever it was, was quite overgrown, and with some impulse of pity for him who lay below, and had so soon been forgotten, I began scraping it with the ferrule of my stick. The moss peeled off quite easily, coming away in long shreds and fibres, and presently I saw that the name was visible. But as I worked the darkness had so gathered that I could not read it, and I lit a match and held it to the surface of the stone. And the name I read there was my own.
‘ “For half a minute,” he said, “I thought you had got me.” A few moves were sufficient to bring the game to a most undesired conclusion, and after a short chat I went home. The vision apparently had lasted just the space of his own move, for mine was already being made when it began.’
He paused, and I supposed the story was over.
‘What an odd affair!’ I said. ‘It’s just one of those meaningless but interesting intrusions into everyday life, coming from God knows where, which doesn’t lead to anything. What was the name of the station, by the way? Did you take the trouble to find out whether your vision resembled the actual place? Was that the coincidence?’
I was, I confess, rather disappointed, though, indeed, he had been telling his story very well. But like so many of these strange glimpses which clairvoyants and mediums seem genuinely to get into the world of powers and unseen agencies, which we know lies so closely round us and sometimes manifests itself to the senses of those who are still on the material plane, it seemed so pointless. Even if it turned out that eventually he was buried in the cemetery of this twilit, untenanted town, what good would it have done him to have known of that before it happened? What is the use of communications between this world and some other world inaccessible to the ordinary perceptions of mankind if these communications contain nothing that is of value or interest?