The Haunted House

by Hilaire Belloc

  “Oh,” John had answered. “Yes, Rackham, of course. Where else should you send it?” And he had turned abruptly out of the familiar door.

  After that he noticed the odious thing in the address of letters arriving. On the first day he had occasion to write a note he found it on the paper heading. He saw in the County News that some show or other was to be opened a fortnight hence by Mrs. Maple of Rackham Catchings. He was beginning to get it on the brain.

  And certainly there had been plenty of Catchings added to Rackham. To his mind, in those few days during which he still lingered, the new sham timbered front was the Catchings and the beastly sham panelling and sham beams of the new rooms, and the odious antique furniture, and the silly Wardour Street pictures deliberately darkened—all these were the Catchings. He went over them one by one, listing them in his mind, and grimly delighted in the coming luxury, distant or near, of tearing them out by the roots like a lot of bad teeth.

  It was a state of things that did not make for better relations, though John was careful to keep off any questions on the novelties, even on the absurd novel name. He would learn its origin in due time. Meanwhile upon anything that mattered he was stubbornly silent, and sufficiently talkative on things that did not.

  Aunt Hilda played her part well enough, determined as he was, and successful as he was, in preventing an open quarrel. On the day when she bade him good-bye at the door, and made him promise to write and to return often to visit her, she rejoiced that she had not broken her word to the dead man. She had done her best. And if anything went wrong with John, why she was always there to help. But there is no denying that she was relieved.

  As for John, though he had left Rackham silent, he had fallen into a new mood as the train approached London. Her friends and his father’s had given him introductions and he had been told of good and reasonable lodgings; and he had those few hundreds and scores of pounds in his pocket, which are a fortune on the threshold of one’s twentieth year.

  But quite unchanged in his heart as he travelled still stood the image of the old Rackham, the real Rackham. And those hurried facts which his father had passed over as though they were too painful for him—sums of money: the real sum owed—£10,000, or say £12,000, £13,000 at the very most—yet £20,000 claimed. Well, £20,000 it legally was and £20,000 he would adhere to.

  That £20,000 he would find, make, somehow, somewhere.

  At his age 20,000 is like a million, but at his age, also, a million may be found, made, somehow—somewhere. That £20,000 hardened in his soul and became the permanent furniture of it.

  Chapter III

  How young people fall on their legs no one knows—least of all themselves: no more than cats thrown off a roof. Those who have gone out into the world on their own before they were twenty know that it happens, and that is all they can say.

  It happened to John Maple. He went through the string of those adventures which all such lads go through, indifferent to the squalor because he was too young; delighted with the uncertainty, and buoyed up by the novelty of his life. It happened to him also (as it happens to all such) that he was never cut off from his equals in real life as such are cut off in melodrama. There was nothing about not darkening doors again, or shaking dust off feet. He went down often enough to Aunt Hilda’s (thinking himself a noble fellow enough for tolerating Rackham). He made better and better friends with Corton, who always thought of him as the only true Maple. He met his aunt’s friends. His father’s old acquaintances looked him up, and asked him out in London. If you had taken a couple of weeks out of the boy’s life and followed it hour by hour, you would have found such a mosaic as only an early experience of that strange kind knows—there are plenty of us alive to-day who have known it and can remember it. John Maple came to know them all.

  Lodgings chosen for their peculiarity, their isolation; a single bare room overlooking London from the height of an old building; a basement; a dusty studio; one changed for another. Odd acquaintances from the most different sorts of worlds. Broken-down actors, young men trying to find work, and trying to forget the time when they were soldiers. Pompous hosts in huge great mausoleums of houses (bad speculations on the Crown property at Kensington—white elephants). Dull Bohemian nights in Chelsea. Much more interesting revolutionary nights sandwiched between foreign and domestic spies in reeking cellars off Houndsditch. One or two really interesting parties in the houses of such people, for instance, as Charles Baker, who had been his father’s friend for years before the exile, and who was still in Parliament and still ridiculing it, but whose real point was that he could paint; or tea with another friend of his father’s of very many years’ standing, Lady Pattle, the widow of the Admiralty Judge. There he met everybody—and there, incidentally, he met Bo.

  Lady Pattle liked pretty well everything, but if she liked one thing more than another it was people who could talk crisply and dress crisply. She liked them best when they were least English; and she liked them best of all when they were American.

  Now God in His providence had at this very moment provided for Lady Pattle, and for England, precisely what was most needed in this line.

  Hamilcar Hellup had not begun life upon a few copper coins, still less had he walked as a barefoot child into New York, because he could not afford to ride. He had been born of a very good family—that is to say, of a family that had plenty of lineage (ten generations of it since the first settlers); moderate in fortune; once Puritan, now atheist, in religion. He had been brought up with the other lads of the village under that fine tradition of social equality which for so long was, and still is, in unspoiled places, the tradition of the United States. He had made a large fortune without selling any material objects that anyone had ever seen, dealing shrewdly in paper. He had never cheated anyone, to his knowledge. What is far more remarkable, very few people had cheated him; or, at any rate, very few with impunity.

  His delight was to escape from New York and return at too brief intervals to the place of his birth: and there his confidant was a play-mate who had remained poor and cunning on the soil, one Hiram Jake. Hiram Jake remained in Hamilcar Hellup’s vision the symbol of his own people, and years later, when he stole back home on brief escapes from England, to talk of Mayfair to Hiram Jake over the broken fence of that citizen’s lot was cold water in the desert to the millionaire.

  When he was a little over fifty he became a widower, and was left with an only child, a girl called Isabeau, then twelve years old, and to enjoy, at eighteen, yet another fortune from her mother. His whole life changed. He gave up the accumulation of further wealth—and therein was wise, for he had an enormous lump of it. He came over to Europe with his daughter. First he travelled with her to many places he himself had seen in his former journeys; then he put her back into a school in his own country; his wife would have wished it.

  While Isabeau was thus growing up American, her father, fully realising, what he had known at the back of his mind since first he had seen the country, that England was the place where rich men should come to die, made his arrangements to settle here.

  Nearly seven years had passed since then, and Isabeau, whose name had very naturally contracted into Bo, was on the point of coming back to England, when Hamilcar Hellup (he had been Hamilcar J., but he had dropped the J.—wherein again he was wise) was first pestered by our hungry politicians to pay them money for a peerage.

  Now Hamilcar, being an American, knew all about such things. The Press of his native country had told him far more about English politics than our own Press ever tells Balham or Tooting. He knew all about the politicians, with their tongues hanging out for money—and he preferred to keep his money to himself. Therefore had Hamilcar been standing on guard, like a wicket keeper with the gloves on, for now some years: ready to catch each attack on his purse and throw it back. Hitherto he had succeeded. Of the last begging interviews, two had been attempted by a tout of the Prime Minister of the day, very clumsily done, without a proper introductio
n; the fellow simply rang the bell and sent in a card. He was shown out; or, as Hamilcar put it, thrown into the street. But appetite in politicians is over - mastering, and Hamilcar’s wealth was notorious, illustrious, quite unconcealed.

  The next attack was delivered in his club. It was delivered by an old gentleman who had bothered him about a lot of other things. This cadger was (to change the metaphor) deftly cut through the slips. But the third attack came, only two days later, in the shape of a florid young man in the Government, with whom he got on like a house on fire. It was quite late in the evening during a party in Merton Street, when this under-secretary suddenly asked him whether he would meet yet another politician at lunch next day. Hellup very foolishly consented; and there suffered a most brutal hammering, a torture of direct insistence that he should pay. But there was plenty of hard wood in Hamilcar Hellup, and he stood firm. There was nothing doing.

  What did the trick was Lady Pattle. Lady Pattle had got to know him just after he had landed. She was a dab at that sort of thing, and she had managed it sideways, getting him kidnapped to tea in her house under the guard of her niece and a Lord Chancellor in a large motor. She had him by the Christian name within a year. She was not for hurrying things. He was taking her advice during all the second year, and still more during all the third year; and he had rarely found it wrong. Lady Pattle it was who told him quite solemnly, after now six years of acquaintance, that he ought to buy. Lady Pattle it was who broke down that iron resolve and made Hamilcar Hellup a peer. No other: Peggy, Lady Pattle.

  Let me cast no suspicion on that honoured name. She took no commission. She had been specially urged by no one. It was principally from Hamilcar himself that she had learnt how he had set his teeth, and was becoming obstinately proud as well as amused in turning the politicians down. She desired to do only what might be good for him, for she was really fond of him—and she advised him to yield. Her arguments were sound. The Prime Minister was asking nothing exorbitant. A dozen new peers had paid him from twice to ten times as much. Hamilcar was very rich, and he would not feel it. It was not as if he had run after them; they had run after him; and really a peerage was a solid advantage—especially for an American.

  “Not Home,” was Hamilcar’s comment; and Lady Pattle had answered sharply, “No, but you are not living at home.” Whereat Hamilcar had sighed, for it was true. And in his heart he longed for the wooden houses and Jake, the playmate of his boyhood, and to see the smoke rising from his own land, and after that to die.

  “It is not,” she said, “as though you had a boy to take it on after you. That would be a nuisance. But it will certainly help Bo. She’d like it. She’s been too young so far to know what it means; but she’d like it now. And it’s great fun, remember. You go and hear the debates and if you like you can join in. Anybody can. Then, it helps you abroad: on the Riviera especially, and in Paris too. Still. Even to-day. It won’t last, but be an English peer while it lasts.”

  “Raises prices?” said Hamilcar.

  She shook her head.

  “Not at the kind of places you go to. They couldn’t raise them.”

  What clinched the matter—nothing less would have convinced him—was the battery she brought up at the end of this memorable conversation.

  “If you don’t pay that little bounder off and have done with it, you’11 be plagued for the rest of your life. He’s worse in opposition than in office,” she had said. What that meant Hamilcar Hellup hardly understood; but he understood well enough the wisdom of cutting worry. And that very week he bought the peerage. One thing, however, he stuck to; he would not change his name. They tried hard to make him, but he was adamant. The Hellups had been Hellups too long to change, and Hellup he remained.

  Therefore, when Bo came over from her school, and when Lady Pattle presented her at Court, and when, with her straightforwardness and beauty and (to be quite just) her hardness, she had duly impressed herself upon London, she was the Honourable Isabeau Hellup. Why she was not Lady Isabeau Hellup was explained to her, and she was reluctant to accept the explanation. Then did she begin with great verve a career of conquest; and her father was prouder of her than of any deal he had ever made in his life : not excepting the original great Paramount Paper Merger, in the year ’95.

  Bo had armed herself, as must every woman who proposes to conquer, with a dog—by name Lovey-Lad, by nature swift and terrible, strong to seize and to tear, strong also to growl, and of the bulldog breed. He became, in the few hundreds of newspaper pictures which appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, her cognitive sign, as is the Lion that of St. Jerome, the Dog that of St. Roch, the Eagle that of Jupiter and St. John, and an open Bible spread under the left hand that of the late Queen Victoria at a certain epoch of her reign.

  All guessed—some had arranged—whom Bo was to capture. There were titles in the list—the more knowing ones had particularly good foreign titles to put forward. There were also great untitled lumps of money, still knocking about unmarried. There were even a few of the minor Exalted Personages. Lady Pattle herself, though she was no fool, could not help, being a hostess and a woman, having fixed plans of her own. She had settled on and pinned down and labelled young Lord Ockley, because he had no money, because he was nice, and because she knew him: three very good reasons.

  But these good people reckoned without the Hellup blood, which was good, tested stuff; they had reckoned without its particular qualities in Bo; above all had they fatally reckoned without the Bow and Quiver of the Little God—the Unconquered in Battle—who perpetually scatters the arrangements of possessing men, and falls like a bolt into the midst of riches.

  It had amused the Little God to bring Bo up against John Maple, and John Maple up against Bo. It had amused him to shoot at them both; first from a distance, to try his bow; then good and hard at short range. They were already quite certain each of the other, before either of them was quite certain who the other was. They were both married in heaven—or whatever the process is—I mean, they had both known about each other from all eternity, while Bo still had no more definite knowledge of John than that somehow or other he was connected with “that Mrs. Maple,” and was perhaps vaguely the heir to a Manor House somewhere or other, with English lawns and oaks, and all the rest of it: no title—at least, she thought no title. She had not yet thought much one way or the other about anything connected with him, except that she knew his soul as she knew her own: and liked it more.

  As for John, he knew she was the daughter of one of these American lords, and he did not honestly try to distinguish between them. But he had liked her father. He liked the crispness, the exceedingly well-brushed close short white hair; the equally well-groomed short white moustache; the humorous, keen eyes and all the rest that goes with the type. He liked the short sentences, the lively metaphor, and he liked the man’s certitude in himself. It was as well. For considering how fiercely John Maple loved that tall infant he might have hated the rival affection even of her father. And considering how much Lord Hellup doted on his daughter, he might most furiously have disliked anyone else claiming her.

  That Bo had a great fortune was present in John’s mind, but occupied no place there. It is often like that. He knew her fortune was there, as one knows that a big cloud is in the sky. It did not occupy his thoughts as being anything prominent, still less as having any effects. For remember, he was still very young. If he had thought of it at all it would have worried him, I fear. But he did not think of it.

  In the adventures of John Maple there had been one very simple motive running through, which was to earn a living: though he put it to himself not as earning a living, but as earning, making—getting, anyhow—a certain fixed sum of money, to wit, twenty thousand pounds, wherewith to buy back Rackham.

  Aunt Hilda had, in the interval since John had come up to town to make his way, gone from bad to worse. It wasn’t enough for her to call the old place Rackham Catchings; she sometimes used “Catchings” by itself. And when John
protested against that innovation (as he had done on one of his last visits) she had poured out a torrent of horrible antiquarian stuff which she had got from an archæological society, and which boiled down to this: that once, in one of the older title deeds, the word “Catchings” appeared; it seemed to have been used for some part or other of the estate. She was proud to add that they had also found a certain Sir Harry Murtenshaw mentioned in a letter (undated, but in a handwriting of the sixteenth century), and that in this same letter there was mention of a Catchings. It was true this last Catchings was in Norfolk; but that didn’t trouble Aunt Hilda. She had already established her legend. The true name of Rackham was Rackham Catchings, or even Catchings alone; and it had descended to the Maples and so to herself diversely, by heiresses and marriage, from Sir Harry Murtenshaw, Knight; a courtier of Gloriana’s, a jewel in the crown of the Virgin Queen, an Elizabethan.

  With John’s movements among the rich Aunt Hilda was insufficiently acquainted. She kept in touch with him, and she was vaguely pleased to know that whatever tricks he was playing in private to make a living—and on these she did not yet inquire—he was at any rate, to the world, her nephew and his father’s son. If he appeared to be living in London instead of in Sussex, she liked to have it put down to his—or rather her—opulence. And if he had to refuse many engagements, if he mysteriously disappeared for days at a time, why, that was again a proof of his ample leisure and power to choose his own recreations. She knew, of course, and she half envied, the way in which she heard him talked about, though it annoyed her more than it pleased her when, in that world which had been his father’s, they asked her (as they often did) whether she were not a cousin. For the truth is, that Aunt Hilda did not know the rich as well as John did. Still, there were few whom John knew and whom Aunt Hilda had not at least heard of: not many houses where John was intimate and she had not at least called. She addressed Lady Pattle by her Christian name, and had more than once been called Hilda in return. Two warm friendships Mrs. Maple had made in that world—one with Lord Hellup, who quite frankly admired her; one with a certain Lord Mere de Beaurivage—or rather, with his wife, Amathea, whom she had piloted through many straits and narrows. For the wife of Lord Mere de Beaurivage had to learn the intricacies of high life rather late, as indeed had her worthy husband. Fortune had come upon him with horrible rapidity, like a shell, after his fiftieth year. It was not till the first war Coalition Government that he had appeared as Sir George Huggins. It was not till the second war administration that he had come—by the usual cheque—to adorn the House of Lords. His creation dated some months before Lord Hellup’s. He was senior to Lord Hellup in the proud hierarchy of our nobility: senior by half a year.